Author Archives: Bryony

Brexit – is it even possible?

This post was contributed by Professor Erik O. Eriksen, Director of ARENA Centre for European Studies at the University of Oslo, who will be participating in a panel discussion on Friday 17 June as part of this year’s Law on Trial events. Law on Trial is the School of Law’s annual week-long programme of free-to-attend public lectures and panel discussions and this year puts the European Union on trial – one week before the EU referendum in the UK.

Can the Brits actually decide if they want out of the EU on the 23rd of June?

There have been quite a few moments of truth in the British debate about leaving the European Union. Increasingly it has become evident how deeply involved the country is in the EU, and how dependent the Brits are on European cooperation. The debate has highlighted the importance of the financial industry, whereby London City would be threatened by the replacement of Frankfurt as a leading European finance centre. Then there is the issue of agriculture, which would be left without subsidies from the EU. Business in general is dependent on immigration. The same goes for healthcare. Leaving the EU is said to have consequences for staff, waiting lists and the quality of treatment in British hospitals.

And also soccer, a major industry with a turnover of billions that relies on free movement, would be affected. There are currently 332 soccer players from the EU playing in the top league in England and Scotland. These players, however, do not fulfill the criteria for working permits for citizens from non-EU (member) states. Surely such matters can be arranged, but what will withdrawal mean for the rights of Britons that live and work in the EU? And how will the relationship of the UK with third countries look after a withdrawal from the EU?

The situation of the UK in the EU illustrates a general point about an integrated Europe. Much sovereignty has been delegated, interdependence has increased. Integration has affected the very nature of nation states. Many laws will have to be rewritten if the country leaves the Union. This should however not come as a surprise. The EU is known to be more than an intergovernmental organisation, where states can easily withdraw.

The EU makes its own laws that are binding on the members. And the internal market is much more than a free trade zone. The Union abolishes differences in laws and standards and develops new rules and regulations that all members have to accept. This uniform regulatory framework provides legal certainty for market participants. Within the EU cases can be brought before a supranational court. Rules shall be interpreted, enforced and complied in the same way. The European Economic Area (EEA) Agreement that Norway, Iceland and Lichtenstein have with the EU, makes this apparent. EEA law has no material substance in and of itself, but obliges Norway to accept existing and future EU law. It should therefore not be seen as EEA law, but rather EU law.

Right to sign out?

There is a right to withdrawal from the Treaty, but how does this work in practice? First of all, the conditions for withdrawal need to be negotiated. These negotiations can take up to several years. At present there is no majority in the House of Commons on any option for withdrawal. Some want to negotiate first, others want to use the withdrawal-clause immediately, and then there are those undecided. The problem is that the country has to get rid of complex regulations, covering different policy areas. New policy has to be created to replace abolished EU regulation.

Second, the future relationship with the EU needs to be renegotiated. All, including EU-sceptics, acknowledge that they cannot manage without some kind of agreement with the EU. In particular, the Union represents the world’s largest market with its 500 million inhabitants. The Brits are dependent on an agreement with the EU in areas of common interest.

The example of Switzerland, a country that has 120 bilateral agreements with the EU, shows how complex such a relationship can be. Neither do we know what the political climate will be after a possible ‘no’ in the British referendum. It is difficult to first withdraw from the Union and from the incurred commitments, and then start negotiating good terms for continued cooperation. Divorces are seldom pleasant.

Third, bilateral trade agreements with third countries have to be established, to replace those that have been signed with the EU. This creates many uncertainties, especially because large trade agreements are at present negotiated between blocks of countries, where the great powers China, the USA and EU dominate. From an economic perspective, there is a risk of an economic downturn in the UK after withdrawal. Financial markets already signal unrest over a possible turbulent economic situation in the future.

These factors can lead to a legal nightmare and years of negotiations and uncertainty. One thing is for sure: leaving the Union would change the UK’s trade relations with the EU and the rest of the world significantly.

Unclear consequences

Furthermore, a whole list of other problems arises if the UK decides to leave the Union. What about the rights of the almost two million Brits that live in other EU member states, and make use of the rights they have as EU citizens? British pensioners living in Spain, for example, have access to Spanish healthcare.

The UK has also considerable clout in the foreign policy of the EU. It is therefore unclear what role the country will be able to play outside the EU. The UK will become less important to the USA and many argue that as a former empire, the country will have difficulty in being regarded a neutral broker.

