The discussion below seeks to separate out some of the different strands that have been bundled t... more The discussion below seeks to separate out some of the different strands that have been bundled together in recent debates, and to better understand the underlying issues in the row about antisemitism, Labour and the left. Since this discussion took place, there have been a number of further developments but the basic problematics have not changed.
Alan has been my friend for twenty-five years, my mentor as well, throughout all those years. I h... more Alan has been my friend for twenty-five years, my mentor as well, throughout all those years. I have never written anything without wondering what Alan would think about it, seeing him as one of my most sympathetic, supportive, and yet most critical and incisive, of readers. I started reading Alan's work in the 1980s (the decade before we met), when I was researching literature on the 1950s for my book on masculinity, Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men (1990). 1 Such a sharp observer of his fellow men, I soon learned that Alan had been carefully scrutinizing masculinity from his childhood, in that charitable boy's boarding school to which he had been sent at age eleven, following advice to his mother from a well-meaning primary school teacher. Soon enough, he was exploring its manifestations all the way back to at least Shakespearian timeswhen those thespians slipped so happily into feminine attire and identifications. Thus Alan was acutely attuned to the shifting cultural affectations and performative pretences of manhood, its oppressive dynamics doggedly policing the behaviour of men, even as they restricted or coerced the lives of women. The book he first edited on postwar British writing, Society and Literature: Essays in Cultural Materialism (1983), was my perfect guide to the dire misogyny of the 1950s, fanned by those male soldiers, the survivors, returning home from the intense comradeship and homosociality of wartime excitement, anguish, and loss. 2 Safety installed in hearth and home-if they were luckythese erstwhile soldiers all too often found themselves living unadventurous lives, often daily confronted by bored wives and resentful children, in the ever-expanding, acquisitive ambience of suburbia. Postwar masculinities The distinct misogyny of that era intertwined with a heightened, almost hysterical, homophobia-necessary to keep men from delaying their entry into conventional (ideally bourgeois) domesticity, or from straying too far or remaining too long outside it. I stole Alan's vivid discussion of Kingsley Amis and John Osborne, those writers who so chillingly captured the noxious sexism of the day. It was often sharpest in the alleged radical voices of the era, Kingsley Amis, John Wain, John Braine, and all the rest of them-those ever-so-Angry Young Men who revelled in their apparent detestation of women, those creatures they portrayed always scheming to trap them in the treadmill of domestic conformity. As Alan noted, it was the huge success of Osborne's triumphant play Look Back in Anger which was 'hailed as most representative "in every nuance" of the context of the mid-fifties'. 3 They were electrifyingly unsettling, the productions this man, John Osborne, as we now know a person with so many
Writing this essay at a time when talk of the effects of ‘credit crunch’ is ubiquitous, when cuts... more Writing this essay at a time when talk of the effects of ‘credit crunch’ is ubiquitous, when cuts in essential services have been repeatedly declared inevitable and few restraints have been placed on those banks and bankers so recently bailed out by taxpayers’ money, it might seem a strange time to revisit that contested theoretical terrain, ‘the cultural turn’. At least, that is how it looks from where I have been situated as a feminist in academia over recent decades, working primarily on gendered identities and belongings from within the humanities and critical social sciences. Here, the earlier impact of Marxist framings on feminist perspectives, including the situation of women in relation to domestic and waged work, had been largely relegated to the outmoded backwaters of academia, as ‘Culture’, its representations and significations dominated the most fashionable intellectual highways at the cutting edge of feminist scholarship. Capturing the sentiment, British feminist Michele Barrett heralded what she referred to as a type of paradigm shift, for the most part welcoming theoretical realignments from their earlier concerns with social structure, material inequality and oppression for a new focus addressing ‘sexuality, subjectivity and textuality that feminists have put at the top of the agenda’ (Barrett, 1992: 215).
How do we tackle the enduring prejudice against the very idea of old age, resulting in the habitu... more How do we tackle the enduring prejudice against the very idea of old age, resulting in the habitual marginalisation and disparagement of the elderly by people of all ages, including old people themselves? It remains a challenge, especially knowing that women have always been aged by culture, and frequently discarded in their public and personal lives, far faster than men. However, in this wide-ranging collection the diverse authors help us to subvert the troubling ties between ageism and sexism, showing how we can instead deliver far more complex narratives of the ageing lives and experiences of all old people.
