# data[].attributes.body
Andy Spinoza's view....

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Manchester Unspun: How a City Got High on Music by Andy Spinoza – from Cottonopolis to Manc-hattan

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A hugely entertaining account of the city’s resurrection over four decades, relayed by a well-connected former journalist, focuses on the catalytic role of Factory Records and the Haçienda

# data[].attributes.body
Multimedia archive of key moment in UK feminist history

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
An interactive 3D experience to mark the 40th year since the start of the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, a vital part of anti-nuclear British History.

# data[].attributes.body
project working to amplify the stories of HIV positive women, working with the Positively Women archive.

# data[].attributes.body
Fantastic, historically rooted teaching materials arising from Wellcome funded research project Gender, Self & Family at University of Essex

# data[].attributes.headline
Prim-n-Poppin, reimagining beauty adverts from the past 

# data[].attributes.subject
Prim-n-Poppin, reimagining beauty adverts from the past 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Nostalgia is always in style. From television show reboots to magazine revivals, everything makes a comeback. Now it's time for the vintage beauty ads of yesteryear to get their makeover. In a new photo series titled Prim-n-Poppin, photographer Julia Comita and makeup artist Brenna Drury reimagine old-school '70s and '80s cosmetic ads by featuring LGBTQ+ and POC models. Advertisement spreads that once only featured predominately cisgender, thin, and white models are now fully upgraded with models of a variety of racial backgrounds and identities including queer, transgender, and non-binary, as well as talent from the body-modification, vitiligo, and body-positive communities. The resulting images are an inclusive and modern reinterpretation of the monotonous ads of the past.

"Julia and I asked ourselves, 'what would the future look like today if these advertisements had been the standard?'" says Drury of the project. "As creatives, we want to challenge the industry to take responsibility for their marketing and diversify their talent pool." As you peruse through the Prim-n-Poppin site, you'll find interviews with each featured model about what this project means to them. One of the models, Cory Walker, says: "[Older beauty advertisements] made me feel invisible in a lot of ways. I had to imagine what it would look like if heteronormative beauty standards weren't so primarily highlighted. It's a beautiful healing mess when you go from being a kid who never sees a reflection of themselves to dreaming up better than what currently exists. I feel energized when I see a good beauty ad, because I'm like, 'I can give that and also take it further and bring more identities and levels of beauty along with me. The new vanguard, really.'"

The site also features a list of beauty brands, modeling agencies, and beauty education groups that promote diversity and inclusivity. Drury and Comita have plans to expand the photo series with more models of all ages, gender expressions, body shapes and more. But for now, we'll relish the sight of the new vanguard.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
"Prim-n-Poppin" Reimagines Vintage Beauty Ads for Today

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Nostalgia is always in style. From television show reboots to magazine revivals, everything makes a comeback. Now it's time for the vintage beauty ads of yesteryear to get their makeover. In a new photo series titled Prim-n-Poppin, photographer Julia Comita and makeup artist Brenna Drury reimagine old-school '70s and '80s cosmetic ads by featuring LGBTQ+ and POC models.

# data[].attributes.body
part of the culture in 1989 as mentioned in WRAP interviews

# data[].attributes.body
Niamh Moore and colleagues write about making and sharing archives and the risk of caring for data

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
Lovely paper by Susie Weller on the emotional labour or archiving and reusing data and how a feminist ethics of care might clash with the neoliberal university

# data[].attributes.body
Great paper by Matt Cook showing that place matters in the making of sexual cultures

# data[].attributes.body
collecting and sharing soundscapes

# data[].attributes.body
Youth clubs

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
From first loves to first jobs, favourite hangouts to best school stories. We are building a collective memory of what it was and is like growing up in Britain and we want you to get involved! Share your memories and photographs of being a teenager and become part of the Museum of Youth Culture.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
From first loves to first jobs, favourite hangouts to best school stories. We are building a collective memory of what it was and is like growing up in Britain and we want you to get involved! Share your memories and photographs of being a teenager and become part of the Museum of Youth Culture.

# data[].attributes.body
Short film by Valerie Walkerdine capturing painful experiences of social mobility for educated working class women in the 1980s

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Didn't she do well: A film by Valerie Walkerdine

# data[].attributes.headline
From Pullan, B. & Abendstern, M. (2000) A History of the University of Manchester, MUP.

# data[].attributes.subject
From Pullan, B. & Abendstern, M. (2000) A History of the University of Manchester, MUP.

# data[].attributes.body
Good on feminist student politics in late 1980s, reclaim the night etc.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
[9781526137197 - A history of the University of Manchester 1973–90] Student culture in the 1980s(1)

# data[].attributes.body
Working with Shocking Pink and Spare Rib as resources

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Much has been written about how 'second-wave' feminism dealt (or did not deal) with the intersectional identities of race, class and sexuality. However, there has been little or no consideration of how second-wave feminists reckoned with chronological age. In this blog post, I'm going to offer some initial, speculative thoughts about how the second-wave feminist magazine Spare Rib addressed childhood and adolescence in the late 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s, how these age-stages were conceptualised by this particular feminist project, and how female children and adolescents themselves engaged with the magazine.

In the first few years of Spare Rib, age was rarely dealt with directly by the magazine, and usually only arose as an issue in the letters page. Even then, as the magazine provided no template for the discussion of ageism per se, especially ageism that was directed towards younger rather than older women, letter-writers tended to argue that the magazine should focus more on teenagers because they were most vulnerable to misogynist exploitation and coercion, rather than suggesting they experienced a different kind of oppression because of their age. In 1976, 17-year-old Barbara wrote in to suggest 'if you want the next generation of women to have a new conception of themselves, you must speak to the young girls, who are I feel the most pressurized group in society' [SR 42]. Sporadic letters like this from teenage girls throughout the magazine's first few years indicated that some read and bought it, but, until the 1980s, Spare Rib did not produce any of the kind of material that Barbara had desired, instead confining itself to publishing analyses of play and friendships that were aimed at the adult reader [e.g. SR 58].

Following a steadily increasing number of one-off articles in the early 1980s that addressed 'teenage' issues, a semi-regular page aimed at young women, 'Typical Girls', was introduced in Spare Rib in October 1986. This may have been at least partly inspired by the greater visibility of young women's activism after a series of 1985 protests against Victoria Gillick's campaign to require doctors to gain parental consent before prescribing contraception to under sixteens, an ageist issue that Spare Rib perhaps connected with more easily because of its links to second-wave feminists' original demands.

At the same time, however, teenage feminists had already found new outlets, such as the magazine Shocking Pink, which was produced by different collectives of young women between 1979-1983, 1987-1989, and 1989-1992. The first collective acknowledged the help of Spare Rib in getting the magazine started, with Sally, one of the first members, saying 'they were very, very generous about trying to explain how to literally make a magazine. We didn't know how to make a magazine'. Nevertheless, young women's concerns still did not really impinge on Spare Rib itself.

Shocking Pink, from its very first issue, laid out the issues facing young women by explicitly reckoning with age as an axis of oppression in a way that Spare Rib tended to avoid. In this way, although the magazine set itself up as in opposition to mainstream eighties teenage magazines like Jackie, Oh Boy and Blue Jeans, it also posed a challenge to adult-led feminist movements. The age of consent was an especial focus for activism in the early 1980s, with the first collective arguing in the first issue that 'women under sixteen' had the 'right to determine their own sex lives' (Unlike Spare Rib, the writers of Shocking Pink deliberately used the term 'woman' rather than 'teenager' or 'adolescent'). In the second issue, a response to a reader who argued that under-sixteens were not 'mature' enough to have sex gave the collective the opportunity to develop their argument more fully: 'the idea of "maturity" in our society is a bit contradictory - young people in general aren't treated as people or as adult so how can they be mature? The whole idea of "maturity" stems from adult prejudice; it's people and their attitudes that matter regardless of age'.

The experiences of young female activists, as recounted in both Spare Rib and Shocking Pink, indicated how ageism prevented them from having their voices heard in the wider women's movement, as Anna Gough-Yates has argued. One recurring complaint was that 'young' women's events and workshops were, in reality, dominated by older women who saw younger women as in need of help and protection, and didn't listen to what they had to say. Sara, Melanie and Kate attended a Young Women's Conference in 1979, and wrote in Spare Rib: 'we were all struck by the number of women who we thought didn't identify as young women... one of us who is 13 felt dominated and patronised by the attitude of the older women there, some of whom came as teachers and social workers in an organising role. This aggravated us more and more throughout the day' [SR 90]. The first Shocking Pink collective noted in their third issue that it was at this conference that the idea of Shocking Pink first emerged.

