Category Archives: Humanities and Social Sciences

Naked Homo

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This post was contributed by Lee Pritchard, a Birkbeck MA English student

At one point in Martin Lewton’s candid one-man performance ‘Naked Homo’, seen here before its short run at the Brighton Fringe, a small towel is utilized as a head scarf – the sketch, one of 8 that make up any one show, concerns a transvestite’s frank recounting of a recent encounter with a haberdasher. Sitting on a chair (the show’s only other prop and sole staging device) Lewton was visibly struggling to tie the towel – no bigger than flannel – around his head before he could start his monologue. After tying a loose knot he confides that it may well fall down later and that we will have to do our best to just imagine it in place. After a short burst of coy-feminine, cross legged introduction, the towel does indeed fall off. Martin gives a panto aside of ‘told you so’ and an unabashed smile in our direction before carrying on, unflustered. It’s a trivial memory of an otherwise smooth performance but one, I dare say, that could have actually been just as intentional as any other part of the choreography. What it allowed Martin to do was something quite crucial: it broke down the wall for only the briefest of moments, letting us all breathe a slight awkward laugh of relief that the naked man in the room was aware of his nakedness and that he could smile and share in our tightly hidden embarrassment, thus alleviating some small part of it.

Nakedness is not just a selling gambit for this show. It is, more than the ‘homo’ part, its very subject. How do we feel about parents talking to their son after he has just walked in on them having sex? Do we feel differently when considering that their parents are gay? How about gay and naked, standing in front of their son who, we learn, has had his own pre-pubescent homo-erotic encounter?  It is to Martin’s credit that he has been able to deftly ‘get at’ the now standard gay-drama issues (e.g. attitudes to casual gay sex in a post-aids era, cross-dressing, gay parenting, gay-hate and the secular popularity of summer ‘pride’ festivals) by simply adding the element of nudity. It speaks to a very British sensibility, perhaps, that finds itself even in these ‘unshockable’ times open-jawed at the sight of a naked actor bending over to show them a close-up view of their anatomy(!) Even more so as this performance has none of the Saddlers Wells high-art dance sheen that makes nudity acceptable to a paying cultured class; rather the point of nudity here is to give a wry, heel-kickingly proud prod in the sides of our less than modern relationship with sex and nudity. The aim is very much to make you smile, to make you go through all the phases of smiling that even the most prepared art-goer is likely to encounter: from wide-grinning embarrassment down to friendly, relaxed familiarity by the end of the show.

The real nakedness however, comes in those sketches that focus on the less than assured gay-personas. In an autobiographical sketch as Martin tells us, we hear a man’s life-long suppression of homo-eroticism blend with the guilt of his wife’s recent passing and the new lease of (sex) life this has granted him. The emotions are tenderly uncovered as Martin skilfully shrinks his body in on itself, covering his intimacy up in a ball of hand-wringing guilt as he learns to confront the real man he is finally learning to love. In a Q + A session after with Martin and director/partner Andrew McKinnon, we learn that this inauspicious rehearsal studio is surprisingly not the strangest space Martin has performed ‘Naked Homo’ in (suffice to say that the angle a seated diner has at a table looking up at a naked actor makes for quite a unique experience!) We asked if Martin had ever experienced any negative heckling at a performance or any walkouts – Andrew stepped in to tell us of a man, on his own and clearly gay who could barely conceal his discomfort and did indeed nearly walkout. The frankness of the themes explored perhaps, or the way that a friendly naked man can make you see old problems afresh, can provide for some a very affecting experience.

 

Dr Holly Furneaux, ‘Dickens’s Gentle Soldiers: Fiction and Journalism of the Crimean War’

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 This post was contributed by Emma Curry, a a PhD student in the Department of English and Humanities, working on Dickens’s representations of objects and body parts.

Dr Holly Furneaux’s first book, Queer Dickens, has already become legendary within the world of Dickens scholarship. Based on her PhD thesis from her time as a student at Birkbeck, the book is exciting, pertinent, thought-provoking and utterly ground-breaking, and changed the field by redefining the ways we think about Dickens’s representations of sexuality. Having found Dr Furneaux’s work a huge help to my own research on Dickens, I was thus both excited and intrigued to find out more about her latest project.

Moving on from her explorations of male nursing in Queer Dickens, Dr Furneaux’s lecture centered on the figure of the ‘gentle soldier’ within narratives of the Crimean War, and explored why the man of feeling became the particular model for male heroism in this period. Her lecture began with a close reading of ‘The Seven Poor Travellers’, an often-overlooked tale that Dickens wrote for the Christmas edition of his journal Household Words in 1854. Dr Furneaux highlighted Dickens’s attention to the tactile, emotional nuances of the relationship between the two soldiers of this tale, Captain Taunton and the improbably-named Richard Doubledick, and suggested that such a portrayal was a means of thinking through the social and psychological consequences of war. She then moved on to discussing the tale’s subtly reformist agenda, pointing out that by positioning the tale directly after an article critiquing the elitist ranking of military officials, and by portraying the gentle Richard Doubledick’s swift rise to Major, Dickens sought to redefine contemporary notions of honour and heroism within the Victorian armed forces. She then went on to trace the implications of other ‘gentle’ representations in art and literature of the period, and once more their surprising prevalence. I found her research on the troops’ battlefield reading particularly interesting here, as she pointed out both the range and sheer quantities of texts dispatched to the front lines, furthering her argument on the widespread dissemination of these ‘gentle’ ideals.