Book synopsis: This book examines a decade of extraordinary ferment in ideas, and the battles abo... more Book synopsis: This book examines a decade of extraordinary ferment in ideas, and the battles about those ideas out of which emerged the Britain of the late-twentieth century. In addressing the ideational contours of the decade, Reassessing 1970s Britain takes an innovative approach. It assembles a group of actors who were influential in generating and disseminating new ideas in the 1970s to reflect on key texts and arguments in which they were closely involved during that decade, and debate them with contemporary historians. It ranges over a wide field, encompassing politics, economics, women’s liberation, and popular culture. It also engages with the ways in which such ideas were disseminated to a wider audience. Reassessing 1970s Britain will be of interest to lecturers and students in a wide range of disciplines: modern British history, economic history, cultural history, social history, politics, gender studies, and cultural studies.
Book synopsis: "A generation ago we wrote Beyond the Fragments. Inspired by the activism of ... more Book synopsis: "A generation ago we wrote Beyond the Fragments. Inspired by the activism of the 1970s, and facing the imminent triumph of the right under Margaret Thatcher, we sought to apply our experiences as feminists to creating stronger bonds of solidarity in a new kind of left movement. 'Since then the obstacles facing us have grown formidably; deepening recession, environmental pollution, falling real wages and savage welfare cuts. 'New forms of resistance have appeared, but how are they to coalesce? In our three new essays in this new edition of Beyonds the Fragments we return to the fraught question of how to consolidate diverse upsurges of rebellion into effective, open democratic left coalitions."
It is rather amazing to be at a celebration of 1968 that begins, and also ends, with reflections ... more It is rather amazing to be at a celebration of 1968 that begins, and also ends, with reflections by feminists on women’s position in the Sixties. Certainly, it is usually not women who are highlighted in reflections upon what became the iconic year of that momentous decade. Yet, far from it being simply tokenism to ensure the inclusion of a few women’s voices, retrospectively, it now seems quite essential to draw attention to women’s place in Sixties memorabilia. Merely saying so, however, brings to light at least two things. First of all, it confirms how distant we are now from the structures of feeling 40 years ago; second, and most interestingly, it indicates how memory itself mutates, allowing us to look back and see the past differently, differently from how it was seen at the time, or even how we might once ourselves have looked back upon the era.
Helene Moglen's article is especially welcome, given the paucity of psychoanalytic reflection... more Helene Moglen's article is especially welcome, given the paucity of psychoanalytic reflection on ageing. She usefully describes possible ways of managing the losses of ageing through accessing the multiple, decentered self-states embedded in our personal histories. However, I have some queries on her use of contrasting psychic topologies. In particular I wonder whether she is sometimes in danger of seeing images of former selves as being associatively “recovered” in the work of mourning that might be better seen as the more illusive “production” of presumptively anterior contexts and states of mind in the present. I also question how successfully Moglen's positioning of her notion of “transaging” somewhere between “transgender” and “transsexuality” serves to loosen up the vicious binary between “young” and “old. I would appreciate closer attention to the dreaded “feminization” of old age, noting the toxic sexism permeating cultures of ageing. Nevertheless, Moglen offers an excellent opening into this troubling topic.
Preface - Notes on the Contributors - Reconsidering British fin de siecle sexology L.Hall - Think... more Preface - Notes on the Contributors - Reconsidering British fin de siecle sexology L.Hall - Thinking Sex Historically L.Bland & F.Mort - Psychoanalytic Challenges S.Frosh - Sexual Values Revisited J.Weeks - Sexual Revolutions R.W.Connell - Feminist Sexual Politics and The Heterosexual Predicament L.Segal - Conservative Agendas and Government Policy M.Durham - Sexuality and Medicine L.Tiefer - Preventing HIV/AIDS in Gay Men G.Hart - The Limitations of Trust in Intimate Relationships C.Willig - From a Man's Internal Family to New Political Forms A.Samuels - Bridging the Gap Between Material and Discursive Analyses of Sexuality J.Ussher - The Context of Women's Power(Lessness) in Heterosexual Interaction I.Vanwesenbeeck - Gender Difference as Process and as Content S.Prendergast - Queer Identities and the Ethnicity Model A.Sinfield - Seeing the World from a Lesbian and Gay Standpoint M.McIntosh - Resisting the 'New Homophobia' A.M.Smith - Feminism vs Queer Theory M.Merck - Sex Talk and Daily Life J.Lewis - Index
ForPeter First published in the United Kingdom by Virago Press Limited, 1990 Fust published in cl... more ForPeter First published in the United Kingdom by Virago Press Limited, 1990 Fust published in cloth and paperback in the United States of America by Rutgers University Press, 1990 Second paperback printing, 1995 Copyright O Lynne Segal, 1990 All rights reserved Printed in ...