Education was an issue that young women, unsurprisingly, often engaged with passionately, but which was usually taken out of their hands by adults, even those adults who claimed to be committed to forms of education that gave students more power. Discussion of the sexist school curriculum was a continuing thread in Spare Rib, but there was little attempt to elicit students' views or to involve them in activism. Indeed, when young women offered opinions that did not fit with received feminist views on schooling, these could be dismissed by the adult editors. 15-year-old Sandra wrote into Spare Rib in 1974 to complain about her CSE History syllabus:

'For this I have to do a topic on something that has or is affecting our day to day lives. Most of the girls are doing the different things that affect their mother's lives, for instance, the History of the Washing Machine, and all different so-called household things, while the lads do all the interesting things like the history of the Atom Bomb. (That was what I wanted to do but the teacher said it was more of a boy's topic and to choose something else.)'

Rather than reckoning with the progressive educational assumptions about girls' 'natural interests' that had limited Sandra's choices, Spare Rib's answer prioritised 'women's history' agendas that had little relevance to what Sandra was experiencing at school and implicitly informed her that she was not protesting in the 'right' way: 'To women whose history has been ignored, the idea of the history of household things sounds quite interesting' [SR 22].

In the 1980s, young women encountered similar problems even when they tried to engage with supposedly radical, left-wing educational groups or with schools and local authorities that seemed open to new ideas. In 1988, Sheffield Young Lesbians Group [YLG] were originally welcomed by a local secondary school who wanted them to speak to students about the experience of being a young lesbian, but the school failed to adequately brief their students in advance and the first session did not go well. As a result, the school not only stopped the sessions but liaised with Sheffield City Council to prevent the YLG using facilities that had previously been available to them through the council's Girls and Young Women's Project. One member of the YLG wrote angrily that while Sheffield might have a reputation as a 'trendy socialist council', it was actually bigoted. In the same year, one member of the Shocking Pink collective attended a Libertarian Education Conference but found it was not as libertarian as it was made out to be: 'There wasn't very much in depth communication between the young women (the "worked with") present and the women working with them... a workshop about girls/young women should surely focus on what we want from those in the powerful position of "working with" us (a power/authority usually not recognised by those who have it)'.

The limited influence of young women's analysis of ageism on the wider movement was evident in how Spare Rib addressed issues of age outside a few isolated articles by writers like Susan Hemmings who took a special interest in the topic. While the magazine 'dealt with' adolescents in the later 1980s and early 1990s by giving them their own page - visibly isolating them from the adult discussions rather than fully integrating issues of age throughout the magazine - children who engaged with Spare Rib fared even worse. Female children occasionally wrote into the magazine throughout its lifetime, often inspired by having read their mother's copy or having talked to their mother about some of the issues raised by second-wave feminism. As 11-year-old Rachel from Swansea wrote in 1983, 'I am involved in a girls' group which meets on a Wednesday evening. I read Spare Rib sometimes as mum buys it every month... I did this graffiti [on a Cosmo advertisement] as I am sick and tired of sexist advertisements. They, men, think women are dolls... If they think this magazine [ Cosmo] is feminist, they are thinking wrong. Yours angrily...'

Rachel's graffitied Cosmo advertisement. Spare Rib 128, March 1983, Letters Page, p.23. Image from author's personal archive.

However, Spare Rib treated letters from children quite differently from letters from adults or adolescents. Often (though not always) spelling mistakes in the letters were not corrected, and the salutation and/or sign-off were presented as a photograph rather than typed out. This preserved the writer's original spelling and 'childish' handwriting, presenting the letter as a cute, funny 'exhibit' rather than as a serious account of an experience or as a contribution to discussion, as in this 1979 letter from an 8-year-old, H:

H's letter. Spare Rib 82, June 1979, Letters Page, p.4. Image from author's personal archive.

Overall, therefore, while Spare Rib increasingly paid lip-service to the needs of young women during the 1980s and early 1990s, the magazine's editors tended to conceptualise them as a vulnerable sub-group rather than as a group experiencing intersectional oppression, and this was especially evident in their dealings with female children, who were not considered to be serious correspondents, but instead presented as amusingly precocious. Attempts by young women to combat this through the Shocking Pink collective and through involvement in organised events were not ultimately enough to cause adult feminists to seriously question their attitudes to their younger counterparts, at least insofar as these attitudes were expressed in the pages of Spare Rib.
Primary Sources
"Odds and sods," Spare Rib 22, p.33, April 1974.
"Letters page," Spare Rib 42, p.4, January 1976.
"A girl's best friend," Spare Rib 58, p.38, May 1977.
"Letters page," Spare Rib 82, , p.4, June 1979.
"Young women's conference," Spare Rib 90, p.10, January 1980.
"Fury over bid to make sex under 16 legal," Shocking Pink 1, p.17, 1981.
"Letters page," Shocking Pink 2, p.3, 1981.
Editors' letter, Shocking Pink 3, p.3, 1982.
"Letters page," Spare Rib 128, p.23, March 1983.
"Report from Libertarian Education Conference," Shocking Pink 4, p.38, 1988.
"Young lesbian women," Shocking Pink, issue number unknown, p.18, 1988.
Secondary Sources
Cazz Blaise. "A shocking shade of pink," in The F Word, 13 August 2011.
Anna Gough-Yates,. "'A shock to the system': feminist interventions in youth subculture - the adventures of Shocking Pink," in Contemporary British History 26/3, 2012.
About the Author
Dr Laura Tisdall is a Leverhulme Early Career/NUAcT Fellow in History at Newcastle University. Her monograph A Progressive Education? How Childhood Changed in Mid-Twentieth-Century English and Welsh Schools (Manchester University Press, 2020) argues that there was a significant shift in concepts of both childhood and adolescence in Britain after the Second World War. She works on childhood, youth and adulthood in twentieth-century Britain, and she is especially interested in medical and psychological ideas about chronological age and the history of schooling and education.

Cite this article as: Laura Tisdall, " Spare Rib, Shocking Pink and the Politics of Age in 1980s Feminism," in Changing Childhoods, 19 January 2021, https://changingchildhoods.com/politics-of-age-in-1980s-feminism

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Spare Rib, Shocking Pink and the Politics of Age in 1980s Feminism - Changing Childhoods

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
By Laura Tisdall "Shocking Pink, from its very first issue, laid out the issues facing young women by explicitly reckoning with age as an axis of oppression in a way that Spare Rib tended to avoid. In this way, although the magazine set itself up as in opposition to mainstream eighties teenage magazines like Jackie, ...

# data[].attributes.body
Archive of youth work resources, banners, leaflets, magazines, oral ‘her-stories’ and other documents related to feminist youth work with girls and young women

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Showing all 168 resources. Please use the filter on the right to narrow your selection.

This is a resource to use at the beginning of a year. Use My New Year Goals to look back and celebrate what happened last year before looking to the future. Complete each corner one at a time to create a set of goals with tools to help you get there.
Download file
Download this 90 minute lesson plan or the whole Democracy Cookbook which has lots of different activities.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Showing all 168 resources. Please use the filter on the right to narrow your selection. This is a resource to use at the beginning of a year. Use My New Year Goals to look back and celebrate what happened last year before looking to the future.

# data[].attributes.body
A crowdsourced archive of images from the Manchester rave scene, hosted by Manchester Digital Music Archive.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Rave in Greater Manchester, 1985-1995 - Manchester Digital Music Archive

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
To celebrate the launch of the Lapsed Clubber Audio Map, we've started an exhibition about rave in Greater Manchester.

# data[].attributes.body
Observing the 80s

Amazing blog with youtube playlists, teaching resources, audio recordings and infographics, using material from the Mass Observation Archive.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Observing the 1980s brings together, for the first time, 'voices' from both the Mass Observation Collections and the British Library Oral History Collections. This material offers a unique and inspiring insight into the lives and opinions of British people from all social classes and regions during the 1980s.

# data[].attributes.body
Curated histories of 1980s Manchester with an emphasis on girls for once

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Manchester Voices is a research project which explores the rich tapestry of accents, dialects, and identities that make up Greater Manchester. In this week's blog, Dr Erin Carrie and Dr Rob Drummond discuss how the research will develop, and demonstrate why it really is a project about, with, and for the people of Greater Manchester.
As sociolinguists, we spend our time listening to the ways in which people use language, and investigating the role it plays in the performance of regional and social identity. With the Manchester voices project, we enrich those viewpoints with insights from poetry and history in our effort to celebrate Manchester's rich linguistic and cultural heritage.