By drawing on such a broad range of literary, artistic and historical material, Dr Furneaux’s lecture was thus a fascinating insight into a relatively underexplored facet of nineteenth-century history. She made a strong but nuanced argument for the significance of these military men of feeling, highlighting their radical, reformist potential whilst at the same time pointing out that, contrary to her own expectations, much of what she had discovered often worked to promote as well as critique a militarized society. The productive, stimulating nature of her research was further indicated by the number and range of questions at the end of the lecture. I look forward to reading the finished work!

The Bellwether Revivals – book reading

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Birkbeck creative writing lecturer Benjamin Wood’s debut novel The Bellwether Revivals (Simon & Schuster) was published in February this year, and is currently longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize. The Guardian praised it as “an accomplished novel, suffused with intelligence and integrity.” Here, Benjamin outlines the musical themes at the heart of the book, from which he will read at a special Hubbub event for Arts Week on Monday 14th May 2012.

My relationship with music has always been more visceral than intellectual. By that I mean I was drawn to teaching myself to play an instrument as a teenager, not because I wanted to comprehend the mechanics of music, but because I saw it as emotional release. In some of the most difficult periods of my life—as I’m sure is the case for most people—I have sought consolation in music, be it the mournful hush of a Jeff Buckley vocal, the skin-prickling harmonies of a church choir, or the searing hum of Bach’s cello suites. The impact a piece of music can have on our state of being—how a simple melody can comfort and relieve us, elevate our spirits, and bring memories as vivid as any picture to the surface of our minds—is what The Bellwether Revivals aims to explore.

In writing the novel, I wanted to find out if the redemptive power of music could be explained in definite terms. And so I began reading into music theory and got acquainted with the more cerebral aspects of music that I’d skirted around in my younger days. The themes within The Bellwether Revivals began to emerge when I discovered the writings of the largely forgotten Baroque composer, Johann Mattheson. I approached the novel wanting to build a story around a character who claims to be able to manipulate the properties of music for healing effects, and, before long, I conceived of Eden Bellwether, a gifted organ scholar at King’s College, Cambridge, who is inspired by Mattheson’s theories. I was also intrigued by the idea of what full-blooded commitment to honing musical technique might do to a boy and his family, the rivalry and tensions this could create amongst them, and how such profound musical talent might alter a person’s perspective on the world.

Through his skill and scholarship, Eden finds a way to connect the theoretical foundations of music with its more elusive, visceral powers—for Eden, the sadness we feel when we hear a sad song is something that can be designed and controlled by the composer. The lives of the characters in The Bellwether Revivals hinge upon how much they believe in the restorative properties of Eden’s music. The book investigates what might happen if the refrain of a cello, or the sound of a church organ, or the swell of voices singing in harmony, could hold more influence over us than we ever expected.

For more details on Benjamin Wood, you can visit his website at: www.benjamin-wood.com

For further details on Birkbeck’s creative writing programmes, please visit: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/study/ug/creativewriting/UBACWRIT.html

Ideology Now – part 3

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This post was contributed by Nick Pearce, Director of the Institute for Public Policy Research.

Is there a distinct social democratic ideology which has political relevance in the 21st century? Patently not, if you think that social democracy was the product of a particular moment in European history that has now passed. This view, exemplified by John Gray’s After Social Democracy, holds that social democracy was a geo-political response to the Cold War, a class compromise to build a democratic, social market alternative to Soviet Communism and US capitalism, which lasted nearly forty years, until a combination of neo-liberalism and the collapse of the Berlin Wall administered its last rites. 

Ironically, this perspective is obliquely endorsed even by self-professed social democrats. In Ill Fares the Land, the late Tony Judt lamented the passing of the post-war European order but did so in terms that conceded the depth of social democracy’s political defeat and offered little hope of its resurrection.

It is perhaps unsurprising, therefore, that Third Way revisionists seeking to revive the fortunes of the democratic left in the 1990s recoiled from professing an ideological position. Anthony Giddens gave the subtitle The Renewal of Social Democracy to his book The Third Way but “what matters is what works, not ideology” was more often the lodestar of New Labour. In the pre-crash period of steady, continuous economic growth – or so-called Great Moderation – a distinct political ideology came to be seen as a little outré.

The political terrain of post-crash politics is more rugged. But as European voters splinter off the mainstream political parties, there is no guarantee that social democracy will furnish the ideological or political tools for a new generation to bring it back to power. Indeed, even contemporary Labour theorists like Maurice Glasman who are critical of the New Labour record disdain the term social democracy, preferring to nourish themselves on European Christian Democracy, Catholic social movements, and the guild traditions of British socialism.

Yet for all that, the social democratic tradition is a remarkably resilient and versatile one. It defeated its main rivals, Marxism and Fascism, in the 20th century. It fed off a productive intellectual and political relationship with liberalism, the other great winner of the last century, and built institutions for the common good, as well as individual liberty, that have endured successfully in European countries. It was pragmatic, recognising the necessity of building cross-class alliances, and drew political success, as well as ideological flexibility from that pragmatism. But it held fast to core beliefs, chief amongst them the universality of citizenship, a claim which it embodied in institutions of the welfare state, like the National Health Service, through which social democratic values live and breathe, assumed and unspoken, today. And it renewed its political appeal despite the passing into history of the Cold War era and the organised industrial working class which had done so much to shape it. Its most successful Nordic bastions remain beacons of social justice, human flourishing and the pursuit of a decent common life.

If social democratic ideology has continued relevance today, it is because it asserts the “primacy of politics” in Sheri Berman’s felicitous phrase. It insists on the importance of active democratic citizenship and the primacy of politics over economics. As Europe seeks to emerge from the wreckage of the global financial crisis, it will need a new political economy. A new generation of social democrats are likely to be at the heart of that endeavour, even if in partnership with other political movements, and actors, as they have been for most of their history.