Mapping the hobosexual: A queer materialism

The intervention

In mapping what I call the hobosexual, I am in excellent company. Several scholars of gay male culture have recently connected the American hobo to a history of male same-sex desires and relations (Boag, 2003; Chauncey, 1994; Heap, 2003; Romesburg, 2009). This range of scholarship, while connecting queer sexual practices to the figure of the American hobo, however, tends also to focus less on the hobo as a distinct historical figure and more on same-sex spaces, or places of perversity of which the hobo was a part. In mapping the hobosexual, my own intervention into this field takes as its starting point the actual hobo known to have traversed the American landscape from the mid-19th through the early-20th century. For what I have termed the hobosexual is generated out of a historicizing of the hobo; the hobosexual, in other words, does not represent every hobo, but a partial truth of hobo history. I locate the hobosexual in American hobo history specifically at the junction of not-for-profit practices of sexuality and labor and, in the process, generate a queer materialist reading of specific hobo practices. Soon after Queer Theory became popular in the academy, materialists demanded scholarship that ‘situate[d] queer along the axis of class’ (Morton, 1996: xiii). The hobosexual has been developed as a particular response to such a request, for the conceept is shaped by both a concrete material history of the American hobo and poststructural queer theory.

Over a decade ago, Morton (1996) critiqued queer scholarship produced by poststructuralists for its primary emphasis on the cultural, radical and fluid, and called for a focus on ‘Material Queer,’ or a concentration on ‘how [the] pursuit of desire relates to the problems of class, the division of labor, and the exploitation produced by surplus value’ (1996: xiv). Hennessy (2000) has since noted the disappearance of class in most academic scholarship in late capitalism, specifically criticizing queer theory for its singular focus on culture-ideology and its dismissal of the classed dimensions of desire. Sears (2005) also promotes a queer Marxist feminism in order to revitalize sexual liberation politics. And most recently Johnson (2008) has recognized the tendency of queer scholarship to reduce capitalism’s organizing effects on sexuality to the mere migration of gay and lesbian subjects to urban centers. This inclination results from queer historians not expanding on materialist arguments made by such scholars as D’Emilio (1983), ¹ who replaced the static mythology of the ‘eternal homosexual’ by connecting the emergence of gay and lesbian identity in the 20th century to an economic shift from the rural family to the urban wage laborer in the 19th (1983: 101). In extending D’Emilio’s assertion that gay men and lesbians ‘are a product of history … Their emergence is associated with the relations of capitalism’ (1983: 102), Johnson complicates the narratives of urbanization that fuel gay history by arguing that capitalism also produced ‘millions of migrant agricultural and other transitory wage workers’ at the same time as the gay urban wage worker (2008: 304).

In mapping the hobosexual, I extend Johnson’s construction of a ‘sprawling’ ‘queer past’ inclusive of historical figures not often considered in gay identity politics or history (2008: 319). I also applaud his work for disrupting what Duggan (2003) has labeled the ‘homonormative’ of gay culture, for Johnson’s subject of casual workers focuses specifically on poor and working-class queers as opposed to the more homogenous, commodified version of middle-class gay identity of which Duggan (2003), Hennessy (2000) and Morton (1996) are critical. Johnson’s overall argument, however, is based primarily in the relationship between sexuality and geography. His emphasis on the sex practices of casual workers in specifically rural locales interrupts the privileging of the urban over the rural in gay history and, in the process, challenges what Halberstam (2005) has deemed the ‘metronormative’ of queer narratives. I would also contend, however, that this focus results in scholarship that foregrounds sexual practices amidst a background of materialism. Exploitative practices and historical conditions are noted, but the bulk of the article maps sexual practice as both queer and rural.

This privileging of sexuality makes sense in that Johnson is primarily concerned with non-urban, same-sex relations and their erasure in traditional gay history. In my mapping of the hobosexual, these sexual relations are crucial as well, but they are connected to the labor practices of a distinct historical figure, that of the American hobo. Johnson collapses all casual laborers – migrant workers, tramps and hobos – but my mapping the hobosexual requires analyses of both bourgeois discourse regarding the hobo specifically and the concrete material effects resulting from such classed discourse. This specificity matters, for it enables a more complex hobo history, one with more agency than that given to casual laborers more generally. Johnson, for instance, employs Anderson’s (1923) research on hobos to stress that hobohemias (urban locales where hobos congregated while in the city) were infused with ‘exploitative businesses run by individuals seeking to capitalize, literally, on the material deprivations of transient homeless men’ (Johnson, 2008: 315), but fails to mention one of the spending habits of hobo identity and culture historically was that of splurging the money earned on a job while in the city only to run out of cash and move on to find work again (Anderson, 1923; DePastino, 2003). And while Anderson notes that the urban second-hand dealer’s profit was made in the ‘coming and going’ of the hobo, he also acknowledges that ‘the veteran hobo kn[ew] how to drive a bargain’ in this exchange (1923: 36).

