Programme
Introduction
‘Were Europe’s early actresses “notorious whores”?’
Peg Katritzky (English)
‘Painting and Prostitution: Contextualising the Greuze Girl’
Emma Barker (Art History)
‘"Soldiers' trolls"': Prostitution in the port, dockyard and garrison towns of Kent, 1860-1880’
Catherine Lee (History)
‘The University’s policing of prostitution in 19th-century Cambridge’
Janet Oswald (History)
‘Prostitution in Ngugi’s Later Fiction: History, Representation and Asymmetrical Agency.’
Brendon Nicholls (English, Leeds)
‘Asian bodies and African fantasies: Chinese prostitution and the transformation of the local economy of sex and pleasure in Cameroon’
Basile Ndjio (Social Anthropology, Yaounde)
‘The Problem of "the prostitute, the bully and obscenities": An Exploration of the Linkages between the Campaigns to Regulate White Slavery and Obscenity in the British Empire’
Deana Heath (History, Trinity College Dublin)
Plenary summing up
Family photographs have received a modest amount of critical attention, much of it dismissing these images as banal, repetitive and ideological. Such accounts tend to focus only on the photograph itself. This seminar will treat family snaps as visual objects embedded in a specific range of social practices, and will explore what happens when various things are done to them.
The conquest and pacification of Morocco were accompanied with a massive production of postcards depicting aspects of native people, customs, towns and villages, guilds, etc. These postcards were read as authentic ethnographic documentations of indigenous life and culture and were hugely reproduced in colonial encyclopaedias, tourist-guides, travel narratives and geographical magazines.
This paper analyzed the representation of the mauresque (Moorish woman) in the colonial postcard photography and showed the extent to which this representation is implicated in discourses of racism, imperialism and pornography. It also tried to problematize the configuration of the mauresque by foregrounding the native gaze and its subversion of the European photographic eye. The images of the mauresque were discussed in comparison with those of the North African Jewess as well as the Senegalese nude.
Organised in association with the Ferguson Centre for African and Asian Studies and the Department of Art History
It has become a received truth that the Achilles heel of Modernism in architecture and design was the domestic. Modernism has been judged incapabe of delivering the sense of warmth, identity, memory and intimacy connoted by 'home'. My little book The Modernist Home (V&A Publications 2006) appears then to be trading under false pretences. A number of influential feminists led the attack from the 1970s, but the the idea that men are unsuited to designing a livable interior has a venerable ancestry. By the same token, women were seen as leaders in the struggle to introduce Modernism in the 1920s, and much Modernist rhetoric was aimed in the direction of 'die Frau als schöpferin' ('woman as creator', the dedicatee of Bruno Taut's book Die neue Wohnung, 1924). The seminar focused on the Modernist work of four women designers, Lilly Reich, Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, Eileen Gray and Charlotte Perriand to reassess the uneasy balance between Modernism and the domestic.
My research has concentrated on the forgotten and unknown innovative women living between 1637, when the first English patent was granted to a woman, and 1914. Hundreds of women navigated a route through the oppressive social attitudes and legislation to invent unusual and ingenious devices, machines and methods. In the 1770s, Eleanor Coade ran a factory to produce her Coadestone for the architects of the day. Their patented inventions included methods to sink piles into riverbanks to support bridges (1811), safety signals for sea travel (1859), washing machines (1880s), furnaces to extract gold from base metal (1890s), bras and corsets (1890s) and windscreen wiper (1904). Others won medals at the Great Exhibition (1851) and Chicago World Fair (1893). All illustrate how adept women could be at problem solving in a broad perspective, for the good of society or on a personal scale, as well as the impact of technology on their lives. They formed part of the scientific community of the 18th century watching demonstrations in electricity, participating in experiments and making detailed botanical drawings. Many subsequently participated in the revolutions in technology and industrialisation. But their contributions are rarely acknowledged, and their inventions could have been as ‘great' as those by many men had they been allowed the same access to engineering, technology and design.
