• Kat Gupta’s research blog

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

Author: Kat

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Cis: a brief introduction

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This is probably going to be the first of at least two posts about the response to the Moore-Burchill article and fallout. In this one, I want to talk about the term “cis” and objections to it, and in a future post I want to talk about the media framing. There might be some other stuff if anything strikes me.

One of the fascinating (for me at least) things about the ongoing Moore-Burchill thing is the issues of language, identity and power. There’s a real tussle over words – hate speech, slurs, violence, identity. A lot of it is to do with who gets to use which words.

Firstly, objections to the word “cis”.

I have to admit that I’m hiding a dark and shameful secret here: I have an A-level in Chemistry. Not a good one, but it meant that I first came across cis and trans when talking about isomers. Basically, an isomer has a carbon double bond in the middle which means it can’t rotate on that axis. This means that the molecules attached to the carbon atoms can’t swing around. It’s actually a really nice illustration, so have a very quick diagram (and don’t laugh at my lack of artistic skill).

cis and trans isomers

Cis and trans isomers (image by K Gupta)

As you can see in the cis isomer in figure 1, the yellow molecules are on the same side and the green molecules are on the same side. And that’s all cis means: “on the same side”. In the trans isomer in figure 2, the yellow molecules are across from one another, as are the green molecules. And that’s all that trans means: “on the other side” or “across”.

When we talk about gender, we use cis to describe people whose assigned sex and gender identity are in alignment and trans to describe people whose assigned sex and gender identity aren’t in alignment. The diagram below shows this:

Cis and trans genders

Obviously this isn’t (and cannot be) a perfect representation of the complex relationship between assigned sex at birth and gender identity, but it will do as a starting point and hopefully makes things clearer.

Cis is simply trying to give a name to a certain set of experiences. Actually being able to put a name to this set of experiences is important. The term is not an insult or a term of derision.

One of the problems here is that there are words to describe minority experiences but not necessary words to describe majority experiences. If we don’t have words for majority experiences, it makes them even more pervasive and normalised. For example, if we don’t have words to describe white people or heterosexual people or able-bodied people, then people who are not these things exist as a marked experience – as something unusual or Other. Many feminists quite rightly object to terms like “lady doctor” or “female doctor” because it assumes that doctors are male, and any deviance has to be carefully noted and expressed. My mum, a doctor, once made a home visit accompanied by a nurse. When she got there, she was taken aback to find that the nurse was being addressed as the doctor – because he happened to be male. The assumption was that if there’s a doctor and a nurse and one of them happens to be a man and the other a woman, then the man is the doctor and the woman is the nurse. Prejudices like this are reinforced by gender marked terms like “lady doctor” or “woman police constable”.

Similarly, if a white person said “I don’t like being called white, I’m just a normal person” I’d be annoyed because that suggests that their white experience is the default – that normal people are white, and that non-white people are somehow not normal. There’s an additional dynamic at work with people who say “I don’t like being called cis, I’m just a normal woman” because it actively positions normal women as those who were assigned female at birth and in doing so, rejects that trans woman can also be “normal women”. While I’m sure some objectors genuinely do reject trans woman as women, I’m also confident that many more simply haven’t thought about their use of language and are unaware of the implications. There is nothing bad about being described as “cis” just as there’s nothing bad about being described as “white” or as “able-bodied”. It just means giving a name to the majority experience and in doing so, shifts it away from being the default experience.

As a linguist, I also find Julie Burchill’s objection to cis as “sounds like syph, cyst, cistern” kind of hilarious. As Tony McEnery notes, “the sounds in a word such as shit seem no more unusual, and combine together in ways no more interesting, than those in shot, ship or sit“; just because a word sounds a bit like other words doesn’t mean it has anything to do with them in terms of meaning.

As a pedant with access to the Oxford English Dictionary (a dangerous combination), I note that syph is an abbreviation of syphilis, itself apparently derived from “Syphilus, the name of a shepherd in the poem Syphilis, sive Morbvs Gallicvs (‘Syphilis, or the French disease’), supposedly the first sufferer from the disease. Cyst is derived from cystis from the Greek κύστις, meaning “bladder”. And cistern is derived, through the Old French cisterne, from the Latin cisterna, meaning “a subterraneous reservoir”. While these words sound similar, they have very different origins, histories and usages. It’s rather disingenuous to take offence at a word simply because it sounds like another word that means something unpleasant.