Present-day Greater Manchester is an increasingly prominent city-region comprising 2.8 million inhabitants across 493 square miles. It unites areas that were once part of Lancashire, Yorkshire and Cheshire, bringing together wide-ranging industrial histories, folk traditions and cultural influences, making it an ideal site for a study of this kind.

Our preliminary research across the ten boroughs of Bolton, Bury, Manchester, Oldham, Rochdale, Salford, Stockport, Tameside, Trafford and Wigan suggested that the accents and dialects of this region are heavily bound to notions of place and belonging. They are often a source of pride for their speakers, and evoke a strong sense of identity.

We exhibited these early findings in an interactive exhibition at Manchester Central Library in the summer of 2017. They demonstrated the wide variety of linguistic forms used in Greater Manchester, with sounds and grammar changing within the space of a few miles, and words varying from region to region.

'Ginnel' (alley), 'skriking' (crying) and 'cruckle' (to go over on one's ankle) were just some examples of this rich lexical variation, not to mention the numerous words used for 'bread roll' across the ten boroughs ('barm', 'barmcake', 'teacake' and 'muffin', to name just a few!). The enthusiastic response to the exhibition reassured us that we were investigating a topic of genuine regional interest and value, which gave us the impetus to seek further funding.

With support from the AHRC, we're now in a position to take the project to new levels, building on earlier successes, and employing additional methods to gain a more complete picture.

In 2020, we'll undertake a comprehensive tour of the ten boroughs of Greater Manchester in our Accent Van - a specially kitted-out vehicle which will serve as a mobile interview booth and recording studio. This will give us access to a far greater range of people, stories and insights than ever before, making this one of the most detailed linguistic descriptions of a particular region the UK has ever seen.

Participants will be asked to share their thoughts on how they speak, reflecting on deeply embedded beliefs regarding the status and value of their own, and other people's, accents and dialects and how they relate spoken language to a sense of local identity.

In addition to the Accent Van, we will be digitally mapping the area's accents and dialects using a sophisticated online tool developed specifically for the project, as well as running a series of attitude surveys to track people's thoughts and feelings about the speech of the region. We will also be organising outreach and poetry workshops in collaboration with the Manchester Centre for Youth Studies, the Manchester Centre for Public History and Heritage and Manchester Met's English Department, which will serve to engage members of the public in thoughtful discussion and creative collaboration around issues of accent, dialect and identity.

The project will culminate with a permanent Manchester Central Library installation and audiovisual archive, containing interviews with people from each of the ten boroughs, interactive dialect maps and excerpts of analysis and creative artefacts.

The archive will also contain recordings digitised as part of the British Library and Heritage Lottery Fund Unlocking the UK's Sound Heritage initiative, which will provide a vital historical link and allow the researchers to explore language change in the region over time. In addition to this, we will tour a smaller exhibition around the ten boroughs, inviting people to share in the findings they have helped to generate.

Manchester Voices will have a further public presence in the new Manchester Poetry Library (opening at Manchester Metropolitan University in 2020), where there will be an archive of regional poetry that features the area's diverse dialects. As part of the project, we will host a series of poetry performances and events across the region, exploring the role of accent and dialect in literary works and literary creation, and workshops in local schools and community settings.

Manchester Voices is an AHRC-funded project that is truly about, with, and for the people of Greater Manchester. By bringing regional accents and dialects to the fore of public consciousness, we hope that they will come to be understood and appreciated in new ways.

Further information about the project is available at www.manchestervoices.org

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Manchester Voices: Documenting and celebrating the accents and dialects of Greater Manchester

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Manchester Voices is a research project which explores the rich tapestry of accents, dialects, and identities that make up Greater Manchester. In this week's blog, Dr Erin Carrie and Dr Rob Drummond discuss how the research will develop, and demonstrate why it really is a project about, with, and for the people of Greater Manchester.

# data[].attributes.headline
Preface to second edition of Male in the Head 2004

# data[].attributes.subject
Preface to second edition of Male in the Head 2004

# data[].attributes.body
Reflects on changes and continuities since the study was undertaken

# data[].attributes.headline
marking time and making methods - untimely dillemas

# data[].attributes.subject
marking time and making methods - untimely dillemas

# data[].attributes.body
Paper by critical friend Julie McLeod making interesting points about the oddness of a revisiting study as the researcher brings the past into the interview through her questions and lines of enquiry which may not resonate with with partic
ipants. How the experiential is a mode of carrying the past forward and the role of new time horizons in revising this.

# data[].attributes.body
Passed to us by Margaretta Jolly who was in the teenage women's group that wrote this article

# data[].attributes.body
Link to Tufnell Press site for WRAP publications

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Books about young peoples's exuality and the limitiation of AIDS

# data[].attributes.body
Link suggested by Pam Thurschwell

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Historians and social critics differ on the specifics of the timeline, but most cultural observers agree that the strange and fascinating creature known as the American teenager - as we now understand the species - came into being sometime in the early 1940s. This is not to say that for millennia human beings had somehow passed from childhood to adulthood without enduring the squalls of adolescence. But the modern notion of the teen years as a recognized, quantifiable life stage, complete with its own fashions, behavior, vernacular and arcane rituals, simply did not exist until the post-Depression era.

Here, in the first of a series of galleries on the evolution of LIFE magazine's - and, by extension, America's - view of teenagers through the middle part of the 20th century, LIFE.com presents photos that the inimitable Nina Leen shot for a December 1944 article, "Teen-Age Girls: They Live in a Wonderful World of Their Own."

Leen focused on a group of 12 girls, from 15 to 17 years old, living in Webster Groves, Mo., a suburb of St. Louis.

(Note the hyphenated phrase, "teen-age." By all accounts, it would be several years before the word as we spell it today, "teenager," would make an appearance in the pages of LIFE. The word "teen-agers" itself, meanwhile, likely made its debut in print in a 1941 issue of Popular Science Monthly.)

In its December 1944 feature, LIFE breathlessly discussed the "teen-age" phenomenon in language that, in 2013, somehow feels naive, chauvinistic, celebratory and insightful, all at once. That so many of the article's impossibly broad, sweeping claims ("Some 6,000,000 U.S. teen-age girls live in a world all their own: a lovely, gay, enthusiastic, funny and blissful society. . . .") clearly apply to a specific type of teenager - i.e., white, middle-class - tends to blunt some of the more incisive observations. But taken as a whole, the LIFE article and Leen's photographs constitute a fascinating, early look at a segment of the American populace that, over the ensuing decades, for better and for worse, has assumed an increasingly central role in the shaping of Western culture.

As LIFE stated the case to its millions of readers in 1944:

There is a time in the life of every American girl when the most important thing in the world is to be one of a crowd of other girls and to act and speak and dress exactly as they do. This is the teen age.

Some 6,000,000 U.S. teen-age girls live in a world all their own - a lovely, gay, enthusiastic, funny and blissful society almost untouched by the war. It is a world of sweaters and skirts and bobby sox and loafers, of hair worn long, of eye-glass rims painted red with nail polish, of high school boys no yet gone to war. It is world still devoted to parents who are pals even if they use the telephone too much. It is a world of Vergil's Aeneid, second-year French and plane geometry, of class plays, field hockey, "moron" jokes and put-on accents. It is a world of slumber parties and the Hit Parade, of peanut butter and popcorn and the endless collecting of menus and match covers and little stuffed animals.

Nina Leen-Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

American businessmen, many of whom have teen-age daughters, have only recently begun to realize that teen-agers make up a big and special market. . . . The movies and the theater make money by turning a sometimes superficial and sometimes social-minded eye on teen-agers.

Their new importance means little to teen-age millions. By their energy, originality and good looks they have brought public attention down from debutantes and college girls to themselves. Moving through the awkward age, the troubles of growing up, their welter of fads and taboos, they eventually become - in the judgment of almost every Western nation - the most attractive women in the world.

Then again, perhaps that particular discussion is best left to another series on LIFE.com -- one looking at, say, LIFE's portrayal of women through the years?
Liz Ronk, who edited this gallery, is the Photo Editor for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Invention of Teenagers: LIFE and the Triumph of Youth Culture

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Historians and social critics differ on the specifics of the timeline, but most cultural observers agree that the strange and fascinating creature known as the American teenager - as we now understand the species - came into being sometime in the early 1940s.