Johnson is correct, of course. Hobo history (and that of casual laborers more generally) is one of exploitation. Capitalism’s inherent uneven development and ‘seismic shifts in … economy’ (2008: 319) engendered hobo agency as relative, for sure, but to dismiss this agency entirely is reductive and forecloses an understanding of American hobos as ‘both products and agents of corporate capitalist expansion’ (DePastino, 2003: xviii). What the hobosexual represents is a node of hobo history, a particular site where industrial capitalism’s logic of exploitation is confronted by the relative agency of the hobo. Framed by resistance, the hobosexual is not every hobo, but represents temporal anti-capitalist hobo practices and, therefore, a particular truth of hobo history. The hobosexual signifies the provisional resistance demonstrated by American hobos, a resistance located at the intersection of not-for-profit practices of sex and labor.

My employment of the term queer in queer materialism, therefore, is not based in identity politics, but in practice. In this respect, I am obviously influenced by post-Marxist poststructuralists, despite their producing queer desire as primarily cultural and symbolic as well as rooted in transhistorical pleasure. Because the transience of hobo practice is most significant to mapping the hobosexual, readers invested in the polarization of Marxism and postructural Queer may be skeptical of the concept. ² But while my production of the hobosexual is enabled by the poststructural productions of queer desire as unstable, fleeting, and provisional, my focus is also specifically classed. Like many who employ the term queer in scholarship, I look to such a term for its concentration ‘on mismatches between sex, gender and desire’ (Jagose, 1996: 1), but understand the triptych of gender, sex and heterosexuality Butler (1996) has mapped and critiqued as particularly bourgeois. My redeployment of queer also differs in designating queer as temporal not-for-profit practices. The hobosexual, then, if ever considered an identity at all, should be understood ‘as a nonessential identity… as an identity of doing rather than being’ (Jakobsen, 1998: 516). And these queer practices, or the ‘doing’ of the hobosexual, are reflective of what Bataille (1985) refers to as ‘non-productive expenditure’ within capitalist regimes. To consume, conserve, acquire and meet profitable goals in capitalist economies is deemed appropriate and valued behavior, while the practice of expending without a profitable goal is rarely considered a suitable practice when projected onto the working-poor or poor classes of which the hobo was a part.

The hobosexual represents a queer materialism, but one that accentuates the relationship between class and not-for-profit practices, not class and identity. And while hobo historians occasionally cite hobo connections to labor organizations based in Marxism, ³ I have chosen not to concentrate on this association in mapping the hobosexual. Rather than locate queer materialism in the Marxist rhetoric of, for instance, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), with which some hobos were affiliated, I produce the hobosexual as a concept specifically designed to connect unstable and fleeting anti-capitalist practices, not fixed identities (or even fixed practices), and to stress the significance of capitalism’s role in determining the mobility associated with such practices. Rather than the property of lesbian, bisexual and gay history or the canopy term for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, two-spirited (and others), the term queer, when representative of hobosexual practices of nonproductive expenditure within capitalist regimes, is not only released from the heterosexual oppositional referent and the heterosexual–homosexual binary, but also speaks to a resistance to the logic of exploitation so central to capitalist enterprise. The hobosexual does not necessarily erase identity, but certainly suspends such and, in the process, enables historical connections between queer practices that are anti-capitalist.

Queering the American hobo

The American hobo is a productive site for a queer materialist critique in that the term hobo lends itself to both postructural and class analysis. Hobo, understood by most historians as a specifically classed, intermittent white male laborer generated out of mid-19th-century industrialization, is also troubled by the term’s lack of distinct origin and its various significations. Contemporary historians agree; the actual origin of the term is unknown (Allsop, 1967; Bruns, 1980; Cresswell, 2001; DePastino, 2003). Tales of its initial source, however, are prolific. Some argue the term originated from the French term ‘haut beaux’ (Bruns, 1980: 12) or from the Latin ‘homo bonus’ (DePastino, 2003: 65). Other tales of origin claim ‘homeward bound,’ a response made by Civil War soldiers when asked where they were going after the war, was abbreviated to the first two letters of each word, or ho-bo (Bruns, 1980: 12). The most accepted version of origin (because of its association with labor) begins with the label of ‘hoe boy’ used to brand migratory farm workers who carried farm implements, most notably a hoe, as early as the 18th century. Hoe boy was then abbreviated to hobo (Bruns, 1980: 12). The term's official, documented use in the English language is recorded as 1889 in the Oxford English Dictionary (‘hobo’ in OED, 1992). Soon, thereafter Flynt, a journalist who reported on US transients in the late-19th century, used the term in an article in 1891 to signify an ‘aggressive' type of ‘work-shunning' transient (DePastino, 2003: 65). And, as I will explain briefly later, hobo organizations also partook in the term’s slippery etymology by countering definitions such as Flynt’s.