To reinforce my point, I note that the Guardian/Observer Comment is Free section is often referred to with an acronym: Cif. Which also happens to be a popular brand of bathroom cleaner. Isn’t the arbitrariness of language great?

References:
McEnery, T. (2006) Swearing in English: Bad language, purity and power from 1586 to the present. London: Routledge

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So what is intersectionality?

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I’ve been discussing intersectionality elsewhere, so thought I’d edit those comments into a post here. I came to this concept though my activist communities rather than academia, and as such, that’s the language I use here. At the end of the post I’ve put a couple of links to posts about intersectionality that I found particularly helpful.

Basically, “intersectionality” means acknowledging our various experiences, often in terms of privilege, and how these affect each other. It takes as a starting point that we have different experiences and that these experiences influence and intersect with each other. If we have a particular experience – for example, being white – we experience the world as a white person. This risks blinding us to the experiences and issues faced by people who aren’t white.

Think of it as getting dealt a hand of cards. You have cards for race, assigned sex at birth, sexuality, trans-cis identity, (dis)ability, class, education, immigrant status and so on. A few people get absolutely shitty hands and a few people have absolutely amazing hands. Most of us are in the middle – we have a good card or two and a shitty card or two and some others in the middle.

So, for example, someone might have cards for “white”, “cis”, “male” and “heterosexual” but a shitty card for “wealth”. What intersectionality means is that this hypothetical man experiences his whiteness, cis-ness, masculinity and heterosexuality differently than someone who has those cards but has a good card for wealth – his lack of wealth affects these things in different ways. However, he also has a different experience from someone who has the same shitty wealth card but who also has a woman/queer/non-white/disabled card. Intersectionality can account for complex situations, like poor white men and rich Black women, and help us understand that privilege doesn’t occur along simple axes. It can also help identify areas where people experience multiple oppressions.

As an example, say a company decides to sack all its non-white women workers. Technically, they aren’t being racist – after all, they’re still employing non-white men. And technically they aren’t being sexist – after all, they’re still employing white women. However, people who exist in the middle of those intersections are being discriminated against.

A fairly common experience for intersectional feminists is to encounter white, cis, middle-class, able-bodied feminists are telling them that they should be focusing on their particular interpretation of feminism and leaving race, class, disability, trans* experiences etc out of it. To draw a parallel, it’s a bit like being told by lefties that “you can have feminism after the revolution” or “how dare you accuse us of sexism, it distracts from class war”.

doing intersectionality
The issue for me is not putting aside difference, but how to react when faced with them – and especially how to react when you’re part of the system that unthinkingly perpetuates such hierarchies.

For example, I don’t identify as disabled. I am unaware of what it’s like to navigate society as a disabled person, and if I’m not careful I can unintentionally hurt people.

What I do try to do is be aware of access issues, never speak on behalf of people with disabilities if someone who actually experiences such issues is willing to speak, amplify their voices (whether this be through promoting their writing/events/activism or literally handing someone the mic and them speaking rather than me), listen and learn, and learn the etiquette. If I can help without talking over someone or denying them their voice I will do so – for example, in tutor training sessions I’ve pointed out access issues because no one else did. But basically, I take my lead from them.

I don’t get this right all the time. I make mistakes and I am called on them. However, when this happens, I apologise immediately and I try to always take the criticism on board and change my behaviour in light of it. When I am criticised it’s often not particularly personal; it’s because I’ve blundered into something or screwed up, and so embodied something that hurts people with disabilities. There’s a balance between being systematically unaware of issues because you don’t experience them and using that as an excuse to not learn and educate yourself.

Whether or not I am a disability ally is not my decision to make – I don’t get to decide whether I am or not. I’ve encountered too many people who call themselves white allies but behave in really problematic ways. Instead I try to behave in a way that supports that group of people without Making It All About Me.

why intersectionality matters
I am someone who lives in the intersections. In some ways I am enormously privileged – I am highly educated, when I was growing up my parents could afford books and they encouraged and valued my education. In other ways, I am far less so. Intersectionality is the only framework I’ve found that can make sense of these experiences.

Living in such intersections means you can have no heroes. People who are good on trans* issues can disappoint you when it comes to race; people good on race issues can disappoint you when it comes to sexuality; people good on LGBQIA issues can disappoint you when it comes to disability issues.