# data[].attributes.body
Piece reflecting on WRAP findings after 20 years

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In this short article we revisit "Deconstructing virginity" published in Sex and Relationship Therapy in 2000. The article was based on data from two largely qualitative studies of young people's sexuality: the Women Risk and AIDS project and subsequent Men, Risk and AIDS project, which were funded in the late-1980s in the light of the threat of HIV and AIDS. They constituted the first UK-based major empirical investigations of young people's heterosexual understandings and practices. Here we place that article in its own time and in the current context of research, practice and culture in relation to young people and sexuality. We comment briefly on how key ideas in "Deconstructing virginity" and these early studies have been developed in subsequent research, considering critical biographical moments as a way of exploring the relationship between the individual and the social and narratives of loss and gain as a medium for negotiating conflict and inequality.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Revisiting youthful sexuality: continuities and changes over two decades

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In this short article we revisit "Deconstructing virginity" published in Sex and Relationship Therapy in 2000. The article was based on data from two largely qualitative studies of young people's sexuality: the Women Risk and AIDS project and subsequent Men, Risk and AIDS project, which were funded in the late-1980s in the light of the threat of HIV and AIDS.

# data[].attributes.body
Blog by Tracey Loughton reflecting on themes of Wellcome funded historical project on sexuality

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
On 9 November 2018 the Body Self and Family project hosted the first of two interlinked workshops on the theme of 'Gender, Body and Selfhood'. The aim of these workshops is to explore the challenging questions that investigation of subjectivity and embodiment raise for researchers, including around how best to understand the interrelations of different aspects of identity, conceptualise the relationship between representation and experience, and negotiate the constraining effects of social structures on individual and collective agency.

The workshops explore how historians of different periods and specialisms, as well as scholars in other disciplines, approach these questions. Participants reflect on their own practices within the context of disciplinary assumptions, limitations, and opportunities. The sessions therefore encourage sharing of different approaches as well as debate across disciplinary boundaries, and in this way contribute to developing methodologies to probe fundamental questions for scholars of gender, body and self.

Workshop 1 included panels on identity and intersectionality (Laura Doan, University of Manchester; Isabel Davis, Birkbeck, University of London; Rochelle Rowe, UCL); qualitative and quantitative approaches across disciplines (Caroline Rusterholz, University of Cambridge; Sundari Anitha, University of Lincoln); and local, regional and transnational identities (Daisy Payling, University of Essex; Rebecca Jennings, UCL). I have attempted to gather my thoughts on recurrent themes in these panels and the discussions that followed; there is a lot more that could be said, and I would love to hear your thoughts.

Intersectionality One recurring question is whether 'intersectionality' and 'identity' are still useful terms. For some, uses of 'intersectionality' often end up emphasising divisions and a hierarchy of victimhood, whereas for others 'intersectionality' is still an essential concept to undo the erasures of the past. The embodied self can stand against these erasures - but we require highly nuanced understandings of the different possible types and layers of erasure in order to recapture what, exactly, might have been erased. Many of those present recalled instances in which they had interpreted the stories of their subjects/ participants using a particular framework, only to later realise - either in dialogue with a participant, or on subsequent re-reading of source material - that the initial reading had little in common with the teller's own interpretation of events, and had closed off other avenues of interpretation. Life history can allow us to escape these fixities and to think about how identities change over time, but only if we are sufficiently open to starting with the life itself, rather than our idea of what that life was or meant - how can we achieve that openness while acknowledging the quest for meaning that drives our research?

Indeterminacy Indeterminacy stands in an odd relation to 'identity' and 'intersectionality'. On the one hand, the concept exists as a way of expressing that which cannot be nailed down, and a means of emphasising the fluid nature of experience. On the other hand, it is a term that has attained prominence within certain fields of scholarship precisely as a result of concerns with 'identity'. Its origins will always lie within it, and perhaps should not be transcended; what looks to one person like acknowledging complexity is to another the denial of rallying points necessary for political action. Uncertainty can be liberating and/or frustrating. But as scholars, how can we capture that state of being/ not being, knowing/ not knowing? The nature of articulation is to pin down meaning, and we often perceive this as 'bringing to light' - but what if it constitutes a reduction, a narrowing down, of experience? Is the only alternative not to analyse? Suggested alternatives included representing via the visual rather than text, or analysing actions rather than words - both exciting possibilities for scholarship, but does this simply displace the site of articulation from the thing itself to its representation, rather than avoid the language trap entirely? If so, then how to we bridge the gap between our tactical reasons for trying to pin down what we study, and the messiness of lived experience? Certainly, we need to consider whether current debates about indeterminacy would have made much sense to people in the past, and whether we are now more or less content with indeterminacy than other peoples may have been.

Subjectivity In some disciplines, 'subjectivity' is already yesterday's buzzword; in others, it is still a maligned threat to be staved off at all costs. Those disciplines threatened by subjectivity usually simultaneously deny the subjective and embodied experience of the researcher, and implicitly hold up the white, male, heterosexual, middle-class scholar as the only researcher able to be neutral - the very embodiment of neutrality, in fact. One perverse result of this emphasis is that these disciplines worship biography, while denying the value of autobiography. Against these claims, the insertion of the self into research becomes both a radical act, and an ethical necessity. Those methodologies that involve a face-to-face relationship might seem to necessitate this insertion of the self, but it remains easy to write the self out of the published research. What, then, does it mean to insist on the self? Is this a continuation of the process of recognition that often leads people to become participants in research - 'I will participate, because you are like me, and can help to tell my story'? What kinds of recognition are at stake here? Finally, how should historians who work with sources produced by the long-dead try to understand subjectivity?

Transhistoricism If we shift our focus to embodied experience, this raises the possibility that elements of some experiences - (un)pregnancy, desire, grief, trauma - remain substantially the same over time, because they are lived through the body as much as interpreted by the mind. As a historian I am troubled by this possibility because for decades one of my core beliefs - personal as much as professional - is that context determines who and what we are and how we can think and feel, and therefore that people in different times inevitably experience superficially similar events in different ways. Like many others before me, I first led questioned this tenet because of personal (embodied) experience, but I have found it difficult to know how to negotiate this questioning in my professional activities. I found the suggestion that there are different 'textures' of transhistorical experience intriguing - this is one of the many areas I would like to explore further at our next workshop.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Gender, Body and Selfhood Workshop 1 (November 2018)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
On 9 November 2018 the Body Self and Family project hosted the first of two interlinked workshops on the theme of 'Gender, Body and Selfhood'.

# data[].attributes.headline
1988 public health advert focusing on HIV risk to heterosexuals

# data[].attributes.subject
1988 public health advert focusing on HIV risk to heterosexuals

# data[].attributes.body
The flat - aimed at men

# data[].attributes.headline
1988 Public health adverts focusing on HIV risk to heterosexuals

# data[].attributes.subject
1988 Public health adverts focusing on HIV risk to heterosexuals

# data[].attributes.body
The disco - aimed at women

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Aids Awareness Advert - Disco -  UK TV 1980's

# data[].attributes.headline
Film about 1988 Manchester Stop Clause 28

# data[].attributes.subject
Film about 1988 Manchester Stop Clause 28

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Manchester Stop Clause 28 / Never Going Underground / Gay Rights Rally (20 February 1988)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988 caused the controversial addition of an amendment that stated that a local authority "shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality" or "promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship".

# data[].attributes.body
Exhibition at Manchester People' History Museum 201

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Pits and Peverts Poster, 1984.

Never Going Underground: the fight for LGBT+ rights at People's History Museum, City Centre, 25 February-3 September 2017, free entry - Visit now

'Never Going Underground' was the name of the North West's campaign against Section 28 of the 1988 Local government act, which forbade the promotion of homosexuality. Subversively adopting the symbol for the London underground as its logo, the campaign included the UK's largest ever gathering for LGBT+ rights in Manchester the same year. Now, the People's History Museum has adopted this title for an exhibition charting the fight for LGBT+ rights, opening in a year that marks the 50th anniversary of the partial decriminalisation of homosexual acts: the result of two years of planning and curated by volunteer Community Curators, Never Going Underground explores the political and societal shift from the time when it was illegal for men to have sex together, lesbianism was seen as a medical misfortune, and there were no trans rights whatsoever - to attitudes today.

Opened by actor and activist Ian McKellen on 2 March, the exhibition documents the stories and objects that have been part of a political struggle over 50 years. There's a photograph of the (in)famous 'abseiling lesbians', who descended from the public gallery to the chamber of the House of Lords in protest on 3 February 1988. There's an example of the Campbell's Soup costume worn by LGBT+ rights group Stonewall at London Pride after a Heinz TV advert showing two men was withdrawn following 200 complaints. There's even an example of the Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners 'Pits and Perverts' t-shirt made famous by 2014 hit film Pride - ironically displayed in a small wooden closet. The overall feel of the exhibition is defiant; both jubilantly and seriously so.

