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Mapping the hobosexual: A queer materialism

Heather Tapley
Sexualities 2012 15: 373
DOI: 10.1177/1363460712439648
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Article

Mapping the hobosexual:

A queer materialism
Heather Tapley

Sexualities
15(3/4) 373390
! The Author(s) 2012
Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1363460712439648
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University of Victoria, Canada

Abstract
The following article introduces the hobosexual as a concept in queer materialism.
Mapped at the intersection of not-for-profit hobo sex and labor practices historically,
the hobosexual collapses the apparent impasse between the material and the symbolic
so prevalent in queer studies. The concept represents the redeployment of queer as
anti-capitalist practice; highlighted are the non-normative hobo practices of nonproductive expenditure, but also the recognition that these abnormalities are organized by
capitalist systems of normalization designed to engender profit. The article also considers the degree to which industrial capitalism affected both hobo mobility and hobo
anti-capitalist practice in the 19th century. Generated out of hobo history and queer as
anti-capitalist practice, the hobosexual represents resistance to capitalist systems of
normalization and enables connections, not necessarily between identities, but between
anti-capitalist practices generated out of difference.
Keywords
Hobo, nonproductive expenditure, not-for-profit practice, queer materialism, tramp

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 gure of the American hobo, however, tends also to focus less on the
hobo as a distinct historical gure 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 eld takes as its starting point the actual hobo known
to have traversed the American landscape from the mid-19th through the
Corresponding author:
Heather Tapley, Assistant Professor, University of Victoria, Department of Womens Studies, University of
Victoria, P.O. Box 3045, Station CSC, Victoria, BC V8W 3P4, Canada
Email: htapley@uvic.ca

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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 specically at the junction of not-for-prot practices of sexuality and
labor and, in the process, generate a queer materialist reading of specic 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 uid, 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, specically
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 capitalisms organizing eects 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 DEmilio (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
DEmilios 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 Johnsons construction of a sprawling
queer past inclusive of historical gures 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 Johnsons subject of
casual workers focuses specically on poor and working-class queers as opposed to
the more homogenous, commodied version of middle-class gay identity of which
Duggan (2003), Hennessy (2000) and Morton (1996) are critical. Johnsons overall
argument, however, is based primarily in the relationship between sexuality and
geography. His emphasis on the sex practices of casual workers in specically 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.

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375

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 gure, 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 specically and the concrete material eects resulting
from such classed discourse. This specicity 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 Andersons (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 nd work again (Anderson, 1923; DePastino,
2003). And while Anderson notes that the urban second-hand dealers prot 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. Capitalisms 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 capitalisms 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 signies the provisional
resistance demonstrated by American hobos, a resistance located at the intersection
of not-for-prot 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 inuenced 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 signicant 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, eeting, and provisional, my
focus is also specically 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

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Sexualities 15(3/4)

heterosexuality Butler (1996) has mapped and critiqued as particularly bourgeois.

My redeployment of queer also diers in designating queer as temporal notfor-prot 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 reective of what Bataille (1985) refers to as non-productive
expenditure within capitalist regimes. To consume, conserve, acquire and meet
protable goals in capitalist economies is deemed appropriate and valued behavior,
while the practice of expending without a protable 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-prot 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 aliated, I produce the hobosexual as a concept specically designed to
connect unstable and eeting anti-capitalist practices, not xed identities (or even
xed practices), and to stress the signicance of capitalisms 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 heterosexualhomosexual 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 specically classed, intermittent white male laborer generated
out of mid-19th-century industrialization, is also troubled by the terms lack of
distinct origin and its various signications. 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 prolic. 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 rst two letters of each word, or ho-bo (Bruns,
1980: 12). The most accepted version of origin (because of its association

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377

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 terms ocial,
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 briey later, hobo organizations also partook in
the terms slippery etymology by countering denitions such as Flynts.
The terms transience in origin and meaning parallels the hobos erratic sexual
and labor practices. My intention in mapping the hobosexual is to queer hobo
practices as anti-capitalist; the hobos sexual actions may represent Johnsons
(2008) prehistory to gay and lesbian identities, but combined with hobo labor
practices, these sexual practices are exposed as inuenced extensively by the capitalist regimes in which they transpire. In dening queer as not-for-prot practice,
I extend Halperins (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 reective of and
inherent in capitalism. While not entirely determining, class certainly inects 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 prot organized
these actions extensively, often limiting hobo movement and, in turn, anti-capitalist
practice.
In queering the hobos sexuality and labor and developing the hobosexual as an
identity of doing, the poststructuralist theories of Deleuze and Guattari (1996) are
signicant. I agree with Hennessy (2000) that Anti-Oedipus glories 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 inuenced by the theorys resignication of desire as that
which does not take as its object person or things, but the entire surroundings that
it traverses, the vibrations and ows 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 Guattaris molecular unconscious refers to a process during which
misrings 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 moleculars counterpart, or molar aggregate, signies desire organized

