“Hunkies,” “Gasbags,” and “Reds”: The Construction and Deconstruction of Labor’s Hegemonic Masculinities in Black Fury (1935) and Riff Raff (1936)

In the late 1960s, John Sinclair managed the radical, proto-punk band, MC5. They were militant communists and shared the Trans-Love house in Michigan. But in their commune the exploitation was obvious. Kathy Asheton recalls: “John Sinclair was a pig … [MC5] were really chauvinistic … I wasn’t friendly with the girls at Trans-Love … I’d come over in party mode, all primped to go out for the night, and they’d all be on their knees scrubbing the floor” (McNeil and McCain 1996: 46–7). This blindness to an exploitation grounded in gendered oppression characterized much of the male-dominated left during the twentieth century and helped fuel a long history of animosity between feminists and male-dominated social movements. In this chapter, I explore the contours of that animosity through two cultural artifacts, the films Black Fury (1935) and Riff Raff (1936). Both of these films take up the “labor question” at a moment in history when no other question seemed to matter as much. Both films are sympathetic toward organized labor, but in very different ways.