Never Going Underground focuses on the political importance of being seen, showcasing the ways the LGBT+ movement has championed visibility in both grand and small ways. There's a section on the Pride marches that now take place internationally (with some nuanced questions about how these events have evolved), but also nods to smaller interventions such as rainbow shoelaces for footballers and pansies planted on sites of homophobic abuse. It also highlight that there is nothing inevitable about that progress, and that in the long and complex story of over 60 years of activism, it's important to remember that there were steps back as well as forward.

Never Going Underground: the fight for LGBT+ rights at People's History Museum, City Centre

25 February-3 September 2017

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Never Going Underground at People's History Museum - Creative Tourist

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
January 1967: it's illegal for men to have sex together, lesbianism is seen as a medical misfortune, and trans rights are non-existent. 50 years later, LGBT+ legal protection and equality is almost UK-wide. This exhibition charts the activist struggle to get where we are today.

# data[].attributes.body
Good example of a user sourced community archive which also covers manchester in 1988.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Login - Manchester Digital Music Archive

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
An online community archive established in 2003 to celebrate Greater Manchester music and its social history.

# data[].attributes.body
Special Issue of Sexualities Journal marking 20 years

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Sexualities - Volume 21, Number 8, Dec 01, 2018

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Table of contents for Sexualities, 21, 8, Dec 01, 2018

# data[].attributes.body
Interesting piece on Section 29 and radical feminism - agreement on social construction of sexuality

# data[].attributes.body
An example of an archive linked to an academic project. Including interviews with some fellow travellers (Janet Batsleer)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
birmingham centre for contemporary cultural studies

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Archive of the Birmingham CCCS - University of Birmingham

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies archive is housed at the Cadbury Research Library at the University of Birmingham. The idea for an archive came about as a result of discussions between Matthew Hilton, Kieran Connell and key former Centre staff members including Stuart Hall, Richard Johnson and, before his death in 2010, Michael Green.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Outside the classroom, teenagers with a little money - or a friend or sibling with a little money - could access fairly explicit sex education through the health and problem pages of glossy teenage magazines - without the need of a rebellious teacher or parental consent. Launched in the early 1980s, new teenage magazines such as MIZZ and Just Seventeen enjoyed huge circulation figures.

These magazines, while often suggesting homosexual desire in teenagers was perhaps a 'phase', nonetheless presented it to teenagers as a natural and enjoyable part of the human experience, defending a teenager's right to sexuality and answering questions like, "How do lesbians make love?" frankly (albeit often a little clumsily) and without condemnation.

The explanation of sex acts, and what potential dangers they might carry, formed a substantial part of the discussion on the health and problem pages of these magazines - indeed, this content was a mainstay before and after the passing of Section 28. The openness of teenage magazines eventually caught the attention of the tabloid press, resulting in a minor moral panic, a (failed) bill put forward by Conservative MP Peter Luff to place age limits on teenage magazines in 1995, and the creation of the Teenage Magazine Arbitration Panel - an industry body that monitored the sexual content in teenage magazines.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Getting around the rules of sex education

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
What should we and shouldn't we teach our teens about sex, inside and outside of the classroom?

# data[].attributes.body
Chapter based on youth work practice exploring the idea of the cover version as a methodology.

# data[].attributes.body
Interview with Ed-Webb Ingall about his project revisiting a 1990's community fil 'Framed youth' - the children of LGBT parents speaking back to S28

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
Studio International - Visual Arts, Design and Architecture

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The video-maker talks about working with communities, his current work, We Have Rather Been Invaded, about section 28, which prohibited schools from promoting homosexuality - and the difference between being a parasite and a Trojan horse

by ROSANNA MCLAUGHLIN

Video-maker and writer Ed Webb-Ingall, born in London in 1982, started out working as a researcher and producer on documentaries and music videos. Aware of the rigid hierarchies that govern much of the film industry - and the often-problematic power dynamic between those behind the camera and those on it - he began to look for alternative structures. While he was doing an MA in the history of film and visual media at Birkbeck, University of London, he learned about "community video", a method of video-production, based around a model of collective authorship that enables communities to take control of the way in which they are represented.

He has since produced a number of community video projects, the most recent of which explore the legacy of section 28. Introduced by the Conservative government in the UK in 1988 in the midst of the Aids crisis, section 28 decreed that local councils and schools should not "promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality". In effect, this created a blanket silence on the subject of homosexuality in UK schools until its repeal in 2003 (2000 in Scotland).

Webb-Ingall's video projects have been shown at numerous film festivals and art galleries, including at the British Film Institute's LGBT Film Festival, Showroom and Studio Voltaire, as well as in community centres and classrooms. His current project, We Have Rather Been Invaded, takes its title from the words uttered by BBC news presenter Sue Lawley when, on 23 May 1988, the BBC's Six O'Clock News was invaded by a group of lesbian activists protesting the introduction of section 28.
Rosanna Mclaughlin: We Have Rather Been Invaded is the third of three moving-image projects that explore the relationship between queer history, modes of representation and your own genealogy. The first of these is Raising Hell (2010). What got you started?
Ed Webb-Ingall: Raising Hell was made with the dual purpose of investigating the personal and political history of children with LGBT parents, while giving myself a lesson in the theory and techniques used by queer film-makers in the 1970s, 80s and 90s. I felt that the first film I made should be about something I had experienced first hand. I made Raising Hell, which is about the children of gay and lesbian parents, because I have a lesbian mum. At the time, there were very few films about the experiences of children from families like mine. I wanted to make a video that gave these children time and space, and didn't position them as flag-waving figures of promotion. It was important that room was made for criticism and reflection on what it's like to be a child with a gay or lesbian parent. I wanted to collect and share stories that highlighted the differences and similarities in experience, because, in my own experience, this can be a strange role to occupy.
Raising Hell Teaser Trailer by Ed Webb-Ingall RM: The question of how we understand the concept of "family" is central to Raising Hell. In addition to interviewing the children of gay and lesbian parents, you interview a number of specialists on this subject, too.
EWI: The first person I interviewed was gay activist and sociologist Jeffrey Weeks, whose work I really admire. When we met, he used the term "the logical family", rather than "the biological family", which I loved and could relate to. I had become interested in those people involved in activism or politics who had had an impact on my personal biography, people who are not my family, but who have been important to the formation of what I think of as my family. As well as putting out a call for children of lesbian and gay parents through friends and family, I interviewed an amazing woman called Susan Golombok. She produced the first long-term study of lesbian parenting, which was subsequently used in court to defend lesbian parents in custody battles. I also interviewed my mum's solicitor, Gill Butler, whom, I believe, won one of the first lesbian custody battles in the UK.

I don't appear in the film, except in home-video footage and old family photos, but my brother and sister do. Looking back, Raising Hell was my first community video. I was really aware of the access I was able to have because I'd experienced similar things to the people in front of the camera.
RM: Can you give an overview of what community video is?
EWI: The establishment of community video coincided with the availability of portable video recording technology in the UK at the start of the 70s. This made it possible to record and instantly play back moving images that looked like television. The technology appealed to artists and activists because it enabled a form of moving image production independent from top-down modes of communication and representation. It also enabled those otherwise excluded from these processes of image-making to engage with the medium on their own terms.
RM: Are there specific examples of films that have been influential to your research, and which typify the genre?
EWI: One example I often refer to is Starting to Happen (1974) by Liberation Films. In the film, we see a self-organised community action group, who are encouraged by Liberation Films to learn to use a video camera to carry out interviews, document their neighbourhood, and make and screen a video about local issues in order to change them. The protagonists are a group of mothers, brought together by their shared experience of raising children near a busy road, in a neighbourhood with few resources for young children.

One scene takes place in the living room of a female participant. She is shown instructing the Liberation Films team on how the group wants it to edit the video, while her child watches from the doorway. The language she uses replicates that of the professional editor: "Cut here," "Great shot." That a woman is dictating the action to a group of men, and that the scene takes place in a domestic setting, shows the multiple roles and spaces that community video allows for.
RM: The arrival of portable cameras in the 70s made it possible for people to take the question of representation into their own hands. Today, the potential to make yourself visible using a smartphone is greater than ever before. How much is visibility still the issue?
EWI: Of course, some people have cameras on their phones and they make videos on them and share them, but not everyone has a smartphone, or has the knowledge, confidence or desire to make and share a video. To assume everyone has a smartphone is often to reveal your own privilege, and a lack of awareness that other people might not have the same access as you.