Even areas where Brits enjoy opt-outs from the EU’s laws, as in asylum and immigration policy, are affected by EU decision making. If for example the Dublin Regulations in which member states are responsible for examining the application of asylum seekers is abolished, the UK will not be able to deport them.

Withdrawal is risky also because Great Britain’s unity is at stake. Scotland might withdraw from the United Kingdom.

Problems attached to the withdrawal seem insurmountable, but in a referendum it is not always the rational arguments that prevail. Often voters vote on other things, often external factors and trust in present powerholders play a decisive role. This referendum is particularly interesting for two reasons.

The fiction of alternatives

First, the referendum forces those in favour of continued EU membership to be on pitch. They have to clearly state why the EU is important, and dismantle wrong information and falsely-grounded ideas about what a country in ‘splendid isolation’ could achieve. We rarely hear Brits talk about the EU in positive terms.

Secondly, ‘Brexiters’ have to propose a realistic alternative. Those in favour of withdrawal have to present a credible alternative to EU membership. Responsible politicians have to make evident how a United Kingdom outside the EU would be able to cope in an increasingly interdependent world.

There is no current agreement on what a United Kingdom outside the EU would look like, and how relations with other countries are going to be upheld. Some argue that Britain only needs a customs union with the EU; others argue that they can expand their cooperation with the Commonwealth, and yet others look to Norway’s EEA Agreement and Switzerland’s bilateral agreements. But are any of these models realistic alternatives?

A customs union with the EU – with free market entrance – is only possible if the other 27 EU countries agree, as it requires Treaty amendment. An agreement will not be acceptable without significant contributions from the United Kingdom. Agreements with Commonwealth nations, which can be difficult enough since they now have strong relationships with other countries, would not compensate for the loss of the EU market.

Both the EEA model and the Swiss bilateral model would entail getting access to the internal market by accepting EU law and regulations. The Brits would then be no better off than today with regard to sovereignty, quite the contrary. By adopting any of these models, the United Kingdom would become partially EU member, but without being able to influence EU decision-making.

British EU sceptics want to roll back integration and return sovereignty to national institutions. They frequently reject an affiliation like the Norwegian one because it would mean even more EU dominance. Norway has abstained from having influence, but not from being affected by the EU’s decisions. The core of EU scepticism lies in the experience of being governed by others, which is the reality in the EEA. The Norwegian loss of sovereignty is not compensated by co-decision in the European Parliament and Council, as is the case for Great Britain. Power is not the same as sovereignty. The ceding of sovereignty increases power when it gives actors decision-making power in supranational bodies.

It is not obvious that the UK can actually fully withdraw from the EU. It will be difficult to avoid ending up in a similar situation to that of Norway or Switzerland, where EU laws are accepted in exchange for access to the internal market.

There is, as far as I can see, no realistic alternative to (a reformed) EU, while the fiction about an alternative is what motivates British EU sceptics. This very same fiction underpins the continued legitimation of technocratic EU adaptation made by the opponents to Norwegian EU membership. But what is a plain fact in Norway is the ultimate horror for many Brits.

Bilingualism in Malta

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This post was contributed by Professor Penelope Gardner-Chloros, from Birkbeck’s Department of Applied Linguistics and Communication.

I recently had the pleasant experience of being invited to Malta for the International Conference on Bilingualism. Not having been there before, this provided an excuse to visit the country and to find out a bit more about its fascinating history and linguistic situation. Maltese is the only Semitic language written in the Roman alphabet. It derives from the Arabic spoken in Sicily between the 9^th and 12^th century, but its lexical stock is largely made up of Italian/Sicilian and other Romance borrowings. As it was under British rule for more than 170 years, gaining independence in 1964, English is a co-official language with Maltese and there are now large numbers of English borrowings. Much of the population is bilingual in Maltese and English.

The photograph of a – typically British – Maltese letterbox illustrates the situation. The text in Maltese is made up of Arabic elements, including the days of the week. Blended seamlessly into this are Italian expressions which are equally integrated parts of the language: underneath ‘3pm’ we read about “oggetti ta’ valur”, “posta registrata” and lower down “festi pubblici” – all very recognizably Italian. English is also represented, being a co-official language, resulting in a code-switched text which represents the various origins and layers of the language, viewed through the lens of officialdom. Bi/trilingual documents as such are commonplace in many countries. But here the admixture of Romance, both entirely traceable and distinct from the Arabic, is reminiscent of so-called ‘mixed languages’: due to specific historical circumstances, a few unusual languages, such as Michif (French and Cree) or Media Lingua (Spanish and Quechua) take their lexis and grammar from different sources.