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Sexualities 15(3/4)

by determinant conditions (1996: 139). The relationship between the molecular

and molar is one of interdependency; molecular ows become channeled into molar
aggregates and molar aggregates rupture into various partialities (and so on). The
hobosexuals 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 protable 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 undierentiated 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 objectied part of himself to sell on the market, resulting in a
non-unied subject. This dierence in theorizing the fragmented subject is crucial
because it resignies 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 aect the degree of movement within the molecular. The
instability of the hobosexual at the molar level as an identity of doing, then, reects
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 recongured into dierent 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 uctuations that cause the instability of the hobosexual as an embodiment of anti-capitalist practices. In mapping practice/desire at the molecular level
these non-specic 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 diers from Deleuze and Guattaris 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 specically are the hobo practices

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379

of intermittent labor and freeload travel on trains. Commentators of the mid-19th

century often identied 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 o 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 rst transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, and, in that same year, the Central
Pacic 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 t 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 lled this capitalist need (Bruns, 1980; Cresswell, 2001; DePastino,
2003). He worked not only in railroad construction, but also on cattle ranches, in
grain elds, 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
hobos 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 hobos 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 fullling

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Sexualities 15(3/4)

contracts, for the primary hobo objective was to earn a stake4 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 o 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 hobos refusal
to adhere to the map of capitalism stable labor, home, and family, its emphasis on
stasis, acquisition and prot 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 rebu
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 outt 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-prot 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 prots in the mid-19th century, but the hobos
anti-capitalist practices were not easily managed. Understood both to enhance the
prots of the bourgeoisie (in that exible labor was needed for prot) 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
hobos 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 dicult to chart. In this respect, the hobo practices noted earlier are queered in

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381

that they work against the norm, a norm organized by capitalism and reective of
exploitation and the pursuit of prot. But these hobo practices were signicantly
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 inuenced by machinery, the hobos asocial, homeless
lifestyle of wandering and working sporadically t 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 nancial agent for the
Northern Pacic Railroad collapsed, and an economic depression materialized.
Foreign business had withdrawn from American investments because of a
European nancial crisis, and the American economy began to crumble, rendering an economic climate where more than 100 nancial 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 nancial structure. Not only did an estimated
500,000 railroad workers lose their jobs, but unemployment aected 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 signicant need for exible labor, and the hobo, in having to
compete for wages, lost much of his mobility and anti-capitalist agency.
The American publics 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 modied 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
eect, 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

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prot the primary purpose of capitalist citizenship. Van de Warkers discursive

production of the tramp is not only a practice in objectication, 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
Warkers (1876) justied 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
prot, the tramp became the industrial systems 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 benet of whipping
was that it would mark the tramps 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-eective
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. Bakers 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 hobos train travel. Strict vagrancy laws and an increase
in railroad police ocers 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

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conicts 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 specic class eects (Foucault, 1990: 126, 127). The hobosexual consists
of one of these class eects, for capitalism gauged the tramp/hobos nonproductive
expenditure in labor and, in turn, limited his transient sexual practices. Likewise,
the wealth of research regarding the tramp/hobos nonproductive sexual expenditure was published after 1873.
Anderson (1923) states that the tramp/hobos 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 protable goal.
The hobos 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 conation 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. Elliss (1942) Studies in the Psychology of Sex, for instance, includes the
published correspondence between Ellis and a self-identied 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 Elliss
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 nding, 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

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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 aair, 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 commodied 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 reects 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 uid 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 aected 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 t laborer was the ideal for those suering
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 suering 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

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endeavors, especially in the pursuit of prot, 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/hobos 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 capitalisms aective capacity in organizing systems of normality. What G J
Baker-Beneld (1972) has labeled the spermatic economy of the 19th century
represents the parallel between the management of genital uid 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 hobos sexuality notably same-sex, intergenerational and commodied
represents a prehistory to gay and lesbian identity, I connect the hobos sexual
expenditure and intermittent work practices in order to show how one inects 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 hobos conscientious rejection of
the pursuit of prot, a dismissal of the emphasis on bourgeois stability and accumulation historically.