Groups such as Black Lives Matter, Sisters Uncut and Movement for Justice have used mobile-phone footage to document, share and encourage activism, which has been really important in growing their movements and exposing injustices. There is a real and specific urgency to it, but it is very different from the video projects I work on. The community video projects I initiate are often carried out over a series of workshops and long periods. I always use a single camera that everyone has access to, and it is important that it looks like a camera and not a mobile phone. This helps to de-centre ownership, and sets apart the production of a community video as something different from what might be expected from, or made with, a smartphone.

Primarily, though, the difference is a matter of audience. A community video project has a built in audience, which everyone involved is aware of from the beginning. This is true whether the intended audience is the people in the room with whom you made the video, a community centre, a gallery, or a cinema. When I start a project, I usually begin by creating an agreement with the group that anything that is recorded belongs to everyone in the room, and cannot be shown unless we all agree to it.
RM: Popular documentary-makers often assume the role of tour guide. I'm thinking of the way in which Louis Theroux plays Mr Reasonable, exoticising his subjects and making allies of his audience. Is there a specific ethical code of conduct you apply when making community video? For example, does the film-maker have to belong to the community that is being filmed?
EWI: Not necessarily. When I made Raising Hell, I was an insider. This was also the case with Reframed Youth, a video project I facilitated at the BFI film festival with an LGBTQ youth group, and with my most recent project We Have Rather Been Invaded. As an insider, you are more likely to have a shared language and a feeling of intimacy with the people you are making the film with.
Reframed Youth Trailer, 2013 by Ed Webb-Ingall
There are other approaches to making a community video, too. I might get invited as an outsider to work on a project with a particular community, because my knowledge could help to further their skills, or because I can help with the production of a video on a specific issue. In 2012, I made a video for Lambeth Women's Project, a voluntary, not-for-profit organisation dedicated to women's services. They were based in south London, near where I lived, and were being threatened with closure. In response, they occupied the building. They suggested that I make a video, which I did. I get asked to perform this outsider role quite a bit, and it is important in these situations that I am careful how I negotiate my position. It is complicated, and I often think the efficacy of a project rests on a certain amount of slippage; for the outsider to become more of an insider, and vice versa.
RM: Is this to avoid cultural appropriation?
EWI: There is also a third kind of video-maker, which could be referred to as the colonial video-maker, who picks a group and says: "I think you would really benefit from this project, and I'm going to make a video about you whether want me to or not." This is something I strongly avoid.

I am interested in thinking more about the kinds of relationships and roles involved in film-making. There are complications in viewing these positions as fixed, because it means you end up assuming certain things about your own identity and other people's, too. It is possible for someone with no experience of a community to make an interesting and important video about them, but this isn't an approach I have been invested in, or have spent time developing a means to work within.
RM: You facilitated the video project Reframed Youth in 2013, which was shown at the BFI London Lesbian and Gay film festival. The project takes as its starting point Framed Youth: The Revenge of the Teenage Perverts (1983), a documentary made by the London Lesbian and Gay Youth Video Project. In it, a group of queer teenagers investigate public attitudes towards gay and lesbian sexuality.
EWI: Framed Youth (1983) is one of my favourite videos of all time. It has all the energy and excitement of being young and queer with something important and urgent to share. The voices and points of view are so honest and varied; you really witness the participants giving voice and visibility to their identities. The year 2013 marked its 30th anniversary, so I approached the BFI and persuaded it to give me three days to make a film in its basement, and a slot at the film festival. Rumour has it that I was the first person ever given a slot at the festival who hadn't actually got a film ready to show. The idea was very simple. I would screen Framed Youth for a group of LGBTQ young people, and it would act as a trigger to make a video in the present.
Framed Youth: The Revenge of the Teenage Perverts, 1982 RM: How did you go about selecting the group, and ensuring that authorship was shared?
EWI: That year, Metro Centre - an LGBTQ youth service in Greenwich, south-east London - were doing a survey asking 16- to 25-year-olds what it means to be LGBTQ in 2013. They were really excited about the project as it was a way of bringing some of those people together.

I used certain exercises with the group that I adapted from those used by community video makers in the 70s, such as passing the camera around, and playing games that get everyone used to the camera, in order to diffuse authority as best as I could. We talked a lot about visibility, and what happens when someone doesn't want to be on camera. One person in the group was transitioning at the time, and, at first, she didn't want to be filmed. As a group, we discussed finding a way that her voice could be heard that she felt comfortable with, so that she didn't perpetuate her invisibility. We invented techniques that meant everyone would be heard, but not everyone would be filmed. The camera moves around a lot, and there are lots of shots of people's feet and hands, and so some of the time you can't tell who is speaking.
RM: Your current project, We Have Rather Been Invaded, was partly commissioned by Studio Voltaire, London. The title is a quote from a BBC news presenter, explaining on air what was happening when a group of lesbian activists interrupted the Six O'Clock News in 1988 to protest about section 28. Can you tell me about the significance of this event?
EWI: I was drawn to the invasion because of how analogous and symbolic it was of section 28. Section 28, also known as clause 28 of the Local Government Act 1988, banned the promotion of homosexuality as a "normal" family relationship in UK schools. It was about invisibility, silence, and shutting people off. When these four women invaded the Six O'Clock News, they weren't visible on camera - you could only hear their voices, and see the impact on the faces of the news presenters.

That invisible invasion became the news, featuring on the 10 o'clock news on both channels that night, and in the newspaper headlines the following day. As someone interested in activism and video-making, I find it endlessly fascinating how much work that single action performed. The protesters managed to undo their silencing, while their invisibility symbolised its impact, too.
RM: Your research unearthed some of the headlines in the UK press following the invasion, which are astonishingly misogynistic. "A gaggle of screeching, lesbian harridans tricked their way into the BBC's Television Centre", "Beeb Man Sits on Lesbian" ...
EWI: I found these headlines at the Lesbian and Gay Newsmedia Archive at Bishopsgate Library, where they have an amazing and important collection. The headlines were so shocking and sensationalist. They were particularly offensive in their framing of women. Most of the political activism around section 28 was organised by lesbians and, with this project, it was really important to think about this. There was the group that abseiled into the Houses of Parliament, and the group who chained themselves dressed as Suffragettes to Buckingham Palace. Did you know about the lesbians who occupied a booth at the Ideal Home Exhibition? They had a massive banner that said: "The ideal home is one without any men in it." It was always women.

As a gay man, I am cautious about speaking on behalf of lesbians. But I do feel very much a product of lesbian history, just as I am a child of section 28. Having a lesbian mother makes that history part of my identity, from the books I read, the films I watch, to the friends I make.

We Have Rather Been Invaded is still being made. One of the final pieces of the project will be a video recording of a round-table discussion between me and a number of people who were working in the public sector during the time section 28 was in force, people such as librarians, teachers and council workers. This will enable me to record and document the different experiences people have and the different roles people play, and my relation to them. By bringing in these other voices, I am trying to find ways to be honest and transparent about how I represent different positions.
RM: I am often surprised at how little awareness there is about section 28. As a student at art school, I can remember being taught about A ids activism in the US, but section 28 was never on the syllabus. Even now, when there is an increasing cultural interest in queerness, section 28 is rarely mentioned. RM: One of the key issues that comes up around section 28 is how do we begin to speak of an experience of being silenced and redacted? How can we quantify its impact, and the impact it still has on children being taught by teachers who grew up in silence?
EWI: Sometimes I think this is because section 28 is not that interesting on paper - essentially, it was a bit of policy, and, as far as I know, only one charge was brought under it. Also, it was about a lack, about not doing something, which is something that is often hard to represent or make visually manifest. Almost my entire education took place under section 28. I was six when it went through, and I was 21 when it ended in 2003.

A lot of people whom I have interviewed about their experiences of section 28 said that it brought them out of the woodwork, making them more visible than they had been before. It became a call to arms. It was a real moment of solidarity between lesbians and gay men that worked alongside Aids activism, and it created a huge shift in terms of being visible.
RM: You are clearly extremely careful not to objectify communities when approaching them. How do you, as a queer person, deal with this situation when galleries and institutions approach you?
EWI: This is where video-making can become exciting, because it can be an aid for thinking of new ways of being. It can help to represent those things that didn't exist, but should have. One of the exercises I introduced to the final workshop for We Have Rather Been Invaded speaks to this directly. The group was made up of young people I had recruited through social media and call-outs through mailing lists. I got everyone to think up lessons they were never taught at school, and to think in a utopian way about this idea. They suggested things like, "that time we went to Hebden Bridge to learn about lesbian history", "that time our art teacher took us on a trip to a Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition", "that time I was allowed to dress up as Madonna to go to the school disco", "that time when my school introduced non-gender specific toilets". It's so simple, but it is a way of speaking to what wasn't there, while at the same time imagining what could have been, and what could be.