The term’s transience in origin and meaning parallels the hobo’s erratic sexual and labor practices. My intention in mapping the hobosexual is to queer hobo practices as anti-capitalist; the hobo’s sexual actions may represent Johnson’s (2008) prehistory to gay and lesbian identities, but combined with hobo labor practices, these sexual practices are exposed as influenced extensively by the capitalist regimes in which they transpire. In defining queer as not-for-profit practice, I extend Halperin’s (1995) understanding that queer represents ‘a resistance to the norm’ (1995: 66), but I also contend that western systems of normalization since industrialization have been organized around the exploitation reflective of and inherent in capitalism. While not entirely determining, class certainly inflects hobosexual anti-capitalist practices historically. Particular hobo sex and labor practices represented anti-capitalist practices of nonproductive expenditure, but these practices were also a product of industrial capitalism, for the pursuit of profit organized these actions extensively, often limiting hobo movement and, in turn, anti-capitalist practice.

In queering the hobo’s sexuality and labor and developing the hobosexual as an identity of doing, the poststructuralist theories of Deleuze and Guattari (1996) are significant. I agree with Hennessy (2000) that Anti-Oedipus ‘glorifies desire’ by identifying it as the only ‘motor of history,’ thereby erasing ‘the structures of exploitation on which capitalist production depends’ (2000: 71). I am, however, still both intrigued and influenced by the theory’s resignification of desire as that which ‘does not take as its object person or things, but the entire surroundings that it traverses, the vibrations and flows of every sort to which it is joined, introducing therein breaks and captures – an always nomadic desire’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1996: 141). Desire, then, is not limited to sexual desire. Desire as ‘always nomadic’ is released from its distinct location in genitalia, discursive sexuality and particularly psychoanalysis. Desire as fractured, as consistently rupturing, facilitates its connection to not only various sexual practices, but to practices of labor as well. Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘molecular unconscious’ refers to a process during which ‘misfirings are functional,’ a site where partial objects are ‘engaged in their own assembly’ by processes of dispersion that speak to ‘temporalization’ (1996: 138). Hobosexual practice understood as molecular ‘knows nothing of castration, because partial objects lack nothing’ and can, therefore, form more spontaneous and temporal ‘multiplicities’ of desire (1996: 143) in both sexuality and labor. The molecular’s counterpart, or ‘molar aggregate,’ signifies desire organized by ‘determinant conditions’ (1996: 139). The relationship between the molecular and molar is one of interdependency; molecular flows become channeled into molar aggregates and molar aggregates rupture into various partialities (and so on). The hobosexual’s queer practices in sex and labor are molecular, or spontaneous and provisional, while the hobosexual as an identity of doing refers to the molar level – an embodiment of a conscientious resistance to the capitalist management of proper sexuality and labor. Expending without profitable goal, hobosexual practice resists the determinate conditions that manage heteronormativity and the capitalist work ethic.

Because this molar aggregate inherently includes and relies on the molecular and its constant assembling and disassembling, the hobosexual as embodied resistance is always unstable. For Deleuze and Guattari, this unstable subject is engendered by a desire based in pleasure, a desire embodied by what Hennessy critically refers to as ‘the undifferentiated subject of self-enjoyment’ (2000: 71). The hobosexual, generated out of a working-class and poor labor history, however, represents this fragmented subject as a product of class relations – in the selling of his labor, the hobo separated and objectified part of himself to sell on the market, resulting in a non-unified subject. This difference in theorizing the fragmented subject is crucial because it resignifies the queer subject as not only fragmented, but both a product of capitalism and an embodiment of capitalist resistance. Locating the hobosexual at the intersection of queer/anti-capitalist sex and work practices accentuates both the temporality and partiality of the molecular, but also recognizes the determinant conditions of capital that affect the degree of movement within the molecular. The instability of the hobosexual at the molar level as an identity of doing, then, reflects the instability of capitalism itself. Even Deleuze and Guattari (1996) reference the capitalist processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, or the liberation of desire that is then consistently reconfigured into different commodity forms to maintain surplus value. Alterations in capitalist production, particularly its busts and booms, gauge the degree to which hobosexual practices occur as well, and it is these market fluctuations that cause the instability of the hobosexual as an embodiment of anti-capitalist practices. In mapping practice/desire at the molecular level – these ‘non-specific connections, inclusive disjunctions, nomadic conjunctions’ (1996: 143) – I want to stress the movement, the transience, the nomadic of the American hobo and of hobosexual practices, but I also recognize that it is capitalism that determines the material reality, or the degree, of such mobility. My focus on historicizing the hobo also differs from Deleuze and Guattari’s recurrent reference to the nomad metaphorically. According to Kaplan (1996), the nomad as metaphor erases the material histories of actual nomadic subjects; while Deleuze and Guattari claim to deterritorialize desire from organized sexuality, they actually reterritorialize the nomad as a metaphor for such desire. In mapping the hobosexual, therefore, it is imperative I historicize the American hobo.

