Visit our new website

Although we are no longer updating this blog, do visit our new website to find out more about current research, events and funding opportunities for postgraduate study. You'll also be able to find out more about our newly-launched Centre for the Study of Inequality, Culture and Difference.

Queering Paradigms III, SUNY Oneonta, 7-9th April 2011

Liz Morrish, Nottingham Trent University, U.K. reports on the Queering Paradigms 3 (QP3) conference, successful hosted by SUNY Oneonta, USA. This was the third in the Queering Paradigms series, and it was an excellent international conference which attracted leading researchers in the field as well as many inspiring emerging scholars.

As the title suggests, this conference was designed to bring together scholars from such disparate fields as: theology, public health, cultural studies, law, linguistics, ethnic studies, anthropology, history, philosophy, psychology, neurobiology and performance studies. Indeed, such is the relevance and embrace of queer theory that all these areas offered up paradigms to be queered.

Organisers Professor Kathleen O’Mara and Dr Betty Wambui of SUNY Oneonta took a broad definition of ‘queer’ from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's (1993: 7) in her essay “Queer and Now: … 'queer' can refer to: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when constituent elements of anyone's gender, of anyone's sexuality aren't made (or can't be made) to signify monolithically”. 'Queer' is therefore conceptualized as querying and challenging heteronormativity (or homonormativity) while recognizing that the term does not resonate globally as it emerged from Western experience.

That definition was well demonstrated by the three plenary events. Dr Carlos Ulises Decena from Rutgers University gave the first plenary – ‘Code Swishing’ which called for a widening of linguistic norms tolerated within Latino gay male culture. Gay men from a Dominican culture can be unforgiving in their regulation of each other’s gay-signifying language use, he argued. Professor William Leap of American University gave a powerful lecture outlining Queer Linguistics as an International Project. As queer theory tell us, it is important not to import western categories into other cultures. Queer, we must recall, has no fixed assumptions, and identities emerge in context. Leap made an impassioned defense of queer linguistics and its appropriate objects of study. He provided perhaps the best line of the conference – in a retort to a British scholar who dismissed the study of language and sexual identity with the query, ‘What next, we study the language of gas-mask fetishists?’- Leap argued that the project of queer linguistics was precisely that, to make the world safe for the study of the language of gas-mask fetishists.

The third plenary was a panel which featured three activists: Ignacio Rivera, Victor/Viola Moncar & Charles Gueboguo, representing in sequence, Queers for Economic Justice (USA), BBUD, Bro2Bro in Unity & Diversity (Ghana) and Queer African Youth Network (Cameroon). It was fascinating and illuminating to hear the different approaches they took and difficulties they faced in their activism and outreach to same-sex desiring people in their respective cultural contexts. Talking with the students who attended, I know this was a rich learning experience for them.

The QP series of conferences are informed and structured by an ethic initiated by their founder, Burkhard Scherer, Reader in Theology, Canterbury Christchurch University, U.K, and a specialist in sexuality within Buddhism. He has sought to create an intellectual space which is not viciously competitive and full of academic stars, but genial and supportive so that emerging scholars feel accepted. The conferences aim to work as an extended workshop in which most panel sessions are available to all attending. The SUNY Oneonta team certainly operated within this spirit. In addition, Dr Kathleen O’Mara and Dr Betty Wambui ensured that every need was met: accommodation, transportation, entertainment and catering, which meant that participants stayed together, and this made talking and exchanging views much more likely. The operation was enhanced by an excellent website and cheerful, competent student volunteers from Students for Global Education, Women’s and Gender Studies and Africana Latino Studies classes. Participants were also assisted with great care by Morris Hall staff and campus caterers.

For those of us who are queer (in whatever dimension), to step into a queer oasis offers a kind of mental and physical ease rarely attained in other contexts. But sometimes worlds collide…. there we all were, hanging out in Le Café downstairs in Morris Hall. Next door in the Otsego Grille was a kid’s baseball camp, with visiting parents. It was truly hilarious to watch the consternation of some of the latter, as they wandered through queer space on their way to the terrace, or found Burkhard in his pink leggings in the women’s bathroom. It reminded me of a piece by Sara Ahmed, on universalizing whiteness: “But of course whiteness is only invisible for those who inhabit it. For those who don’t, it is hard not to see whiteness; it even seems everywhere.” The same could be said for heterosexuality – it is everywhere, and in turn, the temporary appropriation of queer space merely underscores that difference.

I have to make one disappointing observation. I would have expected such a weighty international conference to feature prominently on the college website. However, it appears that the remarkable impact of QP3 was barely recognized by its host institution. There was no visible publicity on the website, and despite drafting a press release, the organizers and supporters were unable to persuade the college publicity officer to release this to the local media. As a result, there was little participation at the panels from the local community. I felt SUNY Oneonta had missed a valuable opportunity to reach out to the local LGBTQ community. This stands in contrast to the previous host universities (Canterbury Christchurch, UK and QUT, Australia), which were considerably more affirming of the presence of QP1 and QP2 respectively.

As I make a study of queer invisibility in university diversity statements, this is perhaps why the obscuring of QP3 has irked me. Even more ironically, as I read SUNY Oneonta’s Vision and Values, prominently accessible from the college website, those very values are exactly what was embodied in the conference themes.

• Engaging students in exceptional learning experiences, within and beyond the classroom;
• Nurturing the development of individuals who contribute to local and global communities;
• Building an increasingly diverse, welcoming, and inclusive campus community.

When excellence is overlooked, despite resonating with the proclaimed mission of an institution, it suggests an intentional act. Many scholars at the conference would be aware of another SUNY college’s history of difficulties around issues of sexuality in the public sphere, and we would have hoped, in the intervening 15 years, that these had been overcome. However, SUNY Oneonta’s silence must be read as shame – a stance which is neither honorable nor in keeping with its inclusive pose.

To claim a commitment to diversity and inclusion should mean more than merely auditing its presence on an Equal Opportunities monitoring form. To observe and record difference categorically requires very little in the form of institutional transformation. As Bendix-Peterson and Davies (2010) point out, being open to difference, and encouraging students and faculty to realize difference (as in the sense of becoming), is a very different matter. Maybe SUNY Oneonta needs to queer its own paradigms before it can claim to embrace diversity.

References

Ahmed, Sara. 2004. Declarations of Whiteness: The Non-Performativity of Anti-Racism. Borderlands (e-journal). 3.2. http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol3no2_2004/ahmed_declarations.htm

Bendix-Peterson, E and Davies, B. 2010. In/Difference in the neoliberalised university. Learning and Teaching in the Social Sciences. 3.2. 92-109.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. 1993. Tendencies. Duke University Press.

Erotic capital ? Not in my workplace.