This exercise also opened up a discussion about the Prevent programme in schools, a government policy that involves training educational staff in how to spot and eradicate extremism in educational institutions. I was at a vigil for Chelsea Manning this morning, and I got talking to a woman there who works in a school. She told me that she didn't want to do the Prevent training, but was told she would get into trouble if she didn't because it is mandatory, and not doing it would cause alarm. That kind of thing is really, really worrying. The policing of language in schools that is happening with Prevent, and the way Prevent has been rolled out, is very evocative of section 28. I am hoping that this project might encourage more discussions, so that we can avoid repeating what happened with section 28 in terms of silencing important conversations, and develop methods to recognise and understand difference.
RM: What are you working towards now?
EWI: There are things I try to do, as someone who is queer and visible, to try and avoid being the queer one in the room who is helping to tick a diversity box.

My friend, writer and academic Laura Guy, and I have talked about this a lot. Of course, it is complicated by individual experiences, but I often think about there being two positions one might potentially occupy: a parasite and a Trojan horse. When invited into an institution, you can do your best to pick holes, to draw attention to structural problems within institutions by being there. But this also might involve potentially being instrumentalised by that institution, because, by having you there, they are able to say: "Great, we've done our bit of institutional critique for the week." Whereas being a parasite means that you take the money and run. It means using that institution's resources to do your own work, using your energy to do everything you can to avoid being instrumentalised. Even if it doesn't work, even if this approach can end in failure sometimes, it's important to me to hold on to that intention.

EWI: I am in my third year of a PhD programme at Royal Holloway, University of London, on the history and practice of community video in the UK. I also run the public programme for the London Community Video Archive, which was established last year. As I mentioned, I am in the process of doing my last bit of filming for We Have Rather Been Invaded and I am looking for librarians, council workers and teachers who were working during the time of section 28 and have memories of it. Perhaps I can use this interview to recruit some participants?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Ed Webb-Ingall: 'I am a product of lesbian history and a child of section 28'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
by ROSANNA MCLAUGHLIN Video-maker and writer Ed Webb-Ingall, born in London in 1982, started out working as a researcher and producer on documentaries and music videos. Aware of the rigid hierarchies that govern much of the film industry - and the often-problematic power dynamic between those behind the camera and those on it - he began to look for alternative structures.

# data[].attributes.headline
Clare Hemmings on fictionalising, making up the missing archive

# data[].attributes.subject
Clare Hemmings on fictionalising, making up the missing archive

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
We speak to Professor This interview is published as part of a March 2018 endeavour, Q: Could you introduce Emma Goldman to readers? 'A Month of Our Own: Amplifying Women's Voices on LSE Review of Books'. If you are interested in this book, Q: What drew you to explore Goldman within your work? you can read the LSE RB review of it . Clare Hemmings Q: Ambivalence is in the title of the book. Could you talk more about how it is key to thinking not only about Goldman, but also about the oft-disavowed 'history of uncertainty' within feminism? about her new book, Considering Emma Goldman: Feminist Political Ambivalence and the Imaginative Archive (Duke UP, 2018), which examines Goldman's significance as an anarchist activist and thinker to the past and present of feminist theories and activism. Hemmings shows that the contradictions and tensions within Goldman's approach to race, gender and sexuality speak to unresolved questions that continue to shape feminist practices and politics today.
Emma Goldman (1869-1940) was an extraordinary character, an anarchist activist. She was born in what we would now call Russia, and moved to the United States when she was around 17/18 years old. Her life spanned that particular period of global transformation when socialist and anarchist movements were at their heights post-World War I.
Q: It's a small example, but in the book you take that often-criticised phrase of 'I'm not a feminist, but...' and you open up a space for acknowledging its ambivalence.
Goldman was radicalised in the US through the Haymarket Martyrs, who were anarchists falsely accused of killing police officers. From that moment, she was committed to anarchist causes: challenging authority, strengthening labour resistance and working towards the idea of anarchist revolution. In the US in the late-1890s and early-1900s, many anarchists like Goldman genuinely thought revolution was imminent and were trying to work out the kind of life that would follow afterwards. At the time, the circulation of anarchist journals in the US was much higher than any other socialist journal. 4000-5000 people would routinely turn up to hear her speak, such that she would have to be put on a cart and driven through the streets repeating her words.

Goldman was exiled and moved multiple times during her lifetime. She was deported from the USA to Russia in 1919, due to Edgar Hoover's obsession with her as part of the emerging FBI. Goldman was disappointed by the Bolshevik revolution and was forced to leave without papers, moving to Europe where she lived for most of the rest of her life.
Q: Ambivalence also allows for disagreement and antagonism. LSE are focusing this year on the suffrage movement Q: Goldman was often in exile, a migrant and involved in transnational anarchist movements. But within the book, you also talk about her problematic approach to race and racism, and ensuing tussles over her intersectional importance. , but Goldman was very critical of their version of women's emancipation.
One of the things that is very particular about Goldman, though not unique to her, was her interest, as an anarchist, in the centrality of what she described as sexual freedom to the idea of revolution. On the one hand, she was a mainstream anarchist: she was very popular, there were lots of press reports about her. On the other, she absolutely believed that women's sexual oppression was central to why women and men did not develop as revolutionary political subjects. For her, one of the reasons why there hadn't already been a revolution was because of women's labour: going along with the easy route to prevent poverty and violence in their lives, women's dependence on men made of them, as she put it, 'parasitical subjects'. For Goldman, the social institution of marriage is one of the key lynchpins through which capitalism and nationalism work. She viewed women as uniquely positioned as femininity reproduces capitalist dependencies, but also places women at the centre of revolutionary feeling due to their reproductive and unpaid domestic labour in the private sphere. So any account of revolution that doesn't think you need to get rid of marriage and emancipate women sexually and emotionally cannot work. For her, you can't wait until after revolution, because without women, there will be no revolution in any real way.

These themes of sexual freedom, the critique of femininity as both complicit but also the site of transformation and her commitments to anti-nationalism and transnational social movements are the key areas of Goldman's thought that I've been interested in through my own work, because they resonate so strongly with contemporary problems within feminist activism and theory. For me, feminism still has yet to grapple adequately with the problem of femininity, and within my field of queer theory, we have yet to contend with the idea of sexual freedom as opposed to sexual rights. And in critical race studies, what we mean by race and racism as distinct from class and labour is still very much in process.

So these are three sites of political struggle contemporarily - very lithe, very present, but also very unresolved. There are a lot of ways in which Goldman is also ambivalent about these issues that can help us think about what it means for us to have not resolved them in the present.

This is the second book in which I try to think about the histories of how we talk about the past and present of feminist theory and action. One of the things that has always seemed unsatisfactory is that we often talk about histories of feminist thought as though they were both teleological and resolved. As though questions of equality have got straightforwardly better for women, rather than going in cycles of moments of hope and of desperation. I have therefore been wary of telling a story of the past that would somehow clean it up as a way of highlighting how we've got to where we've come. If you do look at a figure from the past, why do we presume that you can't tell a complex story that pulls through a range of different threads, that highlights contests over meaning that they may represent, embody, allow to survive and thrive?

I was very interested in how the secondary critical material on Goldman is keen to either reclaim her as a fabulous heroine we should emulate or else to position her as of her time, so that if you are disappointed with something she said or did, then you can leave that attached to her, rather than thinking of what that might mean for you. There's a lot of work that states: 'well, she's a bit mean to women, so we need to be careful about claiming her for feminism.' Or her sexual freedom is dependent on a very strong attachment to men that is her downfall. Or she's interested in questions of nationalism and militarism, but not so great or sustained on race and racism. It's as though our own contemporary preoccupations should have been anticipated by her and taken on board.
Q: There's one letter in which Sperry uses a racist slur and when you write back as Goldman, you imagine her speaking back to this. That was striking in light of the themes the book explores.
We therefore tend not to focus on what we might learn from what Goldman hasn't resolved, or to see what's tricky to read in her work as methodologically important for providing a way of thinking through how we also struggle with these questions. We expect her to carry our disappointment, rage and betrayal, or otherwise pop up shiny and clean and representative of our certainties in our own image, which prevents us from really grappling with the difficulties that feminists face about how they interpret the world and where they want to intervene in it.
Q: Did the process of writing this imagined correspondence change your approach to the book or to Goldman herself?
I'm therefore interested, both academically and politically, in trying to tease out sets of procedures, practices and methods for starting from the presumption that things have not been resolved, and that ambivalence is likely to characterise struggle over political meaning more than certainty. What do you gain rather than lose when you start from ambivalence? What we lose is that marvellous creative opportunity of inhabiting not knowing.