While the etymology of the term hobo is rather slippery, many hobo historians agree that hobo practices burgeoned after the Civil War (Anderson, 1923; Bruns, 1980; Cresswell, 2001; DePastino, 2003). Noted specifically are the hobo practices of intermittent labor and freeload travel on trains. Commentators of the mid-19th century often identified the end of the Civil War as the primary reason for mobile homelessness. Revd E Hale, in 1877, argued that this particular transient lifestyle was engendered by ‘military life’ that had ‘produced men who were hardened to life outdoors, used to living off the land and disposed not to thinking too far into the future. Men … [who] had been removed from their normal contexts and introduced to the possibilities of extended mobility’ (quoted in Cresswell, 2001: 34). With the end of the Civil War, then, came the public recognition of not only homeless men, but men who perpetually moved throughout the nation. And it was the US railroad system that enabled hobos this mobility. As a journalist who rode the rails with hobos once remarked, he could see a transient ‘one day on Fifth Avenue in New York City, and a fortnight later… in Market Street in San Francisco’ (quoted in Cresswell, 2001: 35).

Railroad construction boomed with the end of the Civil War. The first transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, and, in that same year, the Central Pacific Railroad connected California to Utah (Bruns, 1980; Cresswell, 2001). With this boom in railroad construction, the hobo practices of working sporadically and traveling throughout the nation fit the landscape of excessive production. The hobo is understood as having answered the call of westward expansion – a call for a ‘special kind of labor, a labor remote from family and community life.’ Considered ‘mobile and adaptable’ – typically a white man in his 20s and unmarried who had an alleged ‘thirst for moving’ (Bruns, 1980: 8) – the hobo suited the US landscape of industrialization. US expansion westward required a mobile work force, and hobo practices filled this capitalist need (Bruns, 1980; Cresswell, 2001; DePastino, 2003). He worked not only in railroad construction, but also on cattle ranches, in grain fields, in mines and in orchards. And he arrived at these various jobs most often by riding trains illegally. Hobo labor laid many railroad tracks, but the hobo’s most consistent historical connection to the railroads is that of a freeload traveler. Whether in unlocked ‘boxcars, in empty battery boxes, on the cow catchers in front of the engines, in the animal cars, on the brake rods, even in the piles of coal in the coal cars,’ the hobo rode the rails, ‘crisscrossing’ the national landscape to take odd jobs and work temporarily, only to move on again (Bruns, 1980: 9). While trains were used to facilitate traveling to jobs, the illegal riding of rails often disrupted even those plans. Hobos needed to be successful in their ability to catch a particular train; they often missed trains by being unable to catch a boxcar for various reasons, and many lost limbs or perished while trying to board a moving train illegally (Anderson, 1923; Cresswell, 2001).

Hobo labor practices certainly speak to transience. Indeed, the hobo’s practices have been deemed ‘nomadic’ (Bruns, 1980; Cresswell, 2001; Uys, 2003), but not only because of railway travel. Beating a train, riding the rods, the American hobo represented a mostly disorganized movement across the nation in the mid-19th century and an intermittent labor required of westward expansion. Hobo transience in labor, however, particularly during economic booms, was not solely determined by the capitalist. Hobos were known to quit jobs unexpectedly, not fulfilling contracts, for the primary hobo objective was to earn ‘a stake’ ⁴ only to cease working, to often spend frivolously and to facilitate further movement (Anderson, 1923: 82). DePastino (2003) notes that hobos most often transitioned between various jobs, rarely ever staying at one for more than a few weeks. Not only were hobos known for their ‘high rates of transiency between jobs, but also greater volatility and independence while on the job’ (2003: 68). Both DePastino (2003) and Anderson (1923) note that hobos were known to ‘walk off’ the job because they were easily “piqued;” in other words, an intolerance for exploitative working conditions ‘was a marked feature of hobo labor’ (DePastino, 2003: 68). Hobo transient labor practices were decidedly anti-capitalist. Hobos used the US railway system not only to transition quickly from job to job, which also facilitated their agency in not completing a contract, but riding the rails also permitted the hobo practice of refusing to work completely and simply riding the rails for the sake of movement and adventure (Anderson, 1923; DePastino, 2003).

Although historically catalogued as primarily white and male, the hobo’s refusal to adhere to the map of capitalism – stable labor, home, and family, its emphasis on stasis, acquisition and profit – rendered the hobo a deviant of the nation he traversed. Not only was his work ethic considered unstable by employers, but the hobo also rejected exploitative working conditions and, as well, often refused to work. To add to these anti-capitalist practices, the hobo was also known to rebuff the bourgeois practices of accumulation and investment. Very few hobos perceived of any reason ‘to accumulate savings or acquire property’ (DePastino, 2003: 68). The hobo did spend money, but his spending habits, much like his work habits, enabled his nonproductive expenditure. According to Anderson, ‘when hobos are in town with money to spend they “go the limit” while it lasts, and then they go out to work’ again (1923: 140). Going the limit, however, rejected the standard national bourgeois custom of accumulation. When in the city, the hobo may very well have ‘invest[ed] in a whole outfit – shoes, suit, and overcoat – only to sell them again in a few days when he [was] broke’ (1923: 36). This hobo ‘nonacquisitive ethic’ caught the attention of middle-class observers who labeled such an anti-capitalist practice a ‘maladjustment’ (DePastino, 2003: 68). While bourgeois observers of the hobo may have pathologized such not-for-profit expenditure, hobos themselves ‘considered their conspicuous rejection of acquisitivism to be a positive component of their identity’ (DePastino, 2003: 69).