Given all these circumstances, the contemporary issue of code-switching, where people alternate languages on a daily basis, is a fact of life in Malta. It was also an important focus at the conference. I myself have rarely met a non-linguist who has heard of code-switching; but on visiting a small restaurant in Malta, and explaining to the affable owner that I was there for a Bilingualism conference, she remarked casually that bilingualism was a big issue in Malta – “and”, she continued, “we also do a lot of code-switching”. Having recovered from the shock of finding a normal person who had heard of my specialism, I went back to the conference and listened to a talk by a young researcher who had carried out a linguistic survey among 120 or so Maltese informants. She reported that one sub-group – considered by others to be snobbish or show-offs – code-switched copiously. Her talk gave rise to the most impassioned and vituperative argument I have ever heard at an academic conference – so impassioned, in fact, that I found it difficult to establish the exact basis of the disagreement. Suffice it to say that it was about who code-switched to whom in Malta, why and when. One elderly participant in the discussion, somewhat alarmingly, threatened to have a heart attack on the spot.

The organisers later apologized for their colleagues’ tempestuous reaction and behaviour. But I myself came out strangely energised by the thought that my little corner of academia could give rise to such passions. Malta may be a small country, but it is a – still under-researched – treasure trove for linguists, and it is invigorating to witness a linguistic debate which so clearly carries on into the street.

Other blog posts by Professor Gardner-Chloros

Emotional rescue: how to stop your employees burning out

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This article was contributed by Dr Andreas Liefooghe, Reader in Organizational Psychology, and Dan Vacassin, an alumnus of Birkbeck’s MSc Organizational Behaviour and Director of Indigo Gold.

Sometimes it seems as though it’s no longer enough for employees just to turn up for work and do their jobs as well as they can. Today, many organisations demand varying amounts of what is known as emotional labour, a phenomenon that sits apart from actually doing the job. Emotional labour manifests itself in a number of ways, but here we are referring to a perceived need to ‘Live the brand’ – to strain every sinew in a bid to achieve the cultural utopia envisioned by the leadership team.

This is not healthy. At best, it can leave employees so exhausted by the energy they put into ‘getting their game face on’ that they have little left to do their jobs properly. At worst, we’ve seen it lead to cases of burnout, where the emotional demands placed on individuals have left them no longer able to function.

While many of society’s ills seem nowadays to be subjected to inflated terminology (for instance we no longer seem to have heavy colds, it is always flu) burnout is very real and its effects can be shocking to witness. In our experience, burnout tends to happen not because individuals work hard, but more because they become emotionally immersed in their work, to the detriment of everything else.

This is not to suggest that presenting a strong brand to the customer is a bad thing. Equally, customer-facing employees have a certain responsibility to embody that brand. We are talking instead about a deeper emotional contract demanded of employees, playing to a need to ‘fit in’ which may be a unique human condition.

Alleviating the burden of emotional labour, as with other culture-related issues, must start at the top. Very often, investigating a case of burnout uncovers insecurities among the leadership team, with senior managers finding it hard to judge when an organisation is working at or close to its optimal level and so continue to push relentlessly towards their version of utopia.

As well as the emotional fatigue it causes, the emotional labour around being constantly ‘on message’ can also stifle fresh ideas and creativity, while negating attempts to promote the diversity of the workplace in terms of personality types and behaviours. The whole point of creativity and diversity is that they involve breaking away from perceived notions of the norm; if people feel they must always behave in a certain way in order to get on, then the norm becomes all-pervasive.

We all have a responsibility to learn, to improve and to better ourselves in whatever career we have chosen. So why not let people get on with doing precisely that, instead of focusing on whether they’re sufficiently on message? You might just keep them burning brightly, instead of burning out.

Sherlock Holmes: the man who never lived and will never die

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This article was contributed by Mike Berlin, a specialist in the social history of early modern London in Birkbeck’s Department of History, Classics and Archaeology. Birkbeck is holding a study day on Saturday 14 March to coincide with the Museum of London‘s landmark exhibition on Sherlock Holmes. The afternoon will feature contributions from Alex Werner, Sherlock Holmes exhibition curator, Dr Nathalie Morris, Senior Curator of Special Collections at the BFI National Archive, and Emeritus Professor John Stokes of King’s College London.

