• Kat Gupta’s research blog

    caution: may contain corpus linguistics, feminism, activism, LGB, queer and trans stuff, parrots, London

Month: August 2011

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(Yet) another move

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Something I thought about, as I once again carefully packed my books into boxes and less carefully stuffed my clothes into bags, is the instability of PhD life. I’m told that some people do their entire PhD at one university, in one department, even while living in one place.

I am not that person.

In the almost exactly three years I’ve been working on my PhD, I’ve been at two different universities, been based in three different departments and so far, lived in four different houses. Weirdly, for something that is in a constant state of development and change, my thesis has been one of the few constants in my life. The other, somewhat worryingly, is my supervisor. Not sure how I feel about that!

In a way it’s made me a more independent researcher and that’s a good and positive thing, but sometimes I wish I could relax and be at least somewhat confident that I won’t have to move again for at least another nine months.

I have Thoughts on how it’s affected my research, my friendships and collaboration with other PhD researchers and on me as a researcher, but that can wait for another day – I have a chapter to write.

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How to erase identities and make everyone bad guys

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A couple of months ago, I posted about the politics of representation. I found the observation that representation in the media can involve “crushing difference in favour of identities constructed by those in positions of power” particularly striking. What you see here is me trying to work out the process of how it happened in the suffrage movement.

Here’s an admittedly simplistic table of differences between suffragists and suffragettes. Of course, it’s not that simple – see Sandra Holton (1986) for more – but for the purposes of this argument, let’s run with this.

Suffragists Suffragettes
considered the more inclusive term members of a militant organisation
constitutionalists challenged the constitutionalist approach
campaigned by lobbying Parliament prepared to engage in direct action

However, what I’ve found in the texts I’m working with looks a bit more like this:

Suffragists
members of a militant organisation
prepared to engage in direct action

I found that suffragette and suffragettes were comparatively low frequency terms and didn’t have many words associated with them. Instead, there were lots of words associated with suffragist and suffragists – even the direct action words like disturbance*, disorder, outrage*, violence and crime* which I then focused on. This seemed out of keeping with the historiography.

What seems to happen is that there’s a process where the two are conflated:

Suffragists
considered the more inclusive term
members of a militant organisation
constitutionalists
challenged the constitutionalist approach
campaigned by lobbying Parliament
prepared to engage in direct action

Galtung and Ruge (1965) work out a set of principles they call “news values”. These decide how likely it is that something will be reported as news, and include factors such as whether the incident forms part of a pre-existing narrative, how recent it was. how unusual it was and so on. Some of the relevant factors to this are conflict, negativity, personalisation and continuity: basically, well-known suffragettes scuffling with the police and getting arrested is more interesting to newspapers than a deputation of nice ladies handing in a petition to their MP.

Therefore, because of news values, the stuff about the constitutionalist approach gets erased:

Suffragists
considered the more inclusive term
members of a militant organisation
constitutionalists
challenged the constitutionalist approach
campaigned by lobbying Parliament
prepared to engage in direct action

Because we’re now not talking about constitutionalists, it doesn’t make sense to characterise a group by its opposition to constitutionalists, so that can go too:

Suffragists
considered the more inclusive term
members of a militant organisation
constitutionalists
challenged the constitutionalist approach
campaigned by lobbying Parliament
prepared to engage in direct action

Ta-da! You have now ended up with something like this:

Suffragists
members of a militant organisation
prepared to engage in direct action

This, if you’re in a position of power, is pretty awesome. If you can label everyone in the suffrage movement as violent and dangerous, you don’t need to listen to their concerns about equality, about welfare, about working conditions, about ill-treatment in prison and police brutality. Hurrah!

The suffrage movement is unusual because the term suffragist, in the Times at least, comes to mean something very different to how it was understood amongst those within the movement. However, I think the process – of conflating a range of motivations, organisations and individuals under one term, erasing the less newsworthy bits, using the term in such a way as to imply it still covers the full breadth of these motivations, organisations and individuals, then dismissing everyone as irresponsible and destructive – is still very relevant today.

As I write this, there are riots in Tottenham, Wood Green, Enfield, Brixton, Walthamstow, Hackney and possibly Peckham. The people involved are being described as looters, protesters and rioters. In light of what I’ve illustrated here, I wonder what’s being erased through using these descriptions. Obviously it’s in the interests of those in power to portray those involved as vandals, thieves and general undesirables – it stops them having to pay attention to legitimate concerns…about equality, about welfare, about working conditions, about police brutality.

References:
Galtung, J & Ruge, M. 1965. The Structure of Foreign News. The Presentation of the Congo, Cuba and Cyprus Crises in Four Norwegian Newspapers. Journal of Peace Research, vol 2, pp 64-91
Holton, S. 1986. Feminism and Democracy: Women’s suffrage and reform politics in Britain, 1900-1918. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

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Pride is a….something

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Yesterday I went to my second Pride. It was better than last year for a couple of reasons – we started marching from Market Square to Forest Fields so got plenty of visibility (as opposed to the extended tour of Nottingham’s back streets of last year) and this time I was at a stall, watched the acoustic stage, had the good sense to leave before I got irritable and wasn’t subjected to the Cheeky Girls. I was marching with Recreation, the local group I help out with, and that made it a good experience. One of the group members remarked that he felt he belonged, and it was good to meet new people who’d been looking for a group like ours. It’s why I call my involvement in this group activism – I might not be on the streets with a loudhailer, but for me, making this space possible, acknowledging the diversity of people’s identities, and offering solace and support is activism. It’s telling people they are not alone and that in itself is a powerful thing.

Marching through the city centre actually felt meaningful – not quite confrontational, but both unexpected enough and big enough to take people by surprise. One of the reasons I march is because visibility is important. It’s a reminder to other people that LGBTQ people exist – that we have families and work and are members of society too.

However, as last year, I had problems with Pride. Bisexual invisibility is a pervasive thing – bifurious is on the bi banner for a reason. This year, one entertainer invited the gays to cheer, the lesbians to cheer and the straights to cheer – completely failing to acknowledge bisexuals, pansexuals and queers, among others. It’s a reminder that often, it’s not so much LGBT as LGBt and that this comes from within the so-called gay community.

There’s also a danger that Pride gets too heavily involved with corporate sponsors. This year’s was sponsored by the owners and operators of Kingsnorth Power Station. At least Nottingham Pride is free – others, like Manchester and Brighton already, or have plans to, charge an entry fee. Pride Is A Protest campaign “against profiteering, exploitation and commercialisation of our Queer and LGBT community events and festivals”. It’s been criticised for being a protest about the lack of protest but at the same time, they warn of where corporate sponsorship can end up.

I have somewhat mixed feelings about this whole Pride business. Rather than being unambiguously celebratory, for me it highlights issues that still need to be addressed, particularly problematic discourses within the gay community and the role of corporate sponsorship in community events; however, simultaneously, it offers a form of challenging visibility and the chance to (for lack of a better word) connect with others.