The discussion below seeks to separate out some of the different strands that have been bundled t... more The discussion below seeks to separate out some of the different strands that have been bundled together in recent debates, and to better understand the underlying issues in the row about antisemitism, Labour and the left. Since this discussion took place, there have been a number of further developments but the basic problematics have not changed.
Alan has been my friend for twenty-five years, my mentor as well, throughout all those years. I h... more Alan has been my friend for twenty-five years, my mentor as well, throughout all those years. I have never written anything without wondering what Alan would think about it, seeing him as one of my most sympathetic, supportive, and yet most critical and incisive, of readers. I started reading Alan's work in the 1980s (the decade before we met), when I was researching literature on the 1950s for my book on masculinity, Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men (1990). 1 Such a sharp observer of his fellow men, I soon learned that Alan had been carefully scrutinizing masculinity from his childhood, in that charitable boy's boarding school to which he had been sent at age eleven, following advice to his mother from a well-meaning primary school teacher. Soon enough, he was exploring its manifestations all the way back to at least Shakespearian timeswhen those thespians slipped so happily into feminine attire and identifications. Thus Alan was acutely attuned to the shifting cultural affectations and performative pretences of manhood, its oppressive dynamics doggedly policing the behaviour of men, even as they restricted or coerced the lives of women. The book he first edited on postwar British writing, Society and Literature: Essays in Cultural Materialism (1983), was my perfect guide to the dire misogyny of the 1950s, fanned by those male soldiers, the survivors, returning home from the intense comradeship and homosociality of wartime excitement, anguish, and loss. 2 Safety installed in hearth and home-if they were luckythese erstwhile soldiers all too often found themselves living unadventurous lives, often daily confronted by bored wives and resentful children, in the ever-expanding, acquisitive ambience of suburbia. Postwar masculinities The distinct misogyny of that era intertwined with a heightened, almost hysterical, homophobia-necessary to keep men from delaying their entry into conventional (ideally bourgeois) domesticity, or from straying too far or remaining too long outside it. I stole Alan's vivid discussion of Kingsley Amis and John Osborne, those writers who so chillingly captured the noxious sexism of the day. It was often sharpest in the alleged radical voices of the era, Kingsley Amis, John Wain, John Braine, and all the rest of them-those ever-so-Angry Young Men who revelled in their apparent detestation of women, those creatures they portrayed always scheming to trap them in the treadmill of domestic conformity. As Alan noted, it was the huge success of Osborne's triumphant play Look Back in Anger which was 'hailed as most representative "in every nuance" of the context of the mid-fifties'. 3 They were electrifyingly unsettling, the productions this man, John Osborne, as we now know a person with so many
Writing this essay at a time when talk of the effects of ‘credit crunch’ is ubiquitous, when cuts... more Writing this essay at a time when talk of the effects of ‘credit crunch’ is ubiquitous, when cuts in essential services have been repeatedly declared inevitable and few restraints have been placed on those banks and bankers so recently bailed out by taxpayers’ money, it might seem a strange time to revisit that contested theoretical terrain, ‘the cultural turn’. At least, that is how it looks from where I have been situated as a feminist in academia over recent decades, working primarily on gendered identities and belongings from within the humanities and critical social sciences. Here, the earlier impact of Marxist framings on feminist perspectives, including the situation of women in relation to domestic and waged work, had been largely relegated to the outmoded backwaters of academia, as ‘Culture’, its representations and significations dominated the most fashionable intellectual highways at the cutting edge of feminist scholarship. Capturing the sentiment, British feminist Michele Barrett heralded what she referred to as a type of paradigm shift, for the most part welcoming theoretical realignments from their earlier concerns with social structure, material inequality and oppression for a new focus addressing ‘sexuality, subjectivity and textuality that feminists have put at the top of the agenda’ (Barrett, 1992: 215).
How do we tackle the enduring prejudice against the very idea of old age, resulting in the habitu... more How do we tackle the enduring prejudice against the very idea of old age, resulting in the habitual marginalisation and disparagement of the elderly by people of all ages, including old people themselves? It remains a challenge, especially knowing that women have always been aged by culture, and frequently discarded in their public and personal lives, far faster than men. However, in this wide-ranging collection the diverse authors help us to subvert the troubling ties between ageism and sexism, showing how we can instead deliver far more complex narratives of the ageing lives and experiences of all old people.