I notice that postings on this blog have slowed somewhat in recent months. Yes, we’re all under pressure here in CCM, and will be even more so next year. But maybe the blog project has started to take itself more seriously than it was originally intended to be? Maybe it is time for a turn to levity, or as the newspapers would have it, let’s open silly season.
There were two things in my mind as I sat down to write this. Foremost was a piece I had read in the Times Higher this week (3-9th June) where Catherine Hakim urges academics to abandon their scruffily insouciant attitude to dress and concentrate on maximising their ‘erotic capital’. Another thought still preyed on my conscience from Friday – I had made a flippant and ill-judged remark on a colleague’s summer shorts. Apologies, and he knows who he is. The two concerns were not unrelated in my deliberations.
The article on ‘erotic capital’ is illustrated by various images of alpha males draped by feminine supplicants. Apologies to film studies colleagues, but I believe one of them to be Marilyn Monroe. Another image places Baroness Professor Susan Greenfield in a sultry and burlesque pose, perhaps deciding whether to deliver a lecture or strip for the audience. Hakim is suggesting that now that academics have a presence on websites, and often their photograph appears, that they should work harder to appear alluring - and reap the benefits. After all, haven’t the recent UK prime-ministerial debates shown the value of a well cut suit, teamed with a charismatic self-presentation? Moreover, their academic pulling power may be enhanced by showcasing their sexual allure, and prioritizing this dimension should not be seen as trivial. Hakim cites research that shows attractive people make more money, find partners, and are likely to be perceived as more competent. But the theory goes further than simply acknowledging the premium of beauty. We should also be trading on our social skills, sexual attractiveness and some other vague sexual ‘je ne sais quoi’ which might also be affected.
Now, I should know a thing or two about erotic capital, as the co-author of research on the language of lesbian erotica, and as one about to begin another project on the language of internet sex-blogging. One thing is that the erotic is context-specific rather than universal. The assumption in Hakim’s work is that there is a heterosexual imperative animating the academic workplace. But whereas the muscular and modestly-dressed contestants in the recent women’s French Open final might hold erotic salience for me as a lesbian, that might not hold true for a heterosexual male. What I am driving at with this point is that we reinforce rather than undermine existing power structures which hierarchize gender and sexual identities in a workplace if we adopt rather than resist these notions. Feminists have worked hard over many decades to allow public space generally, and the workplace in particular, to be free of sexual objectification. Perhaps that explains Hakim’s waspish and unnecessary aside denigrating the feminist contribution to debates over sexual expression, much of it emanating from her more progressive colleagues at the LSE.
Indeed the whole concept of erotic capital seems to be a cynical and misleading attempt to suggest an equivalence with Bourdieu’s notions of cultural and symbolic capital, so widely influential in the academic spaces patrolled by CCM. These latter can be accumulated to transform the self and society, not solely to self-interestedly reinforce inequalities within it.
But to return to my offhand remark to my colleague - had I been guilty of ridiculing him for failing, in my eyes, to achieve ‘erotic best practice’. Who am I to judge anyway? And there we have it. Erotic capital is nothing more than subjective judgement, inappropriately applied. In any case, the whole notion is guaranteed to work against the interests of women who will be pilloried if they enhance their attractiveness, and pilloried if they don’t. This was demonstrated in an article in the Guardian on Saturday 5th June, which convincingly destabilizes Hakim’s argument that only the gorgeous and seductive can be successful . The article is a report of a sex discrimination case in the US where a New York banker had lost her job. Apparently she had an excess of ‘erotic capital’ to the extent that her male colleagues found her distracting. Any woman who thinks she can succeed in manipulating structures where gender inequality is so deeply embedded is sure to experience a similar jarring dose of reality.
I put the article down and tried to imagine NTU’s Continuing Professional Development unit’s training seminar on erotic capital, and how much more fun it might be than some of the other offerings. Then I thought about who might attend, and the illusion was rapidly punctured. But hey, what’s so unlikely? Aren’t we the university that just launched a web presence for our academic experts on the World Cup? Does that qualify as some sort of collective, institutional erotic capital? It certainly stretches the notion of cultural capital. One can only hope that this idea never gains traction in the academy. We are already in the grip of marketization, media friendliness, consumer responsiveness, economic ‘impact’, student satisfaction surveys and other promiscuities. But as a witty and learned colleague of mine puts it, “they won’t rest until they have us going into lectures with titty tassles on”.

NTU Journals: Climate Change and Affect

When Simon Dawes not working on his PhD thesis at NTU, he works as an editorial assistant for the sister journals Theory, Culture and Society and Body and Society, and is also responsible for the content on the website, blog, Facebook and Twitter sites. Here he reports on some recent issues of the journal.

To accompany the new TCS special issue on Changing Climates (TCS vol 27, issue 2-3, May 2010, edited by Bronislaw Szerszynski and John Urry), I’ve been busy working with the contributors to the issue on collating extra material for our website that could be of interest to readers. The double issue demonstrates how social science can help to illuminate the very nature of the challenge of climate change, and gathers papers by some of the world's leading authors working on climate and society (Ulrich Beck, Mike Hulme, Elizabeth Shove and Brian Wynne among them). The contributors trace the way that climate science has been produced, organised, mobilised and contested, and explore the relationships between climate change, politics, global inequity, financial turbulence and even life itself. For the extra material, we’ve so far got an extensive bibliography of climate change texts, and links to podcasts of interviews and talks, as well as a host of other material on related projects, events and articles. We’re hoping it will serve as a valuable resource to anyone in the social sciences interested in climate change.

We’ve also just published on the site an interview I conducted with Lisa Blackman, Mike Featherstone and Couze Venn, as a supplement to the current issue of Body and Society (vol 16, issue 1, March 2010, edited by Lisa Blackman and Couze Venn), which doubles as a special issue on Affect and as the relaunch issue of the journal. The issue focuses on the significance for body-studies of the ‘turn to affect’ that has taken place across the humanities and the social sciences, particularly in terms of a re-engagement with perception, sensation and memory, and explores the role of different versions of affect in the theorising of the body. Articles featured are by Constantina Papoulias & Felicity Callard, Julian Henriques, Valerie Walkerdine, Erin Manning and Patricia T. Clough, as well as those by Blackman, Featherstone and Venn. In the online interview, the editors discuss the significance of affect to their own research, as well as the future theoretical and methodological direction of the relaunched journal. I’ll be conducting more interviews with editorial board members and special issue editors of both journals in the near future.

Subsequent issues and sections in Body and Society on bodily integrity, medicine, and animation and automation, and in TCS on Ricoeur, Megacities, Simmel, and Code and Codings, are all in the pipeline, and there will be many more interviews and much more extra material available on the website to accompany them, so keep checking the website and blog for new developments.

The world cup, football-speak and national identity

NTU linguist Dean Hardman reflects on the status of 'football talk' in anticipation of this years World Cup.