As an activist, there are are lefty groups that I won’t go near because of their racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia. I feel unwelcome and unsafe in those spaces, and I’m not risking verbal (and potentially physical) abuse to engage with them. As a child, I never saw people in the news or on TV or in books who were like me. As a student, I have never been taught by someone with a non-European non-white background – and when I teach, I am incredibly aware that this may have been the case for my students. I am constantly aware of being the only minority in some way in almost any group I’m in. I am constantly aware that no space is completely safe for me. For me, interesctionality is a real, visceral thing.

As a thinker and an activist, I deeply appreciate the nuances intersectionality can offer. For example, when Burchill writes about trans* people and their “big swinging PhDs” – so arguing that only non-working class, highly educated people are trans* – did she stop to think that a working class, non-university educated trans* person would experience all the discriminations and challenges of being working-class and non-university educated trying to establish a journalistic or otherwise highly visible career AND the discriminations and challenges of being trans* and trying to establish such a career, plus a few more? If you didn’t have money – but if you did, you’d be forced to choose between funding internships or going private for the treatment the NHS denies you? That is an incredibly hard place to be.

further responses to Moore/Burchill
Quinnae Moongazer – Unguarded and Poorly Observed: A Response to Julie Burchill
Christine Burns – Mending Fences
Paris Lees – An open letter to Suzanne Moore
Roz Kaveney – Julie Burchill has ended up bullying the trans community
CN Lester – The Julie Burchill transphobia scandal
Ruth Pearce – Transphobia in The Guardian: no excuse for hate speech
Ariel Silvera – Targeting trans women, or the pathetic pastime of increasingly irrelevant wealthy people
Hel Gurney – More on Moore, Burchill, and hate speech
Grace Petrie – Comment Is Free, to attack trans people
Laurie Penny – On feminism, transphobia and free speech

further reading on media representation of trans people and issues
Juliet Jacques – A Transgender Journey: how it came about

further reading on intersectionality
Catherine Baker – On intersectionality, academic language, and where to put my big feet
Sophie Cansdale – The Pitfalls of Privilege: OWS, Social Justice, Intersectionality
Flavia Dzodan – My feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit!

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The gap between experiences and (media) representation

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On Sunday, the Guardian published an article reporting that “Dr Richard Curtis is under investigation following complaints over treatment of patients seeking gender reassignment”. Zoe O’Connell offers important context and I urge anyone who reads the Guardian article to also read her response.

Mainstream media pounces on anything with a whiff of malpractice or trans regret but I don’t think I’ve ever seen an article in the mainstream media about the everyday struggles trans* people experience in trying to access care. Sarah Brown playfully demonstrated how eager the media is for stories about trans regret by referring to an operation she regretted – unfortunately for the newspaper that phoned her within minutes of her tweets, the operation in question was on her hand.

Stories framed as “trans regret” are not harmless, but are used to deny trans* people necessary treatment. Trans* people must undergo months and years of psychological assessment and “Real Life Experience” tests (without hormones or surgery, thus placing them at risk of transphobic abuse and attacks) to test if they really want to transition. It is apparently better to make thousands of trans* people suffer than to allow a consenting but mistaken cis person access to hormones and surgery.

On Tuesday, Sarah Brown highlighted this discrepency in media attention and urged trans* people to tweet about their experiences using the #TransDocFail hashtag. The response was incredible – thousands of tweets and hundreds of participants – but the stories were depressingly similar. Zoe has collected the lowlights, grouping them under the headings “The NHS doesn’t do that!” (GPs’ insistence that specifically trans* care is not offered by the NHS), “The long wait”, “At least delays are not outright refusal to give treatment or right letters”, “The Transsexual broken arm” (every medical condition will be related to your gender), “Pointless abuse”, “Doctor knows best”, “Administrative errors and misgendering”, “Jumping through hoops” and “Non-binary genders don’t exist”. There are clear patterns to this data – at best, medical professionals are ignorant of trans* issues, at a bit worse they directly and deliberately put obstacles in the way trans* people’s attempts to find health and happiness, and at their very worst they abuse people both physically and mentally.

The following comment pieces have been published:
New Statesmen: As the #transdocfail hashtag showed, many trans people are afraid of their doctors
Guardian: The real trans scandal is not the failings of one doctor but cruelty by many

On the same Tuesday, Suzanne Moore’s piece on female anger was published on the New Statesman. It included the observation that

We are angry with ourselves for not being happier, not being loved properly and not having the ideal body shape – that of a Brazilian transsexual.