“The air of London is the sweeter for my presence.” Sherlock Holmes in The Final Problem. ©Museum of London

Though the pipe and deerstalker have been replaced by a waxed Belstaff jacket, new generation of Londoners continues to be captivated of Conan Doyle’s original creation. What was it about the figure of Holmes that holds such fascination in the minds of generations of readers, film goers and now television viewers?

For many people the Holmes stories, originally published in the Strand Magazine with illustrations by Sidney Paget, are synonymous with Victorian London. The atmosphere of back alleys, dense pea soup fogs, hackney cabs and Bradshaw’s railway guides are the epitome of our image of the teeming city, a city of concealment, social mixing and crime.

The original fascination of Conan Doyle’s audience went with a deep-seeded fear of crime. The world’s largest city in 1900, an imperial capital that brought people and goods together from all corners of the globe, London was the perfect setting for a series of tales that mixed bourgeois morality with fear of the mysterious and foreign. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle used the imperial exoticism of the world’s greatest port, including the swamp adder and baboon of The Adventure of the Speckled Band.

It is no accident that Holmes’ opponents are mostly aliens. For late Victorian Londoners the ‘alien menace’ , associated in the popular imagination with the infamous Whitechapel murders of Jack the Ripper, were a direct threat to the city’s greatness. Conon Doyle perfectly encapsulated a sense of anxiety about the menaces of ‘the city of the dreadful night’. It is an anxiety that is decidedly masculine and middleclass, his eponymous hero allowing the reader to overcome fears of crime via cold forensic logic, disguise and confident elegance. Holmes and Watson, independent men of science, defeat the forces of unreason and evil with the skills of the Victorian social investigator, the slummer, who is willing to visit the criminal purlieus of the city in the search for truth.

The gas lamps have gone but the fascination remains. How do we account for Holmes’ appeal ver the last century and beyond. In the 20s and 30s film helped to perpetuate Conan Doyle’s image of London. Different eras have re-created the Holmes that was needed. The detective was enlisted by Hollywood in the fight against the Nazis. Perhaps our age, with its own anxieties about threats from ‘outsiders’ and desire to master the supposed chaos of the urban experience via the appliance of science helps to explain why Holmes will never die.

‘Cash for access’ scandal: What impact will Miliband’s proposals have on MPs and the public?

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This article was contributed by Dr Ben Worthy, a lecturer in Birkbeck’s Department of Politics. It was originally published on the LSE’s British Politics and Policy blog.

Jack Straw and Malcolm Rifkind, two senior MPs were snared in a sting by the Telegraph in which they appeared to offer access for cash. The Labour Party leader, Ed Miliband has responded by calling for stringent new limits on MPs extra earnings and work. In this article, Ben Worthy investigates the practicalities of Miliband’s proposals and asks whether they will increase trust in MPs among the public.

In the wake of the latest ‘Cash for Access’ revelation, Ed Miliband has committed to limit MPs’ outside earnings to £10,000 per year and introduce a ban on all second jobs. The Labour party will start tomorrow, using its opposition day to propose a bill on the subject. These proposals fit with a series of steps since the 1990s designed to open up and regulate this area as controversy has grown about extra earnings and work. But how will these latest changes impact on MPs and the public?

In terms of MPs, the two issues are whether the new proposals will be implemented and whether they will work. Implementing a ‘cap’ and (eventual) ban on outside earnings would represent an easy win for a new Labour government in 2015, a symbolic step that would have ‘signalling effect’ for the new government’s attitude towards such behaviour. On a more partisan level, it will hit Conservatives much harder than Labour. Research by the Guardian indicates that this would impact on 63, or 1 in 5, Conservative MPs who currently earn over £63,000 as against only 20, or 1 in 12, Labour MPs. You can see more numbers from the Telegraph here.

However, it all may depend on whether Ed Miliband has the numbers in the new House and what politics exists around the change. As Meg Russell pointed out, a number of things need to align for any reform of Parliament to happen – a mixture of a relevant crisis, political will and the right context. Remember David Cameron’s cutting down of the House of Commons to 600 MPs?

The second question for MPs is whether it will work. The reforms are part of a longer trajectory of change towards regulation and transparency. The danger of is that such change can drive poor activity into hard to reach places, away from publicity and into dark corners. It could also trigger other unwanted debate, such as around what MPs do with their time or, more disturbingly, Members getting a pay rise – new Prime Minister Miliband is not likely to want to propose bumping up salaries to £150,000.