When the football world cup comes around once every four years, it seems like the nation is gripped by World Cup Fever. Not only is there wall-to-wall coverage of the actual matches; extra television programmes devoted to talking about the matches are aired, while football permeates every other televisual and media genre. Football, already the advertising vehicle of choice for a whole range of brands and products, is used to promote everything from soft drinks to washing powder, from credit cards to chocolate. There doesn’t seem to be a product or service whose brand managers don’t see the world cup as a prime opportunity to increase brand awareness.

Clearly these advertisers are drawing upon the high level of interest that the world cup generates among otherwise casual viewers of the game. Everyone during a World Cup, especially but not exclusively when a home nation is involved, has an opinion on football. These range from the team and game-specific: “Rooney’s injury holds the key, they’ve got to play 4-4-2”, to the more general: “England have got no chance”, and from the positive: “I’m so excited about tonight’s game”, to the negative: “I can’t believe they’ve cancelled Eastenders for this.” Whether the speaker or writer has any specialist knowledge or not, or whether their opinion or comment is positive or negative doesn’t really matter: all this shared focus on football and talking about the world cup helps to reinforce social identities and helps us to construct a shared sense of group identity. Ultimately this might be a shared sense of Englishness that talking about the England team creates. However, it might just as easily be a shared sense of Scottishness when talking about a strong desire to see England fail, or a shared anti-football agenda.

Casual viewers also begin to draw upon the footballing lexicon for the first time in four years. “Beating the offside trap” is inserted awkwardly into sentences, alongside the notion of “hitting a barn door with a banjo” or “making an impression early doors” as “squeaky bum time approaches”. The Ivory coast might need to “shut up shop”, while everyone wants to know who will survive the “group of death”. Again, having a shared national footballing lexicon to delve into also helps to oil the wheels of communication and reinforces a sense of national togetherness and cohesion.

Whatever one’s feelings are towards the world cup, it is absolutely unavoidable. It is going to be all but impossible to spend the month of June in the UK without being bombarded with images of footballers selling ice-creams, or hearing colleagues speak, sometimes inarticulately, about events in South Africa. At the same time, though, for one month only, talking about football becomes a key way in which vast swathes of the population signify membership of a whole range of social groupings and identities. For a limited time only you need never be stuck for something to say, it’s the event that we can all feel part of.

(Image: mrfrogger; permissions)

Narratives on Migration and Transnational Media

After a week in which immigration has surfaced as one of the key issues dominating election coverage in the UK, Olga Bailey offers an overview of her article on media representations of migration, 'Narratives on Migration and Transnational Media: crises of representation?', which she has co-written with Sonia De Nelson. The article will be published later this year in T. Threadgold, B. Gross and K. Moore (eds), Migration and the Media (New York: Peter Lang).

Debates on issues of migration have had perennial importance in national and international arenas and figure prominently in the political agendas of wealthy nations and in the transnational public media spheres. The migration debate was mainly reframed in the post 9/11 attacks interconnected to a ‘global crisis’, underpinned by economic and political issues, focusing concerns on national security, the threats to western culture and its economic impact on receiving western countries. The mainstream media has predominantly covered these debates echoing these concerns and constructing immigration as a national threat, thereby alienating and making alien populations who do not possess the necessary symbols of national belonging. Since 2008, due to the global economic crises, immigration coverage in the mainstream media has been mainly interlinked to the consequences of the economic crises in western societies. In discussing the effect of the economic crisis for international migration, Castles and Vezzoli point out that the media have widely reported on the visible effects on new migration, migrant employment, remittance flows and on attitudes of destination-country populations (2009: 69). The current rhetoric links migration debate to the economic crises in topics such as reducing recruitment of migrant workers because of growing unemployment, to governments’ actions on immigration management to regulate the borders and wider aspects of the life of immigrants, including access to jobs, welfare services, family reunification, and ultimately integration and the acquisition of citizenship. These measures aim to demonstrate to their political constituency they are acting in minimizing the crisis.

In this chapter we look at coverage of migration issues in the BBC news online services. Our focus is on the ways in which otherness interweaves with migration issues. Our assumption is that stories about immigration form an important arena through which ideas about the immigrant ‘other’ are expressed and reproduced.This in turn forms a wider context to our discussion as it is connected to the debate over the changes of the practices of transnational journalism generated by technological, economic and cultural factors. We have chosen the BBC News and BBC Mundo news online for two reasons: First, for its significant role as a public service in the transnational media landscape and its impact on public opinion and, consequently, on governmental policy processes. Second, for its high journalistic standards - accuracy and impartiality – which are recognised by a global audience. The aim is to provide a snapshot of the ways news on migration is presented in both sites. The paper first discusses the challenges faced by journalists working in transnational outlets, and then presents the BBC journalist’s news practices and its relevance to an understanding of the present production of migration stories. The last part provides examples of the representation of migration in BBC. 

(Photo credit: LoopZilla. Permissions)

Guest Paper: 'Invisible Television'

In the final guest paper in the Cultural Studies Research Group series for the current academic year, Dr Brett Mills (Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies, University of East Anglia) talks about 'Invisible Television: The Programmes No-one Talks About Though Lots of People Watch Them'. 

In his paper, Brett focuses on how There exists a disparity between the programmes that get repeatedly discussed and written about in television studies, and the programmes watched by the largest audiences. This paper argues that there is, as a consequence, invisible television. Or, more accurately, it argues there is television invisible to the academy. Through quantitative analysis of ratings and publications, the paper demonstrates this disparity. It then goes on to explore the reasons for its existence and demonstrates why it should be a matter of concern for us all.

The event takes place on from 4.00-5.30 pm on Wednesday 5th May in GEE019, Clifton Campus. Everyone welcome. For further information, please email Joanne Hollows.

(Photo credit: sermoa. Permissions.)

A Genealogy of Broadcasting Policy in the UK

Simon Dawes, a research student in our team and Editorial Assistant for Theory, Culture and Society and Body and Society, explains the key ideas underpinning his current research on broadcasting policy.

I’m working on a genealogy of broadcasting policy in the UK, looking specifically at the shifts in how the public have been constructed over time. This is set in the context of claims that broadcasting was regulated in terms of a public service ethos from the 1920s until the 1970s/1980s, since when it has been regulated as a market. A concomitant shift in the construction of the public from citizens to consumers accompanies these claims.

In research so far undertaken, I’ve used critical discourse analysis (CDA) to demonstrate the relationship between citizen- and consumer- signifiers in the Communications White Paper 2000 (the text that established the creation of Ofcom). My study showed that in addition to the predictable preference for the term ‘consumer’, there was an ambiguous distinction between citizen- and consumer- issues and a contradictory usage of the two terms. Consequently, emphasis was placed upon the collective agency of consumers, while the citizen was reconstructed as a passive and vulnerable individual. Further, the privatisation of public interest and the economisation of public service that I detected in the discourse led me to concur with the Habermasian critique of the depoliticisation of the public sphere. These preferences, ambiguities and contradictions have consequences for how Ofcom regulates the communications industries, and identifying them helps us understand how they will decide on the future of public service broadcasting in the UK. You can see an article I wrote on this research here.