Book synopsis: This book examines a decade of extraordinary ferment in ideas, and the battles abo... more Book synopsis: This book examines a decade of extraordinary ferment in ideas, and the battles about those ideas out of which emerged the Britain of the late-twentieth century. In addressing the ideational contours of the decade, Reassessing 1970s Britain takes an innovative approach. It assembles a group of actors who were influential in generating and disseminating new ideas in the 1970s to reflect on key texts and arguments in which they were closely involved during that decade, and debate them with contemporary historians. It ranges over a wide field, encompassing politics, economics, women’s liberation, and popular culture. It also engages with the ways in which such ideas were disseminated to a wider audience. Reassessing 1970s Britain will be of interest to lecturers and students in a wide range of disciplines: modern British history, economic history, cultural history, social history, politics, gender studies, and cultural studies.
Book synopsis: "A generation ago we wrote Beyond the Fragments. Inspired by the activism of ... more Book synopsis: "A generation ago we wrote Beyond the Fragments. Inspired by the activism of the 1970s, and facing the imminent triumph of the right under Margaret Thatcher, we sought to apply our experiences as feminists to creating stronger bonds of solidarity in a new kind of left movement. 'Since then the obstacles facing us have grown formidably; deepening recession, environmental pollution, falling real wages and savage welfare cuts. 'New forms of resistance have appeared, but how are they to coalesce? In our three new essays in this new edition of Beyonds the Fragments we return to the fraught question of how to consolidate diverse upsurges of rebellion into effective, open democratic left coalitions."
It is rather amazing to be at a celebration of 1968 that begins, and also ends, with reflections ... more It is rather amazing to be at a celebration of 1968 that begins, and also ends, with reflections by feminists on women’s position in the Sixties. Certainly, it is usually not women who are highlighted in reflections upon what became the iconic year of that momentous decade. Yet, far from it being simply tokenism to ensure the inclusion of a few women’s voices, retrospectively, it now seems quite essential to draw attention to women’s place in Sixties memorabilia. Merely saying so, however, brings to light at least two things. First of all, it confirms how distant we are now from the structures of feeling 40 years ago; second, and most interestingly, it indicates how memory itself mutates, allowing us to look back and see the past differently, differently from how it was seen at the time, or even how we might once ourselves have looked back upon the era.
Helene Moglen's article is especially welcome, given the paucity of psychoanalytic reflection... more Helene Moglen's article is especially welcome, given the paucity of psychoanalytic reflection on ageing. She usefully describes possible ways of managing the losses of ageing through accessing the multiple, decentered self-states embedded in our personal histories. However, I have some queries on her use of contrasting psychic topologies. In particular I wonder whether she is sometimes in danger of seeing images of former selves as being associatively “recovered” in the work of mourning that might be better seen as the more illusive “production” of presumptively anterior contexts and states of mind in the present. I also question how successfully Moglen's positioning of her notion of “transaging” somewhere between “transgender” and “transsexuality” serves to loosen up the vicious binary between “young” and “old. I would appreciate closer attention to the dreaded “feminization” of old age, noting the toxic sexism permeating cultures of ageing. Nevertheless, Moglen offers an excellent opening into this troubling topic.
Preface - Notes on the Contributors - Reconsidering British fin de siecle sexology L.Hall - Think... more Preface - Notes on the Contributors - Reconsidering British fin de siecle sexology L.Hall - Thinking Sex Historically L.Bland & F.Mort - Psychoanalytic Challenges S.Frosh - Sexual Values Revisited J.Weeks - Sexual Revolutions R.W.Connell - Feminist Sexual Politics and The Heterosexual Predicament L.Segal - Conservative Agendas and Government Policy M.Durham - Sexuality and Medicine L.Tiefer - Preventing HIV/AIDS in Gay Men G.Hart - The Limitations of Trust in Intimate Relationships C.Willig - From a Man's Internal Family to New Political Forms A.Samuels - Bridging the Gap Between Material and Discursive Analyses of Sexuality J.Ussher - The Context of Women's Power(Lessness) in Heterosexual Interaction I.Vanwesenbeeck - Gender Difference as Process and as Content S.Prendergast - Queer Identities and the Ethnicity Model A.Sinfield - Seeing the World from a Lesbian and Gay Standpoint M.McIntosh - Resisting the 'New Homophobia' A.M.Smith - Feminism vs Queer Theory M.Merck - Sex Talk and Daily Life J.Lewis - Index
ForPeter First published in the United Kingdom by Virago Press Limited, 1990 Fust published in cl... more ForPeter First published in the United Kingdom by Virago Press Limited, 1990 Fust published in cloth and paperback in the United States of America by Rutgers University Press, 1990 Second paperback printing, 1995 Copyright O Lynne Segal, 1990 All rights reserved Printed in ...
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