This observation is all the more crass for the sheer number of Brazilian trans people who are murdered each year. As this articles notes,

On the last Transgender Day of Remembrance, out of the 265 reported cases of murdered trans people between 15th November 2011 and 14th November 2012, 126 of them were from Brazil.

Moore’s response on twitter was shameful: among other things, she declared that transphobia and Islamophobia simply did not exist, stated that she doesn’t “prioritise this fucking lopping bits of your body over all else that is happening to women” and that “People can just fuck off really. Cut their dicks off and be more feminist than me”. She then followed this twitter rant with a Guardian comment piece. Stavvers has an excellent response, as does leftytgirl.

Bear in mind that Moore’s twitter rant was concurrent with #TransDocFail. Had she wanted, she could have easily found tales of horrifying medical abuse perpetuated against women.

What I find so interesting about this is how difficult it is to publish things that don’t fit a desired media narrative of trans* experiences, but how apparently easy it is to publish problematic things if you’re a noted feminist. There’s a lot to say here about access to platforms – Suzanne Moore, as an established writer, has built up a network of contacts which many trans* people don’t have. She can pitch things to them, or is invited to comment on issues or write response pieces.

However, there is something else going on here. Trans* writers and journalists have pitched articles on the difficulties of accessing treatment. It is something that clearly affects a lot of people, perhaps everyone who has been under the care of a Gender Identity Clinic. If this was happening in another NHS department there’d be outrage – not just that treatment is inadequate, but that gatekeeping is built into the system and the patient is forced to prove that they want the treatment enough before it is offered to them. And yet this goes unreported. Instead, what are the media narratives of trans* people? This is something I hope to explore in my next research project, but a quick survey of the articles @TransMediaWatch links to, I’d suggest that as well as medical malpractice, there’s interest in personal, “unusual” transitions. I pulled the two most recent transition-related stories from @TransMediaWatch’s timeline and they’re pretty typical:

Dame of two halves: I was a 24-stone football hooligan but now I’m going to be a woman
‘Having Harry Styles as a role model has helped’: Transgender girl reveals on This Morning why she wants surgery on NHS to look like One Direction star

Note how, in the last article, the person is referred to as a “transgender girl” and the article consistently uses the wrong pronouns. Best is presented as being superficial and transitioning only to resemble a pop singer when his quoted speech suggests something different. In both, the individual is foregrounded and their current situation is emphasised. Focus on the individual, not the system. Focus on the surgery, not the hoops jumped to get it. Focus on surgery as the moment when you “become a woman” rather than the years spent worrying, thinking, shifting, unfurling yourself within a wrong, alien body. This difficult, lengthy process and a system that gatekeeps and denies is not a news story and the media does not, apparently, want to hear it.

As I write this on Friday afternoon, “the Left” is busily shutting down valid criticism of Moore’s transphobia – another reminder that there are some experiences that no one, apparently, wants to hear.

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Thesis in progress

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Venn diagram of the thesis writing experience

I am currently trying to finish off the thesis. In a moment of despair, I decided to attempt to summarise my life in the form of a Venn diagram.

I am intimately familiar with all three of these things (admittedly, less so with “childhood”) and sometimes all you can do is make an (admittedly crappy) joke out of it.

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Thoughts on #1share1condom

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Today is World AIDS Day. The past couple of days have seen the hashtag #1share1condom pop up on my twitter feed. Being the curious sort, I discovered that it was a Durex campaign to donate condoms to help fight HIV. You retweet (or share on facebook or renren) one of their facts about HIV and AIDS with the hashtag, they donate a condom to “a local charity”. Sounds good, right?

Actually, this sort of thing makes me really uncomfortable.

I’m one of those awkward discourse analyst types, so naturally my mind immediately goes to what’s not being said here. If I look past the corporate social responsibility speak, what I see is the distribution of life-saving condoms being based on how many slacktivists (and I include myself in that term) can be bothered to retweet something. Durex has a target of 2.5 million condoms; what if that target isn’t reached? Are they going to withhold aid because not enough people shared their facts or used their hashtag? Admittedly I haven’t done much digging, but I haven’t seen anything about minimum donations or what they’ll do if their target isn’t met and this concerns me.