My thesis will offer a discursive history of broadcasting policy by extending this analysis to a range of committee reports, regulators’ reviews, government white papers, bills and acts that have been written in the UK since the 1920s. In the work I’m currently undertaking, I’m beginning to question the epistemological assumptions behind the theories and methodologies I’ve been using. Methodologically, I’m looking to link CDA with a more Foucauldian approach to discourse analysis, while in terms of theory I’m concentrating on recent problematisations of the public sphere concept. Once I’ve cleared all that up, it’ll be back to the archive for some more analysis.

Guest Paper: 'Beautiful Images, Spectacular Clarity'

In our next guest paper in the seminar series organized by the Cultural Studies Research Group with ICAN, we welcome Dr Helen Wheatley from the University of Warwick. Helen will be delivering a paper entitled '"Beautiful images, spectacular clarity": Spectacular television, "landscape porn", and the question of (tele)visual pleasure'. The event takes place on Wednesday 3rd March 2010, from 4.00-5.30pm in in room GEE219 (George Eliot Building on the Clifton Campus of Nottingham Trent University). The abstract of the paper is as follows:

In establishing television’s difference from cinema, scholars have too quickly dismissed the medium’s spectacular qualities. Typically, arguments about television which emphasise comparison with cinema position the medium as visually inefficient (Williams, 1975 ) sound-led and lacking in visual detail (Ellis, 1982), or simply ‘less dense, less complex, less interesting’ (Lury, 2005). Theories of television’s liveness and distracted viewership also understand television as anti-spectacular. Considering the recent cycle of ‘landscape porn’[i] on British television, I will counter these arguments by discussing television’s spectacular aesthetic. The paper will explore the pictorial qualities of programmes such as Coast (BBC2/1, 2005-), A Picture of Britain (BBC1, 2005), Wainwrights Walks (Skyworks for BBC4, 2007), Britain’s Favourite View (ITV1, 2007)  and Britain from Above (Lion for BBC1, 2008), and visual pleasure on television. I will argue that these programmes presume a contemplative mode of viewing more traditionally associated with the spectacular in other media (landscape painting, film). Whilst I reject a technologically determinist argument about the rise of HD shooting and viewing technologies and the advent of this genre of programming, I will also understand these recent programmes as post-digital revolution television. This is simultaneously ‘slow television’ which allows for a contemplative gaze on spectacular ‘natural’ landscapes, and also a heavily-CGI’d cycle of programming which draws on a ‘Google Earth’ aesthetic to produce a frenzy of dazzling topography, showcasing the spectacle of satellite technologies. The paper will be informed by interviews with production personnel working within this burgeoning field of programming.

Everyone is welcome but places are limited so if you would like to attend, please email Joanne Hollows.

(Photo credit: Stuart Herbert. Permissions)

Symposium on The Body

This year’s our annual Media and Cultural Studies Symposium takes place on Friday 19th February  and centres around the theme of ‘The Body’. Alongside papers from staff in media and cultural studies, we are delighted to welcome two outside speakers, Ruth Holliday (Professor of Gender and Culture, University of Leeds) and Sharon Hayes (Senior Lecturer, School of Justice, Queensland University of Technology).

The event runs from 10.00-3.30 in GEE219, on the Clifton Campus of Nottingham Trent University. Attendance is free and everyone is welcome but places are strictly limited so please email Joanne Hollows to reserve a place if you wish to attend.

The Programme for the Event is as follows:
10.00-10.15: registration
10.15-10.30: welcome
10.30-11.45: session 1: the body, class and citizenship (Chair: Joanne Hollows)
Ruth Holliday, All Tits and Bum: Classing Feminist squeamishness at the 'plastic' body
Steve Jones, Cycling and Citizenship
11.45-12.00: break
12.00-1.15: session 2: the body, sound and music (Chair: Dave Woods)
Gary Needham, Donna Summer: disco and the embodiment of orgasm
Russell Murray, Body/Sound - Sound/Body
1.15-2.15: lunch break
2.15 – 3.30: session 3: ‘deviant’ bodies (Chair: Ben Taylor)
Simon Cross, Mad Bodies: Seeing and Reading the Historical Image of Insanity
Sharon Hayes, The moral temporality of sex, taboo and the body

(Photo credit: Jason Drakeford. Permissions.)

Accent and Identity: Where do the East Midlands fit in the North/South divide?

Natalie Braber reports back from the Borders and Identities Conference.

In the worst of the recent weather, I braved the snow and ice to travel to attend the Borders and Identities Conference (BIC2010) which took place 8-9 January at Newcastle University. This was the first BIC Conference, and has been started under the auspices of the Accent and Identity on the Scottish/English Border (AISEB) project. The main aim of this conference was to examine in more detail the current state of knowledge in this field of study and to relate linguistic studies to other fields of enquiry to further interdisciplinary with other disciplines. Although research on ‘borderlands’ is well-established in the social sciences, it is only within recent years that interest in has taken hold within the fields of sociolinguistics and the sociology of language.

I had been accepted to give a poster presentation on a project I’ve recently started work on which looks at the question ‘Where do the East Midlands fit in the North/South divide?’ Although this divide is a frequently talked about phenomenon, there is much disagreement about where this border can be placed – and Nottingham (and the East Midlands) fall right into this potential border area. From the sixteenth century onwards there have been references to the river Trent as being a cultural and linguistic divide between North and South. Linguistically, language in Nottingham and the East Midlands is a much neglected variety and much more needs to be learned about its particular features.

The work I have carried out so far (funded by SIS – Stimulating Innovation for Success at NTU) has collected a small sample of voices from Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire to examine the variation found within the East Midlands, comparing these findings with previous research. It also considers future work which needs to be carried out within this field – re-examining the perception of the North-South divide and how the East Midlands fit into such a division, as viewed both by those from the East Midlands and from around the UK.

The conference took place in The Assembly Rooms which was a great location for a conference – it had plenty of space for delegates to mingle and discuss projects during coffee and lunch breaks. Fortunately, most of the delegates made it through the bad weather and the conference was so successful that discussions about the next location are already taking place.

(photo credit: John the Scone; permissions)

Work in Progress Papers: the Guardian blogging community

The next ICAn Work in Progress session from a member of the Communication, Culture and Media team is on Wednesday 27th January 2010 in GEE219 (Clifton Campus), 12.00-1.00 pm. In this session, Dean Hardman presents a paper called 'Below the Line But Over the Top: a preliminary look at the Guardian blogging community'. Dean describes the paper as 'very much a work in progress talk, where I'm hoping to instigate a discussion on the types of blog responses that can be seen on the Guardian sport blog.  I'm also hoping to show where I'm headed with some work that is designed to categorise and hypothesise about the purpose behind direct critiques of journalists.  It actually builds on something I did for the cultural studies blog in the very early days.'