Industrial capitalism both determined and produced repetitively the systems of normalization that enhanced its profits in the mid-19th century, but the hobo’s anti-capitalist practices were not easily managed. Understood both to enhance the profits of the bourgeoisie (in that flexible labor was needed for profit) and threaten bourgeois notions of working-class normality (this required labor was entirely irregular), the hobo appears to have been tolerated for the most part. The hobo’s perpetual kinetics, his intermittent work ethic and his refusal to rest, invest and accumulate spoke directly to anti-capitalist practices. Regarding travel, work ethic, and consumption, hobo practices were unstable, unpredictable and difficult to chart. In this respect, the hobo practices noted earlier are queered in that they work against the norm, a norm organized by capitalism and reflective of exploitation and the pursuit of profit. But these hobo practices were significantly determined by market conditions also. With the mid-century boom in railroad construction, as well as Mid-Western harvests and Northeastern lumber yards yet to be predominantly influenced by machinery, the hobo’s asocial, homeless lifestyle of wandering and working sporadically fit the national landscape of excessive production. Both Bruns (1980) and Dunlavy (2001) note, however, that the amount of capital invested in the American railroad system exceeded its imagined surplus value, resulting in company downsizing and collapse.

In 1873, Jay Cooke and Company – the banking and financial agent for the Northern Pacific Railroad – collapsed, and an economic depression materialized. Foreign business had withdrawn from American investments because of a European financial crisis, and the American economy ‘began to crumble,’ rendering an economic climate where more than ‘100 financial houses collapsed, business and insurance companies closed’ and which saw the end of the railroad boom. ‘Wild speculation in railroads and overexpansion in almost every part of the economy’ weakened the entire American financial structure. Not only did an estimated 500,000 railroad workers lose their jobs, but unemployment affected all factory work associated with railroad construction and maintenance, particularly the labor located in ‘the foundries, the rolling mills, and the machine shops.’ A national unemployment rate of nearly 40% led to droves of men on the road looking for work and, in turn, local and state intervention into what would then be deemed The Tramp Question (Bruns, 1980: 28). This same economic shift, in other words, altered the hobo – an embodiment of anti-capitalism tolerated as an exemplar of rugged individualism and a sign of economic growth – to that of the tramp, or the economic Other, in need of labor reform. Hobo practices were now considered part of the tramp class and signaled the end of any bourgeois tolerance for such. No longer was there a significant need for flexible labor, and the hobo, in having to compete for wages, lost much of his mobility and anti-capitalist agency.

The American public’s preoccupation with the Tramp Question was extensive. And its emphasis was not only on labor reform, but the labor reform of a regressed species. ⁵ To give an example, in 1876, Van de Warker, MD, equates ‘trampism’ with insanity and a ‘nomadic tendency’ representative of regression, or that of ‘primitive man,’ a ‘modified savagism.’ Tramps, or those ‘diseased’ men plagued by ‘the madness of unrest,’ constitute a regressive resistance to the evolution of the nation; their ‘latent insanity’ reveals itself in an ‘irresistible tendency to wander purposeless about’ (my emphasis, Van de Warker, 1876: 776, 777). This science of the tramp represents the pervasiveness of Social Darwinism in the 19th century, but also exposes the connection between a social theory of evolution and capitalist systems that organize normality. It is the purposelessness of his wandering – a nonproductive expenditure – that allocates the tramp to the lower echelon of the evolutionary scale. Van de Warker strips the tramp of his capacity to reason and, in effect, relocates this unemployed white male alongside gendered and raced national Others. The tramp, then, is feminized for his own apparent lack of the pursuit of profit – the primary purpose of capitalist citizenship. Van de Warker’s discursive production of the tramp is not only a practice in objectification, but also one of spatialization. Constructed as the de-masculinized male body, the tramp was prohibited in the national public sphere of employed, reasonable men.