Ingenious Women, by Deborah Jaffé Sutton Publishing 2003
The History of Toys, by Deborah Jaffé Sutton Publishing 2006
1. Gender and Shopping in Eighteenth Century England
Claire Walsh, Open University AL and Research Fellow on the Leverhulme Art and Industry Project, Warwick University
This paper looked at different styles in shopping and different cultural responses adopted by men and women in the eighteenth century. It also considered the importance of personal and social relationships in 'going shopping', including the tradition of 'proxy shopping' for friends and relatives.
2. Scheherazade and Selfridges: modernist transactions in commerce and the popular imaginary 1911-1913
Mica Nava, Professor of Cultural Studies, University of East London
This paper explored the promotion of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, and in particular Scheherazade and its ancillary fashions, by Selfridges department store during the period before Wold War I. This is an example not only of the popularisation of modernist visual style but also the dissemination of an avant-garde structure of feeling, albeit one which exists in tension with the cultural mainstream. Thus the narrative of Scheherazade, in which the Shah's wives, who are coded as white, seduce the African slaves of the household, is echoed in other cosmopolitan fantasies and more popular urban cultural forms, such as the tango and the desert romance of popular cinema and fiction. The oriental fashions influenced by Bakst's designs for Scheherazade and the exotic colours, postures and style of the tango blur into each other during these years both in the public imagination and in the commercial domain to form a generic popular cosmopolitanism. Significantly, this formation has a distinctive libidinal economy in which women are key players and cultural difference signals not the excluded and abject but the modern and liberating - a revolt against the English 'traditionalism'. It also, moreover, coincides with the highpoint of militant struggle for women's suffrage and the regular iconic demonstrations which went past Selfridges and through the commercial heart of London.
Jane Aldgate (HSC)
Families and vulnerable children in the context of contemporary Scottish parenting
talked about how governments conceptualise the family in contemporary society.
Emma Barker (Art History)
Representing the Family in Eighteenth-Century France: Carol Duncan's "Happy Mothers" thesis revisited
discussed using visual images as evidence of supposed changes in family life.
Janet Fink (Social Sciences)
"It's a modern story": broken homes and troubled childhoods in 1950s' British film
this paper brought together Emma's visual images with Jane's modern persective.
This paper placed the recent interest in rape in Greek tragedy in the context of contemporary discussions of the topic. In particular, it addresseds the feminist ways in which rape in tragedy centers round the ambiguity of consent.
Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz is the Margaret Bundy Scott Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of the Kirkland Project for the Study of Gender, Society and Culture at Hamilton College. She is the author of Anxiety Veiled: Euripides and the Traffic in Women, the co-editor of Feminist Theory and the Classics and Among Women: From the Homosocial to the Homoerotic in the Ancient World, as well as the translator and co-author of Women on the Edge: Four Plays by Euripides. She is currently at work on a study of women in vase painting, with Sue Blundell, and a study of Greek Tragedy: Then and Now.
Gill Perry led a tour of the Tate Modern exhibition of the work of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (1907-1954). This is the first UK exhibition dedicated to her work to take place for over twenty years. Kahlo is known for her iconic self-portraits, many of which reference her own mental and physical suffering and the traumatic events of her life, including her serious injuries incurred after a bus crash at the age of 18, her tempestuous relationship with the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, and her miscarriages and abortions. Kahlo's works draw on a wide range of influences, including Surrealism, ancient Aztec myths, Mexican folklore, Eastern philosophy and medical imagery. The exhibition consists of eighty works, including many celebrated self-portraits, several richly painted still-life paintings and some lesser known watercolours and drawings.
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Richard Allen addressed the commonplaces that gender is an organising principle within society, influencing individual and collective destinies and that mainstream Western and Bollywood cinema provides a system of representation which depends on 'stars' and constructions of the feminine and masculine. This paper, based on current research in progress, considered these broad assumptions through analysis of the films Fiza (2000), Lagaan (2001) and Devdas (2002). The key question explored is how - momentarily or for a longer period of time - the audience's sense of gender and destiny is manipulated or determined (or not) by the narrative form of the particular film or cinematic form.