What of the public? The new proposals are designed to help increase trust and put an end to lobbying scandals. One basic question is whether the public will notice. It is claimed that few even know the name of their MP, though recent research has challenged this. The public does support a complete ban on second jobs (see page 6 of this polling) and, as research by Rosie Campbell and Philip Cowley shows, they do not approve of wealthy MPs, objecting to both the ‘sums and the source’, with a particular dislike of directorships. Their experiment concluded that any sum of money earned while an MP, whether above or below the cap, is problematic.

Whether this will then increase public trust is a far bigger and more complex question. It may reduce the space or room for manoeuvre in this one area. However, hopes of ‘improving trust’ over-simplify how we think and process information – the MPs’ expenses scandal ‘confirmed’ to many that MPs were corrupt rather than ‘revealed’ it to them. Voters generally suffer from a negativity bias and the continual string of ‘cash for…’ revelations are likely to have fed already deeply held views about UK politics. Nor will it end other sources of Parliamentary controversy, from the revolving door to the picking of leaves. So while it may help change behaviour, looking at the graph below, it appears unlikely any one thing can dramatically improve trust in MPs.

Source: Ipsos Mori; House of Commons Library Research

Queer Studies at Birkbeck

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Dr Dominic Janes, Reader in History of Art, argues that there is a resurgence of interest in LGBT/Queer Studies in the UK in the context of recent political controversies over same-sex marriage and British values and that Birkbeck is playing a leading role in debate on these issues.

Birkbeck has a strong track-record in generating new ideas in the areas of culture and society, including in relation to understandings of gender and sexuality. My own work in queer visual culture is powerfully rooted in an awareness of changes in popular attitudes over the last several decades. It has taken the best part of fifty years to move from the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in England and Wales in 1967 to the introduction of same-sex marriage. The politics of visibility was of enormous importance in gay and lesbian liberation because of the understanding of closet secrecy as a structure of oppression. Some of those involved in the ensuing cultural struggles embraced radical forms of queer identity that were based on the assumption of powerfully counter-cultural attitudes to issues such as relationships, commerce and personal presentation. Visibility was a key element of the demands of gay and lesbian rights activists and battles over self-expression on the part both of artists and members of the public in general played a crucial role of the culture wars of the later twentieth century in Britain, as in the United States and elsewhere. The AIDS crisis in particular rendered the question of visible recognition as being of vast importance not merely to people’s identities but to their lives. The fight for respectful representation in the media has lived on in ongoing contestation over memories and histories of these events.

Since the year 2000 a renewed level of academic interest in queer visibility has been accompanied by wider debates in society. Successive liberalisation of laws in the constituent parts of the UK as in many other western countries have led to claims that the rights struggle is now at an end and with it the need for a distinctive and separate queer culture. The first decade of the twenty-first century has seen the rise of a powerful movement for the assimilation of those who regard themselves as gay or lesbian into the core power-structures of society in Britain and in many other countries. Associated with this has been a widely acknowledged growth in consumerism over politics in the gay community. Whether all this has resulted in a queering of mainstream society or a post-queer erasure of activism and creativity is being hotly debated. David Halperin in his book How to be Gay (2012) has argued from the perspective of the United States that ‘as homosexuality has become increasingly public and dignified, the life of queer affect and feeling has become more and more demonized, more and more impossible to express openly, to explore, to celebrate. It has become an embarrassment….’

Dr Janes’ book ‘Picturing the Closet’

One thing that this view implies is that there was a golden age of gay culture which is now in eclipse. That stands somewhat at odds with other views that have seen much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as dominated by prejudice and closeted self-oppression. In two books that are being published this year I have revisited the worlds of the closeted homosexual in Britain in decades past and asked whether Halperin’s nostalgic tone is justified. In Visions of Queer Martyrdom from John Henry Newman to Derek Jarman (University of Chicago Press, 2015), I examine the development within the nineteenth-century Church of England of a subject position of closeted queer servitude to Christ which allowed a certain degree of scope for the development of aspects of same-sex desire. My next research project, for which I was awarded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, explored the ways in which the closet has functioned as a visual metaphor, and looked at the ways in which ‘homosexuals’ were depicted and visually presented themselves before and after the trials of Oscar Wilde in 1895. The key output from this project is Picturing the Closet: Male Secrecy and Homosexual Visibility in Britain (Oxford University Press, 2015). Together with my many colleagues at Birkbeck who also work in gender and sexuality studies I look forward to continuing the College’s contribution to public debate about the values of openness and tolerance in a pluralistic society.

Where are all the grandparents in modern fiction?