(Photo credit: Jon Juan. Permissions.) 

Guest Paper: Natasha Whiteman, Watching 'Good Television'

The next guest paper in this year's seminar organized by the Cultural Studies Research Group with ICAn features Natasha Whiteman (University of Leicester) who will be speaking on 'Watching "Good Television": The Reception of Battlestar Gallactica and The Wire. The talk takes place on Wednesday 27th January 2010, from 4.00-5.30pm in room GEE219 (George Eliot Building on the Clifton Campus of Nottingham Trent University). The abstract of the paper is as follows:

This paper examines the reception of Battlestar Galactica and The Wire by critics and academics. Despite their differences, each series has received widespread critical acclaim and inspired a range of academic productivity. Each has been configured as an example of “good” television that it is acceptable to watch, and each has been contrasted to less “worthy” forms of television production. This paper examines the positioning involved in critical and academic discussion of these series, focusing attention on the distancing/affiliating moves made by critics and academics in their often fannish responses to these television products. What do these moves tell us about these series and those who celebrate it? What do they tell us about the relationship between fans, critics and academics? In exploring these issues the paper develops work that has examined modes of identification with media texts within online fan communities (Whiteman, 2007).

Everyone is welcome but places are limited so if you would like to attend, please email Joanne Hollows. 
(Photo credit: Jinx. Permissions)

Holiday reading: Bringing Home the Birkin

The basic black Birkin.

Over Christmas i read Michael Tonello’s Bringing Home the Birkin (New York: Harper, 2009) which demystifies the most famous and most expensive handbag – the Hermes Birkin – as much a Holy Grail of luxury as it is a pop culture icon with prices as high as $60,000. A light read but significant in it’s exposing of the marketing myths of luxury brands and their inculcation of consumer desire based on false information. The Birkin probably entered popular culture in the late 1990s when Sex and the City (and later in episodes of the Gilmore Girls, Will and Grace and Gossip Girl) devoted an episode to the most coveted of bags and its notorious waiting list. There are even blogs devoted to random Birkin spotting. My first awareness of the brand name Hermes was the film Basic Instinct in 1992; Sharon Stone’s character uses Hermes scarves to tie her victims to the bedstead. She was a classy killer. The Birkin is copied the world over, often spoken of in relation to the smaller Hermes Kelly Bag (named after Grace Kelly) and mistaken for the larger Hermes Haut a Courrois which was originally for transporting horse saddles as befits the company’s 19th century origin. The Birkin name came about when on a flight sometime in 1984 Jane Birkin was seated next to the CEO of Hermes Jean-Louis Dumason when she bemoaned the need for more space in the Kelly and a design collaboration ensued.

Tonello’s book is as much a story of ebay entrepreneurship as it is the story of how he managed to procure hundreds of the impossible to purchase Birkin bags and sell them on for substantial profit. Anyone who has sold through ebay will recognise the same travails of online selling. Tonello explodes two pop culture fashion myths – firstly, the waiting list and secondly Hermes own claims to producing a limited number of Birkins a year. Even if you have the money to buy an entry level Birkin you can’t just go in to a Hermes store and buy one. It doesn’t work like that since it is the unobtainability that amplifies their desirability. You will be told that there’s a waiting list of approximately two years and that’s even if they bother to ever call you back. However, Tonello discovers what he calls ‘the formula’ for getting the Birkin in nearly every Hermes store he visits. His formula for a ‘same day Birkin’, one that bypasses the waiting list and thus reveals it as a fallacy, is buy lots of scarves and leather goods first, spending a few thousand, and then casually drop into conversation asking if they have any Birkins. With that first offering at the luxury altar the Hermes sales assistant (which he breaks down in to five stereotypes and how to deal with them) disappears in to the back of the shop and magically produces a Birkin. The profit on a Birkin re-sell is so high that Tonello is able to fly the world in search of more Birkins for rich American women and, exposing another fallacy, he alone manages to acquire more than the supposed annual production that the Hermes spiel suggests. In the end Tonello tires of the travel, Hermes and the world of luxury goods and no doubt Hermes cottons on and changes its tactics of sale when it comes to keeping the Birkin shrouded in legends of unobtainable.


Product placement: Carrie Bradshaw appears in Season 6 (Episode 16 - 'Out of the Frying Pan') of Sex and the City holding a Rouge H 30cm Matte Crocodile Birkin.

(photo credits: yumyumcherry; DVD screen grab; permissions)

Seeing and Reading Historical Images of Insanity

In early January 2010, writes Simon Cross, I will be attending the annual Media Communication and Cultural Studies (MeCCSA) conference to be held this year at the London School of Economics. The annual get together of our subject association is an important opportunity to introduce new research ideas.

For this reason, I will use the MeCCSA conference to introduce an analytic strategy for reading historical images of madness that enables us to see that while forms and figures of madness change there are threads of continuity. My main argument is that we can only understand continuity in the visual image of madness in relation to change. I want to use this argument to show that how continuities and changes are read into historical images of madness depend on three interconnecting factors. They are: media technologies, cultural forms, and historical consciousness.

In the nineteenth century, these factors interconnected in visually significant ways when the development of photography and a changing pictorial aesthetic of madness fused with new theories of mental disorder. Through close analysis of three exemplary, historical forms of representations of madness, i.e. clinical photographs, lithograph engravings, and portraiture in oils, I want to show how they produce certain constructions of madness, with different truth-claims and forms of visual rhetoric being involved, each with attendant consequences for certain historically-based epistemological positions.

Those of you interested in pursuing these ideas more closely might be interested to read my forthcoming book, Mediating Madness: Mental Distress and Cultural Representation, to be published Palgrave Macmillan on 1 March 2010.

Feeling Backward (why queer theory still matters)

I recently received a reader’s report for a book proposal in which the anonymous reviewer refers to queer theory as being ‘mid 1990s’ and ‘once cutting edge’. I was struck by the notion that queer theory was over, faddish and outdated and my first response to this was that queer theory will be over when homophobia, the closet, and so on is also over. In order to demonstrate the ongoing relevance of queer theory I would like to introduce a few ideas from a recent ‘queer theory’ book that also helped me make sense of pleasures that might be construed as wholly negative. The question then is why is Brokeback Mountain pleasurable when it also makes me feel bad?

