Where’s labor?

Some of you may be acquainted with my tendency to highlight when scholarship places too much emphasis on class or class-based analysis in their works as an explanatory factor. “The Civil War was mostly about labor,” has been a popular example, as if whites could just as easily be enslaved as people of African descent. But, I’ve begun to recently notice that there is a whole other set of works that do something else. These are often works that fall in line with the tendency of being intersectional or at least owe some debt to being intersectional. These works, however, seem to leave class and economics behind, focusing instead more exclusively on gender, sexuality, nationality, race/ethnicity, or the body. Analysis of the workings of class are often implied, but rarely does it get sustained attention itself. This is, to say the least, a problem.