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This post was contributed by Helen Harris (MA Oxon), associate lecturer in creative writing in Birkbeck’s Department of English and Humanities. Her new novel,Sylvia Garland’s Broken Heart is out now from Halban Publishers. This article was originally published on The Guardian‘s books blog.

Considering how important grandparents are in many modern families – plugging the gaps and picking up the pieces when the stresses and strains on working parents get too much – isn’t it surprising that we don’t find more of them in contemporary fiction?

There is, of course, no shortage of memorable grandparents in children’s literature, beaming benignly – or occasionally malevolently – from the bookshelves: from the four grandparents in Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, via Grannie Island and Granma Mainland in Mairi Hedderwick’s Katie Morag series to David Walliams’ Gangsta Granny, grandparents seem a far richer source of inspiration than boring old parents.

But look around current adult fiction and there’s little writing about grandparents as grandparents. You can find forever-young baby boomer grandmas falling in love at 60 and novels about spirited older women finding self-fulfilment, but novels about grandparents’ relationships with their grandchildren seem in short supply. One rare exception is Finnish writer and illustrator Tove Jansson’s magical The Summer Book. Jansson (of Moomintroll fame) here turns her shrewd gaze on the interaction between an elderly grandmother and her six-year-old granddaughter, spending the summer together on an island in the Finnish archipelago. The book is beautiful, astute and tells us a lot both about childhood and about old age.

When my novel, Sylvia Garland’s Broken Heart, which examines the relationship between a grandmother and her young grandson, was published at the end of 2014, my expectations were low: I hadn’t published a novel for 20 years, my (excellent) publishers are a small independent house and a number of mainstream commercial publishers had previously rejected the book, telling me that it didn’t fit on their lists. So I was quite unprepared for the extraordinary reactions that began almost as soon as the book came out.

In Sylvia Garland’s Broken Heart, Sylvia’s bond with her grandson is threatened when his parents split up, driving her to extreme measures. I was invited on to Woman’s Hour on Radio 4, together with Jane Jackson of the Bristol Grandparents Support Group, which helps those denied contact with their grandchildren after family breakdown. I was quite panicked at the thought of my fiction side-by-side with real-life heartbreak. During the programme, I learned that a million British children have no contact at all with their grandparents because of some form of family rift. After our discussion, Woman’s Hour received so many emails from listeners with their own stories that they opened the programme the next day with a family therapist talking about the issues raised.

Sobered, I went about my business (including getting on with my next novel). A couple of weeks later, I was interviewed by a journalist who told me her own story of a family breakup triggering a loss of contact with grandchildren. Then a neighbour who had enjoyed the book told me about the predicament of a close friend, denied contact with her beloved grandchildren after their parents divorced. Real life, it seemed, was starting to outstrip fiction.

Last month I gave a reading at JW3, London’s new Jewish community centre. Grandparents were invited to come along and join a discussion of the themes raised by the book. Although the weather was cold enough to deter a much younger audience, the room was full and one after another the audience opened up with their own experiences. One woman, a grandma to 11 grandchildren, reduced many of us to tears with the desperate story of how her ex-son-in-law had denied her access to his children following the death of the children’s mother, her own daughter.

My humorous look at a warring mother-in-law and daughter-in-law suddenly felt rather light-hearted. It was a relief when another member of the audience spoke up: “You know the bit where Sylvia gives her grandson ice cream even though her daughter-in-law doesn’t allow it? I’ve done that.” There was a ripple of recognition around the room.

Call me Madame

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This post was contributed by Professor Penelope Gardner-Chloros, from Birkbeck’s Department of Applied Linguistics and Communication.

A few days ago, I phoned to arrange a repair to my washing machine. Having got through to the relevant person – a young woman – who could arrange the appointment, I was asked, as question number one, whether I was Miss or Mrs. This question is of course a standard one in this country, where ‘Ms’ has failed to catch on, unlike the position in the United States. As someone who teaches Language and Gender, I am aware that the way you address someone not only reflects the prevalent social structures, but also shapes and perpetuates them. Classifying women from the outset by their marital status is an instance of ‘everyday sexism’, as a certain massively successful web forum is called. Honestly, why should I have to disclose whether I am married or not to someone I have never met and will never meet, just in order to arrange a washing machine repair?