In Heather Love's Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Harvard University Press, 2007) she explains why hurtful, melancholic and depressing experiences constitute contemporary queer identity and thus need to be acknowledged, incorporated and negotiated since ‘many of these unlikely feelings are closely tied to the realities of queer experience past and present.’ (147) In this respect, Brokeback Mountain is a text that has a backward logic. It uses the past to speak to the present as it narrates a depressing story of historical injury and bad feeling in order to connect to a contemporary audience who may feel that they are still negotiating or finding it difficult to dispel a shameful and homophobic past – homosexuality is problematic! Love continues:

'Backwardness means many things here; shyness, ambivalence, failure, melancholia, loneliness, regression, victimhood, heartbreak, antimodernism, immaturity, self-hatred, despair, shame. I describe backwardness both as queer historical structure of feeling and as a model for queer historiography.' (146)

Many of the terms in Love’s quote may describe the characters and their narrative situations in Brokeback Mountain, as well as the spectator’s response to the film. It is important that the film does provoke negative and bad feeling. It is not a joyous experience; rather it is a film that leaves one feeling hurt and emotionally devastated in its backward turn. Yet, this is somehow what is rewarding about the film also. Brokeback Mountain’s stress on negative and depressive histories of the homosexual past help to constitute contemporary gay and lesbian identity and subjectivity since ‘the experience of queer historical subjects is not a safe distance from contemporary experience; rather, their social marginality and abjection mirror our own.’ (32)


The backward feeling and the pathos in the film articulate a refusal to see progress in the way it is often imagined by gay pride discourses. Brokeback Mountain demands us to accept that homosexuality is still impossible for many, that it is still permeated by tragedy and melancholia, and that it has a history that is still unresolved and needful of being properly negotiated in the present. Love’s work helps to unlock the process of understanding negative pleasures in political terms especially in relation to films like Brokeback Mountain. The film reminds queers that their modern subjectivity is constituted by a painful, closeted, homophobic history and that feeling backward and feeling bad are also important affective dimensions of queer subjectivity in the present.

(image: screen grab; permissions)

Iron Curtain

Patrick Wright brings us his reflections on the Iron Curtain, recently broadcast on the BBC World Service's The Strand. 

Did the fall of the Berlin Wall, twenty years ago last month, also mark the final disappearance of the Iron Curtain that had divided the world for nearly half a century?  We may like to think that it did.  For the length of the Cold War, after all, the Iron Curtain was closely associated with the militarized frontier dividing the blocs in Europe.  Yet the true history of this powerful metaphor suggests a different conclusion.

The first iron curtains had nothing at all to do with geopolitics or international relations.  Instead, they were anti-fire barriers installed in late eighteenth century theatres. Suspended between the stage and auditorium, these novel contrivances were proudly displayed to reassure audiences for whom theatre fires were an all too common horror. 

The early versions were little more than props.  By the late nineteenth century, however, these largely symbolic devices had been re-engineered.    Hydraulically powered in many cases and made of asbestos as well as iron, the new versions actually worked. So much so, that actors and other who worked backstage began to worry that, while the audience might indeed now be saved in the event of a fire, they themselves risked being trapped behind the lowered curtain and burned alive.

How, then, did the iron curtain get converted into a geopolitical metaphor?  Throughout the Cold War, it would be widely believed that the man responsible was Winston Churchill, who famously spoke of the descent of an iron curtain dividing Europe in the famous speech he delivered in Fulton, Missouri, on 5 March 1946.

In fact, the originator was not Churchill at all, but a Liberal and cosmopolitan British born woman named Violet Paget, who wrote under the pen name of Vernon Lee.   Five or so months into the First World War, i.e. in the last days of 1914, she applied the phrase to the war between Britain and Germany – deploring how the conflict had cut off all communication between the opposed peoples, and surrendered them to the propaganda of their belligerent states.  For Vernon Lee the iron curtain had little to do with any frontier or wall.  It was instead a ‘psychological deadlock’ with which the warring states on both sides coerced their citizens into patriotic loyalty.

By 1920, Vernon Lee’s iron curtain, had been picked up by a number of her friends and associates – progressive, socialist, anti-war types - who removed it from its German location and applied it to the Allied blockade of Russia, where the Bolsheviks were still consolidating their seizure of power.  It continued to be used to describe the western attempt to isolate Soviet Russia through the 1920s.

Why might it be useful to bear this prehistory in mind as we watch the endlessly replayed tumbling of the Berlin Wall?  The iron curtain, in this earlier period, was never just another name for a frontier.  It involved economic blockade and trade embargo.  It entailed censorship and a state-driven use of propaganda to simplify the world into hostile camps – one of which, your own, was conceived as uniformly good while the other was imagined as wholly evil.  The iron curtain also retained much of its theatrical origin, not least in the methods of scene-rigging and stage management that were found necessary to the maintenance of loyalty on both sides.  

Did the iron curtain finally vanish with the Berlin Wall in November 1989?   I fear not.  Look at the false information and manipulated imagery with which George Bush and Tony Blair justified their invasion of Iraq.  Look at the way their most aggressive policy advisors applied the same polarized way of seeing to the Muslim world, whether in the name of the supposed ‘Clash of Civilisations’ or of the ‘War on Terror’.  Except for a few yards preserved in various museums around the world, the Berlin Wall may be well and truly gone. But, as we look at the recent interaction between the western powers and Iraq and nowadays perhaps also Iran, we may surely recognise that many of the capabilities and habits of thought that came with the iron curtain survive to tempt the world’s leaders still.

Patrick Wright's Iron Curtain: from Stage to Cold War, published in paperback by Oxford University Press, on  29 October 2009.

Photo credit: Mike McHolm. Permissions)

What is so strange, lonely and troubling about Stephen Gately's death ?

The recent death of Boyzone singer Stephen Gately inspired a number of generous obituaries and one shockingly vicious piece from Jan Moir in the Daily Mail (16th October 2009). The effect of this piece of writing was so painfully felt that it elicited a record number of 22,000 complaints to the Press Complaints Commission from Gately's fans, acutely tuned in to the nuances of homophobic discourse. Moir, of course, in a retraction a week later, denied that her intent was homophobic, but many of the readership, and 'overhearers' who were moved to read the original piece online, disagree. What, then, constitutes homophobic discourse?

There is little point in searching for obviously homophobic lexical items, but instead we must look at the discursive effect of texts. Leap's (2010 forthcoming) notion of a homophobic formation allows us to argue that although there are no recurrent formal properties which identify a homophobic text, there are several key characteristics which they share. Leap remarks that homophobic messages emerge from texts, rather than being contained within them. He is referring to the way in which language users may express homophobia indirectly or obliquely, through lexical items, idioms, metaphors, presuppositions, judgment markers and inference structures which reference homophobia. The homophobic formation appears not solely through explicitly homophobic language, but via a complex set of linguistic and social processes which work through context to deliver their message. I comment below on some examples of these in Moir's article.

Let's remind ourselves of the established facts of Gately's death. He had returned to his apartment after a night out, and was accompanied by his civil partner and a friend. Gately apparently went to sleep on the couch, and was later found dead by his partner.