Yes, staying with the difficulty. I identify very strongly as a feminist so I am likely to be on the side that hears that as a disappointment. If you were not a feminist and you heard that, you might be relieved. But when you listen to the grammar of it, it's an ambivalent phrase. In other words, it could take you away from the feminism part, but it could return you to it in a way that highlights uncertainty about its precepts - it's that hesitation of the political return that I'm interested in.
This interview was conducted by Note: This interview gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics. Dr Rosemary Deller, Managing Editor of the LSE Review of Books blog.
I'm also interested in it because a result of problematic certainties in feminist theories and politics is that it is easy to be overly concerned by how or to what extent people identify as feminist, rather than the work they do to ameliorate sexual and gendered inequalities. And that's why I was interested in Goldman. Because she doesn't identify as a feminist, but is an important figure for feminist histories exploring who and under what circumstances people have intervened in gendered and sexual politics. But I don't resist people being feminist!

Goldman was no fan of equality agendas of any kind, because her position was anti-authoritarian. She was also critical of early-twentieth-century reformist movements, liberalism in general, and certainly of suffrage. Because she saw all of them, and indeed any single-issue politics, as wanting to access the status quo through having a piece of the pie. For her, there was no value in having the vote because all it would allow you to do is feel like you had freedom to participate in democratic life, when the social structures that allow this are so hierarchical and authoritarian that they need to be challenged and transformed root and branch. So it's not so surprising that she was anti-suffrage. What's interesting is how vitriolic she was about suffrage particularly.

One of the reasons that people find Goldman extremely attractive today is her perceived position as an intersectional thinker before her time. There is no question that Goldman linked sexual freedom with nationalism and militarism, had relationships of high intensity with men and women and covered thousands of miles within her lifetime. Yet, especially in the late-1990s and early-2000s, this is also vital for claiming her as an immensely important figure without questioning race and racism. Goldman talks about these in ways that are complicated, difficult, racist at points, transformative at others ... Faced with the anxiety this produces, any grappling with race and racism in the critical archive of her work has been all but entirely displaced. Attention on her intersectionality, her migration, her anti-nationalism and her Jewishness can become one mechanism through which her extremely ambivalent, often egregious but sometimes important, attention to race becomes obscured. So instead of thinking intersectionally about how race and class and sexuality come together in Goldman, I became interested in whether the desire for her to be an intersectional heroine actually allows us to stop thinking about race. There can be a relief in citing intersectionality as a way of not having to do the difficult, messy work of engaging with race and racism as well as their difference and similarity to questions of labour and class. So I think that's interesting: that questions of intersectionality are not always a way of dealing with race; they can be a way of deflecting it.

What we might therefore miss with Goldman are her ambivalent engagements with race and racism. For instance, she does begin to articulate a theory of sexual freedom beyond marriage and borders that challenges the race basis of familial attachments as they are linked to national attachments: a particular way of linking sexual and race politics. I like her idea that if we move past the family, we can think creatively of generating connections across borders. We might agree or disagree, but it shows that Goldman does address race, but perhaps not in ways we might like.

Q: On sexual freedom, at the end of the book, you include a partly imagined, at times feverishly intense correspondence between Goldman and one of her lovers and confidants, Almeda Sperry. Could you talk about the decision to include this chapter and the process of writing it?

We've got 60+ of Sperry's letters, which were only discovered a few decades back, and which chart her desire for Goldman, her fervour and (later) violent attachment, as well as her precarious location as an activist, unionist, sex worker and alcoholic living in a small East coast town. We do not have Goldman's replies. I thought about what it might mean to do interdisciplinary academic work that takes seriously the possibility that while we do not have Goldman's responses, we could imagine them through the way that Sperry refers to letters she has received.

The letters we have are this mess, so one of the things that I did was order them. Sperry was an activist, a sex worker and an anarchist in a particular period whose own archive has been lost because it's just this collection of letters. They have been reproduced in gay and lesbian anthologies before as examples of lesbian desire. But all the obsessive, violent stuff doesn't make it into the reproductions; it's only the nice ones that do.

I thought: what happens if you read the whole correspondence to make her more integral? And also, what if I use my vision of Goldman's letters as part of this chapter to foreground the question of what you desire in your object? In this sense, I was positioning myself as a third-party voyeur of their relationship. They are my reading of Goldman's likely letters, an imagined correspondence. This isn't just about sexual identity, but about eroticism, about sexual freedom that doesn't have to necessarily end up as happily-ever-after. And as a means to understand their exchange as generating possibilities in the world that otherwise aren't registered: labour, their struggles, sickness are all key to this. The process was a way of trying to highlight what it might look like to cherish a correspondence that may not do what you might like it to.

I didn't include this letter because I wanted people to like Sperry and so expunged this part of her language, in much the same way as other critics have done with Goldman, as discussed earlier. But I caught myself in this process, too, and so used Sperry's inclusion of a racial slur as a way of thinking through how Goldman might have responded. While she herself also relied on racist stereotypes at times, she did see racism as a problem of oppression, and consistently spoke out against violence directed towards the vulnerable in all contexts. So I imagined her both noting and challenging Sperry on the one hand, but not making it a central feature of their exchange on the other. It doesn't interrupt their communication, in other words, in ways that use of anti-working-class representation might have. Class trumped race for her, and I wanted to find a way of representing that ambivalence in Goldman. So I left that in as a way of framing the encounter, showing where Goldman might have engaged without holding a line.

It made me more sympathetic to her. It changed my sense of what her views on sexual freedom were: by the end, I was absolutely persuaded that it would be an outrage to think about sexual freedom only in terms of the question of whether Goldman was too interested in men. For us to be able to imagine how it would be to respond to those letters, to have this intense writing and sex with Sperry while being constantly incarcerated, poor, ill, and then to make a judgement about whether she acted appropriately enough to suit us ... Because she's so famous now, one forgets that she's articulating things that didn't even have a language and with such risks attached to doing so. So, I thought: she's pretty incredible, and I want to be able to do justice to her in all her complexity.

Clare Hemmings is Professor of Feminist Theory and Director of the Department of Gender Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and the author and coeditor of several books, including Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory, also published by Duke University Press.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Author Interview: Considering Emma Goldman with Professor Clare Hemmings

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
We speak to Professor This interview is published as part of a March 2018 endeavour, Q: Could you introduce Emma Goldman to readers? 'A Month of Our Own: Amplifying Women's Voices on LSE Review of Books' . If you are interested in this book, Q: What drew you to explore Goldman within your work?

# data[].attributes.body
Tamboukou writing againist relying on serendipity in the archive and on the process (whitehead) of creating archival naratives

# data[].attributes.headline
proofs of The Archive Project book with Niamh's chapter on Feminist Webs

# data[].attributes.subject
proofs of The Archive Project book with Niamh's chapter on Feminist Webs

# data[].attributes.headline
on postcolonial and inidigenous archiving, on early version of Christen/Mukurtu work, on intergenerational transmission of knowledge, on limits of openness

# data[].attributes.subject
on postcolonial and inidigenous archiving, on early version of Christen/Mukurtu work, on intergenerational transmission of knowledge, on limits of openness

# data[].attributes.headline
on feminist archiving: critique of Eichhorn's differences between second and third wave feminist archiving, on metaphorical archives, on queer and post-colonial archiving

# data[].attributes.subject
on feminist archiving: critique of Eichhorn's differences between second and third wave feminist archiving, on metaphorical archives, on queer and post-colonial archiving

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Imagining Something Else Entirely Metaphorical Archives in Feminist Theory

# data[].attributes.body
Rachel Thomson's inaugral lecture 2009

# data[].attributes.body
Debates surrounding putting 2nd wave feminism into museums

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Feminism and the museum in Australia: an introduction

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Is second wave feminism something that can be collected? Does it even have a material culture? If so, what would a second wave feminist object be? This issue of the Journal of Australian Studies places feminism and the museum together to find whether

# data[].attributes.headline
BSA Equality of Sexes Standing Committee

# data[].attributes.subject
BSA Equality of Sexes Standing Committee

# data[].attributes.body
A really important catalyst for feminist sociology and sexualities research

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Poster - 'A Woman's Place?' " Using Archives to Teach Gender

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This poster was created by the British Sociological Association in 1982. It was created by the BSA's Standing Committee on the Equality of Sexes to highlight and offer support on employment issues women faced (and continue to face). This specific poster focuses [...]

# data[].attributes.headline
Collaboration & Duration: a celebration of the research and practice of Janet Holland

# data[].attributes.subject
Collaboration & Duration: a celebration of the research and practice of Janet Holland