So I gave my standard reply: ‘Ms’. The reply to that was that this was not a title that would allow the relevant form to be completed. Since my (then teenage) son once filled in his title from a drop-down menu as ‘the Right Reverend Monsignor’, it was not clear to me why this form could not offer this third option. Irritated, I said “In that case please use ‘Professor’ “. I don’t like using my ‘rank’ outside academia, but desperate measures were needed. Once again, computer said no. This was an academic title, and so no use on the form. My Chinese horoscope says I am a tree, and trees do not budge. For a few moments it appeared that the washing machine would just have to keep leaking.

To break the deadlock, I launched into my normal little lecture given in such circumstances, about how there was no need for anyone to know my marital status, how this would not be required if I were a man in such a context, and how this was, as another teenager once said, SO unfair. I added that the person taking my details also being a woman, she ought to understand the need for equal treatment.

“Well yes”, she replied, getting tired of this difficult customer, “but it’s been like that ever since ever, so it’s a bit late to change it now”. I pointed out that in other countries, such as France and Germany, they had managed to make the change, and that now in France for official purposes everyone was “Madame” and in Germany everyone was “Frau”, the terms for “Miss” having been abandoned in both countries. I should also have pointed out that the company she was working for, Siemens, was German. On hearing this, her tone changed from one of mild irritation to an interested purr: “Oooh”, she said. “I’d rather like to be called ‘Madame’!”

A mini-triumph for the tree?

Other blog posts by Professor Gardner-Chloros

The Imitation Game gets gay life in 40s and 50s Britain spot on

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This post was written by Dr Andy Harvey – a Researcher at the Birkbeck Sport Business Centre and an Associate Lecturer in the Department of Psychosocial Studies. It was originally published on The Conversation.

The Imitation Game has scooped up eight Oscar nominations this year, including the coveted Best Picture. Since its release in autumn 2014 the film has attracted widespread positive critical appraisal and commercial success.

Its story of British mathematical genius Alan Turing who broke the German Enigma codes in World War II is now widely known. Equally well-known, at least in Britain, is the fact that Turing was gay, a homosexual, to use the terminology of the day, and that he reputedly committed suicide in 1954 at the age of 41 after receiving hormone therapy as a result of a conviction in 1952 for gross indecency. He was posthumously pardoned for his “offence” – in 2013.

The film has also attracted criticism in some quarters for underplaying Turing’s homosexuality, and foregrounding a (non-sexual) relationship with fellow mathematician, Joan Clarke, played by British actress Keira Knightley. But besides such personal details, the film’s more general portrayal of homosexual life in the 1940s and 1950s does stand up to critical scrutiny.

Wartime liaisons

Blackout during wartime afforded opportunities for homosexual liaisons that many wouldn’t have experienced before. Men could find each other under the cover of complete darkness and, no doubt, because the authorities had more pressing matters to hand.

However, homosexuality remained illegal under the hated “Labouchère” amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Act in 1885, which outlawed “gross indecency” between men. This was the law that sent Oscar Wilde to jail for two years of hard labour – and which was used to prosecute Turing. It was widely regarded as a blackmailer’s charter. And so although the scene in which Turing is blackmailed by the Russian spy John Cairncross may not be historically correct, it is certainly a good reflection on the times. In this sense the film captures the perpetual threat that homosexual men had to live with.

The war years may have been relatively kind to homosexual men but prosecutions for sexual crimes increased in the period immediately after the war, reaching a peak in 1961. Police tactics were often rebarbative and generated genuine fear. The police pursuit of Turing in The Imitation Game provides an insight into the importance the police gave to prosecuting homosexual “crimes”.

Men often went to great lengths to cover their tracks. A groundbreaking study by Michael Schofield, published in 1960, revealed the diversity of homosexual lives in the period and the myriad ways they negotiated through the undeniable difficulties they often faced. In his autobiography, London journalist Peter Wildeblood, who was another high profile victim of homophobic laws and police tactics, claimed it was necessary for him to watch every word he spoke, every gesture that he made. Turing’s sexual discreetness in The Imitation Game is an accurate representation of how most homosexual men had to behave.

Tolerance, conviction

There has been a growing appreciation in queer academia that there was often tolerance and acceptance of men leading homosexual lives at a domestic level, not just from immediate families and local communities, but also from landlords and landladies. There was widespread public disquiet at these draconian laws. Sympathy for another famous victim caught up in a police sting saw actor John Gielgud receive a standing ovation when he returned to the stage in Liverpool after his conviction for gross indecency in 1953 secured lurid headlines in the newspapers.