The title of Moir's article, then, stands in contrast to this reality: “A strange, lonely and troubling death”. Troubling, yes, but why strange and lonely? These terms function here (using Martin and White's 2007 Appraisal framework) as linguistic markers of judgment, referencing some unstated, but assumed heterosexual norm. These reveal the point of view of the homophobe who judges gay men as essentially lonely, and strange. What troubles her, evidently, is her assumption that Gately's partner and their friend might have been having sex. To the homophobe, any gay male sex is distasteful, and the notion that a man may have sex outside a relationship disturbs the heteronormative ideal. These tropes of 1950s gay male sexual offenses are reinforced by the following characterisations, “shadowed by dark appetites or fractured by private vice. …..secret and not-so-secret troubles, or damaging habits”. Vice ? Damaging habits? These again imply negative judgment, and are modified by adjectives expressing negative reaction (Martin and White, 2007:56). It is unclear what she is alluding to – the nature of (unspecified but assumed) gay male sexual practice, or perhaps more scandalously and libellously, drug use. This becomes more evident when, without access to any evidence, and only her own prejudice to draw on, she writes of, “ the official reports point to a natural death, with no suspicious circumstances”. The emphasis on 'official' implies there are other unofficial reports which she has access to, but are concealed from us; 'point to' implies doubt and that the official reports are in fact inconclusive and tentative.

The reports, according to Moir's reading, serve only to obscure the self-evident and inevitable truth lying behind a gay man's early death, “The sugar coating on this fatality is so saccharine-thick that it obscures whatever bitter truth lies beneath. Healthy and fit 33-year-old men do not just climb into their pyjamas and go to sleep on the sofa, never to wake up again”. Sadly, this occurrence is far from unknown, but this doesn't prevent Moir asserting her ignorance with a modality choice of certainty, indicated by a universalising use of the verb 'do' governing the following infinitive clauses. Such is her certainty that no gay man could meet a natural death in these circumstances that Moir feels justified in contradicting the considered verdict of the coroner, and the verified cause of death of pulmonary oedema. The death, according to her “is not, by any yardstick, a natural one”. Gay men, in the world of the homophobe are strange, troubled and unnatural. And for confirmation that all gay men die early deaths, she mentions the former partner of Matt Lucas. This sad death was no more related to Gately's than the Queen Mother's was to Jade Goody's. The only common factor was that they are gay and dead, but the one condition leads inexorably to the other, is the inference.

Of course another characteristic of the gay 'lifestyle' is the use of drugs. Disregarding the evidence of toxicology reports, Moir concludes that “Gately's family have always maintained that drugs were not involved in the singer's death, but it has just been revealed that he at least smoked cannabis on the night he died”... “Nevertheless, his mother is still insisting that her son died from a previously undetected heart condition that has plagued the family”. The contrastive adverb 'nevertheless' suggests a deluded mother maintaining her son's innocence in the face of obvious corruption. The function of the adverbial 'at least' is to deliver the presupposition that it was probably more than just cannabis. This impression is further reinforced in the next paragraph where we find that the men are judged by Moir to be sleazy. What seems to have led her to that determination is that Gately's partner and their friend went into the bedroom together, leaving Gately in the lounge. Whatever they did or did not do is irrelevant to the circumstances of death. None of this was criminal, unusual or even sleazy behaviour. Two men wanted sex, perhaps. In the words of the Stonewall t-shirt – get over it. This, for Moir, though, invalidates the possibility that 'gay marriage' can be as happy or as valid as heterosexual ones. This is effectively a 'straw man' argument - the spurious contestation of a civil rights issue in order to impugn the whole category of 'gay'.

Of course, Moir's 'retraction' a week after publication of the original piece denied any homophobic intent, stating; “Absolutely none of this had anything to do with his sexuality. If he had been a heterosexual member of a boy band, I would have written exactly the same article”. But as Leap (2010) points out, homophobic messages may be inferred by some speaker/hearers, whilst others will perceive them as unproblematic. I view Moir's apology as insincere. It takes a close critical discourse analysis to trace the emergence of a homophobic formation from her original piece. None of the linguistic choices made in this text are exclusive to the repertoire of the homophobe, however, what reveals a homophobic formation is its defamatory, shaming intent, and its reception by the audience/ readership. I think Moir's purpose is transparent in this piece, and she has been justly vilified for it.
(Photo credit: MangakaMaiden. Permissions)

Guest Paper: David Wright, Making Tastes for Everything: 'Omnivorousness' and Cultural Abundance

This is the latest guest paper in this year's seminar series organized by the Cultural Studies Research Group and ICAN and we are delighted to welcome David Wright from the Centre for Cultural Policy at the University of Warwick. The event takes place on Wednesday 2nd December, from 4.00-5.30 in room GEE219 on the Clifton campus of Nottingham Trent University. The abstract for the paper, 'Making Tastes for Everything: "Omnivorousness" and Cultural Abundance' is as follows

This paper argues that debates about the social patterning of tastes need to take greater account of changed practices of cultural production as well as consumption. It identifies two ‘stories of abundance’ in the cultural realm, firstly relating to the expanding and influential accounts of the cultural industries and secondly to the rich variety of widely available culture enabled by various technologies of distribution. Taking these into account, it argues that sociological analyses of cultural hierarchy might lag behind those that are mundane and everyday to both cultural producers and consumers. The rise of alternative sources of capital that have questions of cultural openness and tolerance at their core means that an orientation to culture that ranges across established hierarchies is increasingly unremarkable. Such a change is not solely related to age cohorts but the structural and discursive means through which culture is produced and valued. The paper concludes that cultural analysts need to modify their theoretical models and their methodological approaches to better reflect a variegated field of culture and a more fluid cultural hierarchy. In the tradition of both Peterson and Bourdieu, contemporary analyses of patterns of cultural consumption and taste need to take fuller account of the ways in which culture is produced, circulated and valued if they are to maintain their explanatory power.

If you would like to attend the event, please contact Joanne Hollows.
(Photo credit. Niels77. Permissions)

'I've Shaken Hands with Her': the Caravan Park and 'The Best Pair of Legs in the Business'

Drawing on research completed for his PhD, Matt Kerry discusses The Best Pair of Legs in the Business (1973).

Britain in the early 1970s was a place of moral panics, strikes and power cuts. Stuart Hall comments that 1972 was a year of ‘sustained and open class conflict of a kind unparalleled since the end of the war’ (293). Terry Staples also points out that the miner’s strike of 1973 had a direct influence on the film industry in early 1974 when the ‘restrictions on the non-domestic use of electrical power’ during the ‘three-day week’ meant that cinemas had to ‘reduce the number of shows they put on’ (229).

British cinema itself was heading for a crisis. Most of the debt-ridden Hollywood companies had withdrawn funding from British films at the end of the 1960s. Filmmakers had to resort to tried and tested formulas, such as movie spin-offs of TV sitcoms, or sex comedies, in order to sustain a living. Although Best Pair is not based on a sitcom, it is a film adaptation of a TV play, both of which star Reg Varney in the central role of Sherry Sheridan. During this period there were a number of films released which looked back nostalgically to the traditional British holiday such as Holiday On The Buses (1973), That’ll Be The Day (1973) and Carry On Girls (1973). However, Best Pair appears to evoke the mood of the time more successfully, exposing the holiday on a cheap caravan park for the dismal experience it could be.