Gina Birch (of the all-girl band The Raincoats) spoke about her musical career, which began at 19. An all female band, with a woman manager and a fairly stubborn attitude to the business, The Raincoats did their best to sabotage any marketing strategies that were put in place. Birch's later career includes playing in other bands with fairly extreme attitudes, forming her own pop band, touring solo, and running her own independent label in the UK and Europe. These days she's a film maker and video director, still performing live, simultaneously projecting some of her own video work.
This seminar continued the theme of masculinity.
Wendy Stainton Rogers (Research School), "Sex, Guys and Porno-tapes", spoke on the construction of male sexuality through a biologising gaze, that positions young men as 'bad' - testesterone-fuelled rapists; and older men 'sad' - impotent and useless.
Clive Baldwin, Queer Identities: representations of white male sexuality in 1948 America
This paper discussed three influential American texts all published in 1848. Two of them are novels: Other Voices, Other Rooms and The City and the Pillar, written respectively by Truman Capote and Gore Vidal. The third text is Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male, commonly known as the Kinsey Report. This paper focused on the relationship of these texts to contemporary discourses of gender and sexuality, considering in particular how they treat the notion of homosexual identity.
Donna Loftus, The Public Use of Private Space: Representations of the Domestic in the Autobiographies of Victorian Middle-Class Men
The paper draws upon a range of autobiographies written by 'normal' middle-class men: businessmen, lawyers, doctors and civil servants, men who are beyond the literary canon. Usually written in retirement at home, the published autobiography often presents a composed retrospective in which public and private life are successfully negotiated. As such, textual and visual descriptions of domestic spaces can give valuable insight into the public function of private space in the construction of a developing masculinity. The paper commented on the way domestic surroundings and family relationships were described and the significance of this representation. In particular, it showed how different forms of narration were used to represent key life stages: the inheritance of character in childhood, the setting up on one's own home, business or professional success and useful retirement.
Peg Katrizky, Wilkes Fellow in Theatre Studies on Business, medicine and theatre: a gendered approach to early modern quacks and mountebanks
Quacks and mountebank - itinerant showmen and peddlars - sold medical goods and services with a promotional repertoire that used a whole range of theatrical techniques. The written record emphases male quacks and mountebanks. Peg's paper considered how women quacks and mountebanks promoted their wares and services, using such material as the iconographic record.
Anne Laurence, Women and the Business of Investment in the eightenth century: The Hastings Sisters, Mrs Bonnell and the South Sea Bubble
The South Sea Bubble gave rise to much press comment about the participation of women in the market but no-one has hitherto looked at some real examples; in the main historians have concentrated upon the economics and the politcal scandal of this episode. A series of archive discoveries have enabled Anne to look at the participation of a group of women in the newly emerging stock market and at how they adapted their investment strategies to their differerent circumstances.
Turnbull's work has been shown recently in a number of solo shows, including the Milton Keynes Gallery (2001), the Museum of Modern Art Oxford (2001) and Matt's Gallery, London (2003). In recent work she has transformed found drawings, such as architectural plans and diagrams, into richly coloured paintings. Using forms of coded information originally used by architects and engineers, she exlpores visual transformations which change the relationships and contexts in which objects are seen. She uses form, colour and design to raise questions about function, purpose and aesthetic meaning.
Her recent exhibition Houses into Flats at the Milton Keynes Gallery in 2001 was a series of twenty-eight paintings inspired by architectural plans, sections and elevations. Her sources for this series included plans of a hospital, school, airport, prison, lighthouse, chapel, zoo, factory and monastery, which are transformed in her work into evocative paintings inviting the viewer to contemplate both architectural and painterly associations. She has also undertaken a number of architectural projects and commissions, including her wall drawing Moon, one of the site-specific commissions made for Milton Keynes Theatre Foyer.
Turnbull's talk focused on her recent and current work, illustrated with slides. She discussed and explained her artistic processes and ambitions, and the studio practices and research involved. She also discussed her most recent series of works (which she is currently preparing for exhibition) based on botantical gardens in Britain and Europe.
The group's inaugural meeting was on themes of gender and sexuality in installations and performance.
Papers