Cresswell (2001) notes that the tramp was most notably a discursive production of the 19th century, particularly in times of economic depression. I argue further that, in de-masculinizing the tramp, medical research and arguments like Van de Warker’s (1876) justified and enabled the violence projected onto the tramp population by not only national and state institutions, but local citizens as well. Because of their unemployment, tramps were considered a national problem able to infect the nation with a lethargy noted as regressive. Their dismissal became the duty of all citizens. Rather than locate massive unemployment as caused by the pursuit of profit, the tramp became the industrial system’s scapegoat. The Chicago Tribune in 1877 ran an article that advised its readers to put ‘a little strychnine or arsenic in the meat and other supplies furnished to tramps’ (DePastino, 2003: 4). In 1895, when the jailing of tramps was troubled by arguments that the unemployed wanderers actually enjoyed being incarcerated during the winter months, calls for the ‘whipping post’ and ‘the return to the lash’ were published as productive measures to purge locales of tramps (Denny, 1895; Seymour, 1878). A benefit of whipping was that it would mark the tramp’s body, making him known and more visible for containment and dismissal. In an industrial climate of economic decline, these remedies, while obviously inhumane, were arguably understood as cost-effective and gave citizens a false sense of security that the tramp problem, understood as a disease of epidemic proportions able to infect the nation with nonproductive expenditure, could be contained. Yet another form of discipline and spatialization employed during economic decline was the Tramp Chair designed by Sanford J Baker of Oakland, Maine. Baker’s design consisted of a chair encased in a cage with four wheels and a drawbar. Newcomers to town without proof of employment were forced into the chair, padlocked inside, then rolled down the main street for public display; this public disciplinary performance ended at the town line where the tramp was dumped from the chair and told not to return (Bangor Police Museum, 2010). Additionally, Flynt (1899) writes of the popular practice of the ‘timber-lesson,’ or the ‘clubbing’ of tramps as sanctioned by citizens (1899: 99). What is exposed in historicizing hobo anti-capitalist practices after 1873, then, is the extent to which capitalism, with its economic busts and booms, determines the degree of mobility and agency of its resistors. For the national preoccupation with and production of the tramp as a canopy term for all unemployed wandering citizens limited even the hobo’s train travel. Strict vagrancy laws and an increase in railroad police officers during economic depressions also regulated hobo mobility increasingly (Cresswell, 2001).

Another increasing result of the tramp scare was the bourgeois preoccupation with the sexuality of the wandering class. Johnson (2008) notes that ‘social reformers and government agents … began explicitly associating casual and seasonal laborers with sexual perversion’ (2008: 316). And Foucault (1990) argues that ‘conflicts were necessary’ before the exploited classes were ‘granted a body and a sexuality,’ that the deployment of sexuality did ‘not operate in symmetrical fashion with respect to the social classes.’ Technologies of sexuality emanated from narratives fuelled by bourgeois self-interest, but he also notes that ‘there is a bourgeois sexuality, and that there are class sexualities. Or rather, that sexuality is originally, historically bourgeois, and that, in its successive shifts and transpositions, it induces specific class effects’ (Foucault, 1990: 126, 127). The hobosexual consists of one of these class effects, for capitalism gauged the tramp/hobo’s nonproductive expenditure in labor and, in turn, limited his transient sexual practices. Likewise, the wealth of research regarding the tramp/hobo’s nonproductive sexual expenditure was published after 1873.

Anderson (1923) states that the tramp/hobo’s ‘sex relations [were] naturally illicit’. ‘Not a marrying man, the hobo [had] few ideal associations with women’ and found the ‘only accessible women [were] prostitutes.’ The sociologist adds that the majority of hobos were ‘as transient in their attachments to women as to their jobs’ (1923: 142, 140). The predominant form of hobo heterosexuality was, then, a nonproductive expenditure based in sexual desire, was typically anonymous, and most often represented a spontaneous encounter between various bodies in multiple locations. The hobo may very well have intended to buy sex from a prostitute, may very well have known on which street sex workers gathered, but, like most urban aggregates, the stability of these city spaces was consistently disrupted by the exchange of various subjects and bodies. As opposed to the investment, repetition and stability associated with personal intimacy, these sexual practices represent a form of anonymous urban sex and the act of expending without profitable goal. The hobo’s sexual encounters with multiple prostitutes over a period of time and in various places signify sexual practices that move against the bourgeois production of stasis, marriage, procreation and the conflation of sex and love.

While researchers disagree on the number of homosexual hobos and the reasons for same-sex practice, they do agree on a presence of same-sex sexuality in hobo subculture. Ellis’s (1942) Studies in the Psychology of Sex, for instance, includes the published correspondence between Ellis and a self-identified ‘male invert’ who claims there is no distinction between tramps/hobos in the USA, England, Scotland, and Wales with regard to homosexual practices. ‘90 percent or I even would be bold enough to say 100 percent indulge in homosexuality when the opportunity occurs,’ he writes (1942: 365). Within this same appendix of Ellis’s work is an essay by Flynt who claims that every tramp/hobo ‘knows what “unnatural intercourse” means, talking about it freely, and, according to my finding, every tenth man practices it, and defends his conduct.’ Flynt, however, reduces this prevalent homosexual desire to pedophilia. ‘Boys are the victims of this passion,’ he explains. Tramps/hobos ‘gain possession of these boys’ by seducing them with stories of the road and ‘caresses.’ The tramp/hobo and the boy are relabelled ‘jocker’ and ‘prushun’ in this relationship, and once on the road, each ‘prushun … is compelled … to let his jocker do with him as he will.’ ⁶ Flynt further reiterates the non-consensual power-relations between prushun and jocker with references to ‘terrible stories of the physical results to the boy of anal intercourse.’ But he also asserts that many boys profess to have received ‘pleasure out of the affair,’ and Flynt himself has been witness to boys ‘willfully’ initiating such contact described by the youngsters as ‘a delightful tickling sensation in the parts involved.’ Flynt also refers to same-sex sexuality among adult men as a ‘practice’ that is ‘decidedly one of passion.’ But, yet again, he then reduces this passion to situational homosexuality. Allegedly, tramps/hobos practice same-sex only because there is ‘one woman for every one hundred men on the road’ (Ellis, 1942: 360, 361, 362).