But while there may have been a certain degree of tolerance toward homosexuality, especially for those men who lived “respectable” and quiet lives, criminal proceedings remained a real threat for many. Patrick Higgins’s review of court cases in Heterosexual Dictatorships (1996) shows that homosexual lives continued to be led across the breadth of the country throughout the 1950s, albeit in the shadow of the law, and involved men from all walks of life. For example, the court records show a case from Rotherham, Yorkshire, where 17 unskilled and semi-skilled men pleaded guilty to 41 charges of homosexual acts. In the same year in Barnsley, 12 men confessed to homosexual acts. Prosecution was widespread.

Despite, or rather because of the occasional high-profile trial and the number of less famous prosecutions, homosexuality was largely pushed into the dark recesses of society. Paradoxically, its very invisibility acted as a cloak for those seeking liaisons with other men. In practice no-one suspected other people of being homosexual. Again, the presumption that Turing could not possibly be gay comes across in the film if only as a minor sub-plot, but it strikes a true chord.

The Imitation Game may play fast and loose with a great deal of historical accuracy, as films are entitled to do. But the artistic portrayal speaks to a greater truth. In the light of what we know about homosexual life at the time, The Imitation Game mostly gets it right.

Invisible Women

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This post was contributed by Professor Lynne Segal, Anniversary Professor of Psychology & Gender Studies in the Department of Psychosocial Studies. It was originally published on the LRB blog.

I heard that the octogenarian Joan Didion was to be the ‘new face’ of the Parisian luxury brand Céline when I was in the middle of commenting on a new monograph by Margaret Gullette called How Not to Shoot Old People. It documents countless grim instances of neglect and contempt for the elderly across a vast ageist spectrum. We oldies live in schizoid times.

Old fashionistas are suddenly all the rage (if hardly plentiful) at Vogueand Dolce & Gabbana. Living longer, old people can be encouraged to consume more, especially by cosmetic and fashion industries promising to keep us looking streamlined and elegant. We may, undesirably, be no longer young, but we can at least dutifully defer to the dictates of fashion. Didion even has the skinny look of a fashion model: hardly an inch of flesh, mere bones on which to hang clothes and accessories.

Meanwhile, social media trolls pour forth hate speech against the elderly. Only occasionally is it directed at those with the resources to resist, such as Mary Beard. Older women in need of care regularly report being treated with impatience or disdain, but only the most scandalous cases of neglect attract public notice. There were mild complaints five years ago when Martin Amis, in the Sunday Times, called for euthanasia booths to deal with the threatening ‘silver tsunami’ of old people who would soon be ‘stinking out’ the streets of London. He said he could ‘imagine a sort of civil war between the old and the young in 10 or 15 years’ time’. His words resonate with the constant hum of alarm – almost panic – about the increasing numbers of elderly people, with our distinctive needs.

The most terrifying images of old age – the witch, hag, harridan – have always had a female face, whether in myth, folktale or horror movie. This can have stark material consequences. Women are twice as likely as men to end up living alone in old age, with no companion to care for them. Their pensions are generally smaller, too, as they are confined to fewer areas of the labour market, paid less, and more likely to have taken time out from their jobs to look after other people. In September 2013, the Labour Party’s Commission on Older Women provided stark evidence of the continuing invisibility of older women in public life. Eighty-two per cent of BBC presenters over the age of 50 are men. More generally, unemployment among women aged between 50 and 64 had increased by 41 per cent cent in the previous two and a half years, compared with 1 per cent overall.

In this dismal landscape, it is pleasing that ‘Fabulous Fashionistas’, older women with a flair for bright, distinctive dressing, were sought out and celebrated on TV last year. They were presented as role models for invisible women everywhere. The programme’s producer, Sue Bourne,confessed it had taken her two years to find the half dozen confidently colourful and stylish older women in the UK, but she’s hoping they are setting a trend. Perhaps Didion will boost that trend: her chic self-presentation mirrors her precise, elegant prose. Didion will never frighten the children, unlike the ‘old woman of skin and bones’ in the playground song, who goes ‘to the closet to get her broom’, and may fatten them up for supper. Didion represents instead the cheery resilience that the government and media look for in those older women who are allowed a certain visibility to tell us all how to grow old gracefully. We must all keep looking healthy and feisty; making few demands on others, and least of all on the public purse.

Didion offers the ironic detachment of a woman able to see through the duplicities and deceptions that any celebration of ageing cloaks, knowing that our culture continues to worship youth, and youth alone. Let’s rejoice that she can ride these contradictions, at least for now. As one young fashion model said, ‘It’s so cool, it hurts.’ Quite.

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