..., faceworkers had maintained their position while surface workers came sixth, ahead of policemen, car workers, toolmakers, and train drivers. ⁷ In Brassed Off and Billy Elliot, the two feature films that shaped popular understandings of the figure of the coal miner...

... of articulating a working-class culture. These two recurrent conceptions of alternative political performance—the subversive queer/camp strategy and the Marxian aesthetic of alternative politics and culture—interact and are combined to startling effect in Billy Elliot, whose dialectical arguments...