Same-sex, intergenerational, and commodified nonproductive sexual expenditure is well documented by hobo and gay cultural historians. Anti-capitalist connections between transient sex and labor are not, however. Mumford (1993) maps one instance of nonproductive expenditure in middle-class males that reflects how knowledge regarding sexuality, masculinity and labor reform were particularly classed in the 19th century. Sexual authorities often located the cause of male impotence in the nervous system and explained the disorder in terms of Social Darwinism. Recognized as limited in supply, sperm became associated with masculinity and needed to be managed by men. The need to keep genital fluid in reserve paralleled a market economy that prioritized and rewarded an accumulation of goods and resources and a phallic economy that equated sperm with masculinity and masculinity with reason and will. And all were threatened by the fast pace of modernization. In the 1880s physicians agreed the bourgeois male was more ‘civilized’ and ‘superior’ to other men, but he was also more susceptible to modernization and sexual impotence (quotations in Mumford, 1993: 77). One such disorder connected to modernization and impotence was sexual neurasthenia. Coined in 1882 by George Beard, sexual neurasthenia affected white middle-class men, but men employed in the working class were ‘largely immune from the disorder’ (Mumford, 1993: 86).

Beard contended that working-class men had been born with a resolve that resulted in a natural immunity; because they performed an assumed perpetual physical labor, the ‘muscle worker’ maintained an ‘old-fashioned constitution,” resulting in ‘rarely or never’ an injury to the nervous system (quotations in Mumford, 1993: 86). The strong and fit laborer was the ideal for those suffering from nervousness; some physicians may have prescribed rest for their patients in particular cases, but ‘most reformers of manhood … addressed the problem … by promoting physical exercise or manly work’ (emphasis added, Mumford, 1993: 87). While the employed working-class laborer became the ideal body to keep pace with modernization, the hobo – deemed a pathologized tramp in reform discourse – was pigeon-holed into a place of arrested development. ‘Certain groups ceased to evolve’ and had ‘lower intelligence and diminished inhibitions,’ including an inability ‘to control their impulses, particularly their sexual instincts’ (Mumford, 1993: 86). Medical science, then, produced the bourgeois male as the only body capable of suffering from the nervousness that accompanied life in the fast-paced city and the only subject capable of the will-power and reason to overcome the disorder. For ‘incontinent men were likely to be found wanting in virtually all manly endeavors, especially in the pursuit of profit,’ or, as one physician stated, ‘“Everyday employment should be … a necessity. A man who is lazy … is nearly always a licentious man”’ (quotation in Mumford, 1993: 82).

It is here, then, where discourses of sexuality and labor reform collide with class. Inherent in these discourses is the medical employment of binary logic; the working-class laborer is either the ideal worker complete with an assumed proper heterosexuality or the lazy and licentious denizen of the nation. The movement from sexual Other to proper sexual citizen is granted only by way of reform (by the white bourgeois male map to reserve genital secretions and the chartered course of perpetual labor as remedy for the unemployed working-class male). In disregarding industrial capitalism as a determining force in the tramp/hobo’s unemployment, medical science, like labor reform discourse, focused on the tramp/hobo as a national degenerate complete with abnormal, primitive instincts, not only dismissing critiques of capitalism, but enabling the bourgeois male a binary opposite and, in turn, a valued citizenry complete with proper procreative heterosexuality, masculinity, will and reason. At this intersection of labor and sexuality is also evidence of capitalism’s affective capacity in organizing systems of normality. What G J Baker-Benfield (1972) has labeled the ‘spermatic economy’ of the 19th century represents the parallel between the management of genital fluid and the accumulation of capital. Preoccupied with the loss of bourgeois sperm and middle-class reproductive capacities, medical researchers aided in not only transforming sperm into a commodity fetish, but in producing a system of normality that connected proper procreative sexual practice to masculinity, masculinity to proper labor practice, and perpetual labor to sanctioned sexual practices.

The hobosexual

What I have labeled the hobosexual materializes at this intersection of labor, sexuality, and class in the 19th and early-20th centuries. Rather than simply recognizing that the hobo’s sexuality – notably same-sex, intergenerational and commodified – represents a prehistory to gay and lesbian identity, I connect the hobo’s sexual expenditure and intermittent work practices in order to show how one inflects the other, how class functions in relation to queer desire, how the pursuit of particular desires relates to class. My argument is not that class determines sexuality, nor that sexuality determines class, but that the degree of hobosexual agency is determined primarily by the ability to move, and it is capitalist markets that determine this mobility overwhelmingly. In mapping the logic of capitalism – the division of labor, the exploitation needed to engender surplus value – as a logic that organizes systems of normalization, my employment of the queer in queer materialism is decidedly anti-capitalist. Located at the junction of nonproductive expenditure in work and sex practice, the hobosexual represents a partial truth of American hobo history, or an identity of doing that encompasses the hobo’s conscientious rejection of the pursuit of profit, a dismissal of the emphasis on bourgeois stability and accumulation historically.