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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 hobos 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 exible labor and the hobo of greatest mobility and anticapitalist agency. With the bust of 1873 came the tramp, the target of tramp
chairs, poisoning and clubbing sanctioned practices that limited the hobos
mobility and, therefore, his anti-capitalist practices as well. The hobos
not-for-prot 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 xed 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 inuence 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 signication. 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 specically on an historical subject and how the logic of
capitalism aected 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 disidentication (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 capitalisms disenfranchised subjects (Hennessy, 2000:
229). Extending Kelshs (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 aect

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to reect the logic of exploitation and surplus value (Hennessy, 2000: 217). In
producing a dierence 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 fullling 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
resignied the hobo as a good man willing to work, a good man who traveled only
in search of work, while the tramp was dened as a man who traveled but refused
to labor (Hobo News Out, 1915: 7).8 In promoting these hierarchical dierences,
hobo organizations not only Othered the tramp, but did so by relying on capitalist
tramp discourse and denition. 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 Chicagos 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 signicant, 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 anticapitalist practices. In doing so, the hobosexual represents a queer site of suspended identity, but a concept also able to include dierences in race, gender,
sex, sexuality and ability. For capitalism has historically produced these dierences
as Other to the valued bourgeois national subject, rendering the pursuit of needs
associated with these disenfranchised citizens potentially anti-capitalist and, therefore, political.
Notes
1. DEmilios Capitalism and gay identity, published in 1983, is a revised version of his
lecture first given in 1979.
2. While the relationship between Marxism and poststructural Queer theory is often understood as one of incommensurability, my mapping of the hobosexual is influenced by more
contemporary scholarship aimed at renegotiating this impasse. For examples of this type
of research that understands queer as a product of capitalism, see Cover (2004), Hennessy
(2006) and Klotz (2006).
3. Anderson notes that the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) appealed to the hobo
because the organization preache[d] the gospel of struggle and revolt and was opposed
to compromise and reconciliation (1923: 234). The radical model of the IWW consists of

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4.

5.
6.

7.

8.
9.

Sexualities 15(3/4)

an understanding of Marxs historical materialism and the linear progression inherent in

such a model. Anderson quotes the IWW preamble: Between these two classes a struggle
must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the earth
and machinery of production, and abolish the wage system . . . It is the historic mission of
the working class to do away with capitalism (1923: 233). Anderson also notes, however,
that organizing the hobo has never been a success in the USA, for labor organizations
tended to compete with each other and reinscribe hierarchical power relations within their
own organizations (1923: 247). He also notes that the hobo often did not join labor
organizations because he maintained a suspicious attitude toward all organizations
and persons in power (1923: 248).
A stake is a particular amount of money that enables the hobo to stop working: It seems
that when a laborer has earned a sum which road tradition has fixed as affluence, he
quits (DePastino, 2003: 68).
See Anderson for references to wanderlust, a tramp/hobo condition of restlessness,
which was often understood as pathological.
Both Allsop and Johnson refer to the nonsense song The Big Rock Candy Mountains as a
tactic sung to romance young boys onto the road. (See also Chauncey, 1994 and
Romesburg, 2009 for intergenerational male commercial sexuality.)
See Tapleys In search of the female hobo (2009) and The making of hobo masculinities
(forthcoming) for scholarship that analyzes and recovers women and African-American
men in hobo subculture.
For a more exhaustive list of the ways in which hobos differentiated themselves, see
Anderson, 1923: 8789, 93.
For women excluded from hobo subculture, see also Stephanie Goldens The Women
Outside (1992) and Lynn Weiners Sisters of the road: Women transients and tramps
(1984).

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Heather Tapley is an Assistant Professor in the Womens Studies Department

at the University of Victoria, Canada. She has published articles on gender, race
and sexuality and their relationship to class in Torquere (2001), Atlantis (2009),
Journal of Lesbian Studies (2012) and Canadian Review of American Studies (forthcoming). Tapley is currently researching the hobosexual history of 19th-century
burlesque women.

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