A lot of the action in the film takes place at night. This darkness adds to the gloomy atmosphere. It’s as if the lights have literally been turned off – pre-empting the blackouts of the early 1970s. As the campsite’s only resident entertainer, Sherry attempts to construct some sense of community in the half-empty clubhouse of Greenside Caravan Park, by starting sing-a-longs such as ‘Oh I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside’, but the merriment appears to be forced. The atmosphere is like the aftermath of a party where the guests have stayed too long – a hangover, perhaps from the affluence and optimism of the late 1950s and 1960s. It’s as if the decade before hasn’t lived up to its expectations, and the decade that has followed has seen both an economic and spiritual slump.

The caravan holiday in Britain had originally been a middle-class pursuit in the 1920s and 1930s, as part of the fashion to ‘get back to nature’, just as the original pioneer holiday camps had been. Camping in a Romany style van had been a rare novelty for Bohemian types who wanted to get away from it all, the whole point of the holiday (as Angeloglou 49 - 50, explains) was to ‘rough it’, by digging your own toilet, cooking over an oil stove, and by looking after the horse, which most city folk were not used to. The static caravan parks of the post-war era, however, had little to do with the origins of middle-class camping, instead providing a cheap alternative to the holiday camp, with cut-price accommodation. As Walton points out, the number of people taking caravan holidays at the end of the 1960s had more than doubled to 4.5 million in comparison to the 2 million who took a similar holiday in 1955, and ‘The coastline of Lindsey (Lincolnshire) saw caravan numbers increasing at 1,000 per year throughout the 1950s and 1960s from the 3,000 already present in 1950’ (43). The rows of static caravans were seen by some traditionalists to be an eyesore. In his 1974 poem, ‘Delectable Duchy’ Betjeman expresses a wish for them to be swept ‘out to sea’ by a ‘tidal wave’ (21).

The crisis of the central character in The Best Pair appears to embody the crisis of Britain at the time the film was made. As an entertainer who has just been dropped by his agent, Sherry’s future job prospects look very bleak. In one scene he announces his options as “the Labour Exchange, National Assistance, and very shortly the old-age pension”, and as a last resort, he pessimistically hopes for death. Sherry belongs, suddenly, to another era. He sings Flanagan and Allen songs and does a terrible drag act that allows him the freedom to fill his gags with innuendo, when in actual fact he disapproves of the sexual revolution – in one particular scene he decries the world as a ‘filthy, dirty’ place, after discovering that his wife is having an affair. Not only has Sherry been stripped of his masculinity, but he has also lost his authority as head of the household. His son, Alan, for whom he paid to have a private education and then go on to university, is now effectively middle class and Sherry feels threatened by this. Sherry believes that Alan is also ashamed of his father for ‘making a living by being a lady’, even though his act is ‘good enough for Royalty’, as Sherry points out.

Sherry is a monarchist. His ‘idea of England’ as Stuart Hall refers to, is an imperial one, with ‘a commitment to what Britain has shown herself to be capable of, historically…rooted in ‘feelings about the flag, the Royal Family and the Empire’ (147). The film was made at a time when the Royal Family was relatively free from scandal, and it could be argued that the strong Royalist sentiments of the time were a reaction again to the crisis of the period. Princess Anne’s wedding was celebrated in the year of the film’s release, and the Jubilee came four years later. These celebrations were part of a trend of nostalgia, as Britain desperately looked back to the Coronation; a time when it was coming out of a period of austerity and rationing and was looking forward to better times.

Sherry constructs part of his national identity around his monarchist values, and name-drops the Queen at any given opportunity, his brief meeting with her, being the highpoint of his career, and a boost to what little ego he has left. He stretches the story, however, beyond credibility, telling two young campers that his Royal command performance was by special request from her Majesty, and that his job at the caravan park is merely a ‘paid holiday’. Later, we get a glimpse of a photograph of the occasion. The Queen is greeting a group of entertainers after their performance, but Sherry is on the back row, and not in close proximity to the monarch, which puts paid to his later claim that he’s shaken hands with her.

The culture clash between working-class entertainer and his educated son is brought to a head in a scene where Sherry and Mary go to have tea with Alan’s prospective in-laws. Their son is due to marry into an upper-middle class family who live in a Georgian vicarage. During his visit to the vicarage, Sherry modifies his regional accent and mimics the vicar’s body language by walking with his hands behind his back. When the vicar questions him about his job in a caravan park, Sherry disguises his shame about the job by saying that he has merely spent the summer there as a ‘try-out’, and that he intends to take over the site when he retires. Sherry feels that working in such a place is only acceptable if you are the owner, just as working as an entertainer is only acceptable if by Royal command.

The argument that ensues is triggered by Sherry’s not knowing the proper way to eat cake during middle-class ‘tea’. The vicar’s Georgian silver tea service, handed down from his grandmother is a symbol of inherited wealth. Mary expresses her admiration for it – she sees it as a symbol of ‘family’, whereas, Sherry is intimidated by it. He tries to go one better by saying that he has eaten off gold plates with the Queen. The claim is so ludicrous that no one believes him for a minute, and the lie is further compounded by Sherry’s saying that it happened first at Buckingham Palace, then Windsor Castle. Sherry wrongly believes that an association with Royalty gives him ‘class’, not realising that those who do have class might not necessarily give a damn whether he has met the monarch or not. He also attempts to speak of his relationship with the Queen in ‘show business’ terms by saying she has ‘warmth and star quality’. This is an attempt by Sherry to exclude the vicar and underline his allegiance to the Queen, and in turn demonstrate her supposed loyalty to entertainers.

Sherry’s façade then slips. He stops speaking in Received Pronunciation, throws down his pastry fork and eats the cake with his hands, much to the disgust of everyone else. By trying to break their pretence by disregarding the rituals of eating with a fork, plate and napkin, he reduces eating to its most basic function and makes it grotesque. He then also admits to his working class status by arguing that he has ‘slaved himself into the ground to make a gentleman’ of Alan. When his lie about having eaten with the Sovereign fails to convince, he desperately claims that he has ‘shaken hands with her’. Even this is a lie, and one which his wife refuses to back him up on. The bitterness of Sherry, and his lack of identity is fore-grounded in a scene which could have come as light relief, set as it is in an English country garden, away from the bleak and depressing campsite. The setting, however, throws Sherry’s inadequacies into relief. He doesn’t fit in with the middle-class traditions of the past, and without the support of his family, and uncertain job prospects, his future is uncertain too.

If earlier depictions of the holiday camp in films such as Sam Small Leaves Town (1937) and Holiday Camp (1947) attempt to construct an ideal working class community in the pre- and post- world war, in The Best Pair community falls apart, prefiguring an emergent pessimism, expressed in the crisis of the three-day week.