Not all hobos performed their sexuality or their work ethic in precisely the same way, but hobo history substantiates that nonproductive expenditure was a recurrent theme, often even an ‘ethical code,’ in hobo subculture (DePastino, 2003: 69). Queering the hobo’s sex and labor, I stress the temporality, movement, and instability of hobo anti-capitalist practice, for it is the actual mobility of the hobo, I contend, that enables the degree to which he practices an anti-capitalism. Hobo nonproductive expenditure in sex and labor, while not completely erased, was certainly thwarted by economic decline. Job competition, vagrancy laws, railroad police and vigilante justice, all fuelled by authoritative bourgeois discourse, worked to immobilize hobo practices in nonproductive expenditure. Hobo and hobosexual mobility were relative, then. While his practices were anti-capitalist, the hobo was also a product of capitalism. With the boom of the railroad enterprise came the need for flexible labor and the hobo of greatest mobility and anti-capitalist agency. With the bust of 1873 came the tramp, the target of tramp chairs, poisoning and clubbing – sanctioned practices that limited the hobo’s mobility and, therefore, his anti-capitalist practices as well. The hobo’s not-for-profit practices enabled by his ability to move, in other words, relied heavily on the system of capitalism against which he moved.

There is, then, nothing fixed about the hobosexual. A molar identity in doing, the hobosexual as an embodiment of anti-capitalist/queer practices can only represent instability, the unpredictable, the temporal in that the uneven development and shifts in the economy inherent in capitalism influence agency, particularly the agency of the working poor and poor classes. In mapping the hobosexual as embodying anti-capitalist actions that are also unstable and shifting, my intention is to unhinge queer from its traditional use as a canopy term for various, but stable identities. Queer as practice releases the term as the property of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, two-spirited (and so on) identities and re-establishes its slipperiness in signification. But in connecting queer to anti-capitalist practices at the site of the hobosexual, I also temper this same slipperiness, this movement in meaning, by focusing specifically on an historical subject and how the logic of capitalism affected and organized his anti-capitalist desires in both sex and labor. What queer as anti-capitalist practice initiates is the ‘process of unlearning that opens up the identities we take for granted to the historical conditions that make them possible’, or what Hennessy calls a practice of ‘disidentification’ (2000: 228, 229), a necessary action for contemporary queers steeped in identity politics at a time when class has nearly disappeared from academic scholarship. Like Johnson, I argue that gay cultural history can expand exponentially by including classed practices as opposed to sexual identity only.

What mapping the hobosexual accomplishes, that neither identity politics nor even hobo history achieves, is what Hennessy imagines as a queer anti-capitalist connection between ‘all of capitalism’s disenfranchised subjects’ (Hennessy, 2000: 229). Extending Kelsh’s (2000) scholarship, Hennessy shifts the focus of queer politics from identity onto the capitalist production of ‘outlawed human needs,’ arguing that capitalism has, since the 19th century, organized ‘sensation and affect’ to reflect the logic of exploitation and surplus value (Hennessy, 2000: 217). In producing a difference between sanctioned needs and those outlawed, capitalism has denied citizens of various practices, including those of same-sex sexuality, their full potential as human beings. The hobosexual is part of the project Hennessy imagines. The concept suspends the identity of being in identity politics in order to connect subjects through anti-capitalist practice, and these conscientious objectors to capitalism are driven by the pursuit of fulfilling the needs of nonproductive expenditure outlawed under capitalism.

As well, while the hobosexual is generated out of American hobo history, the concept, in its focus on anti-capitalist practice and not hobo identity, makes possible the connections between subjects whom hobo identity has prohibited historically. Elsewhere, for instance, I have noted the exclusionary practices of hobo organizations of the early-20th century. ⁷ Countering the discursive production of the hobo as a tramp by government and medical authorities, hobo organizations resignified the hobo as ‘a good man willing to work,’ a good man who traveled only in search of work, while the tramp was defined as a man who traveled but refused to labor (Hobo News Out, 1915: 7). ⁸ In promoting these hierarchical differences, hobo organizations not only Othered the tramp, but did so by relying on capitalist tramp discourse and definition. Excluded as well were women from the hobo appellation, ⁹ and hobo subculture was also particularly raced. DePastino notes, for example, that African-American migratory laborers were ‘systematically barred’ from Chicago’s hobohemia, and Asian-American workers were ‘shut out from the cheap hotels and employment agencies of hobohemian neighborhoods’ (2003: 77). The hobosexual, if an identity at all an identity of doing, is significant, for with an emphasis on class and practices of nonproductive expenditure, this concept opens up and makes available historical queer connections at the intersection of anti-capitalist practices. In doing so, the hobosexual represents a queer site of suspended identity, but a concept also able to include differences in race, gender, sex, sexuality and ability. For capitalism has historically produced these differences as Other to the valued bourgeois national subject, rendering the pursuit of needs associated with these disenfranchised citizens potentially anti-capitalist and, therefore, political.