Of course, Durex could just donate 2.5 million condoms – but then they wouldn’t have their brand all over twitter.

I completely agree that it’s important to raise awareness of HIV and AIDS. As someone involved in LGBT welfare I’ve given out countless free condoms and advice on safer sex. At any other time I’d be glad to see awareness of HIV and AIDS seeping into my feed because this is a really important, global issue. I’d also be glad to see free condoms being distributed to those who need them. I’d be even happier if those condoms were accompanied by advice on safer sex, addressing the stigma of HIV and AIDS and empowering women and sex workers. Tackling HIV and AIDS means addressing a host of complex issues including education, stigma, gender, homophobia and transphobia, poverty and religion. It’s too important to be a social media campaign.

Durex’s facts are horrifying:

3.4m children under 15 are living with HIV.
30m people have died from AIDS in 30 years.
HIV is the leading cause of death in women of reproductive age.
7000 people per day are infected with HIV.

Surely people’s lives are worth more than how many retweets something gets?

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Transgender Day of Remembrance

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Today is Transgender Day of Remembrance when we remember the trans* and gender variant people who have lost their lives this year – 265 lives lost, often in savage, brutal ways. These are the dead we know about; we also mourn the nameless, faceless dead, those whose murders we’ll never know about. As I look through the the list of names and at the breakdown of these statistics, I see patterns to the violence.

Many of these people were trans women or somewhere on the transfeminine spectrum. Many lived in Central or South America. Many were people of colour. Many were sex workers. They lived and died at a particularly cruel set of intersections – racism, misogyny, transphobia, hatred of sex workers, classism.

It is important not to forget these intersections. It is not simply transphobia, but a toxic brew of multiple kinds of hatreds that mean that the existence of anyone living at that intersection cannot be tolerated and they cannot be allowed to live.

Many trans and gender variant people experience prejudice and violence; however, the violence experienced by someone with some privileges (being white, upper/middle class, able-bodied, highly educated) is different from that experienced by those who are insulated by none of these privileges. In remembering them, it is important to never appropriate their experiences and lives and deaths. They are our dead, but we are not all Thapelo Makutle or Laryssa Silveira just as we are not all CeCe McDonald. As Monica Maldonado writes,

We should gather to mourn the dead, not conscript them into a battle they never had the privilege to fight while living.
[…]

Remember trans people today…but remember us tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that. And never forget that fighting for trans justice is fighting for social justice. And just the same, fighting for economic justice, disability justice, and racial justice are fighting for trans justice.

[…]

Reflecting on those whose lives were senselessly lost at the intersections of violence and injustice is one of the most important and sobering works we can do as a community.

[…]

But it can’t be all we do. And until we rise to the occasion; until each of us rises to action; until we meet the very real challenge of creating a more equal community and society; until we do better, we’ll keep meeting here each year, reading this ever-growing list of names of those who lost their lives at these intersections of violence and injustice.

Today we mourn. As Ruth Pearce writes, “today is for the dead. If we don’t acknowledge their passing, it may be that no-one will. If we don’t offer respect, it may be that no-one will”.

Tomorrow, we who still have breath in our bodies, can live and love and fight and hope.

But today is for the dead.

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Police infiltration, then and now

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Protests outside Parliament

Suffragette photo by Victoria Gray, taken 24/10/2012; other photo by K Gupta taken 9/12/2010

POLICE SPIES AMONG THE MILITANTS.

LETTERS FROM A DETECTIVE.

The Suffragette this week says that in the attempt to repress the militant women’s agitation, the Government has enrolled an enormous number of plain-clothes political police, hundreds of whom prowl round the dwellings and meeting-places of suffragist leaders. It adds:-

At private meetings at times police spies are found, having gained admission by first becoming members of the Suffrage Society, under whose auspices such meetings are held, and gradually wormed their way into the confidence of staunch friends.

When it is difficult for some reason for a detective to join a suffrage society, the plan of employing spies is adopted. For a consideration these hirelings will do their best to find out the plans of the militants. The following specimens from correspondence duly authenticated will furnish some idea as to the methods of the so-called political department of Scotland-yard. The letters were sent through the post to a spy who had joined one of the men’s unions for woman suffrage, and were written by a well-known detective who has on more than one occasion participated in the arrest and trial of suffragists.

The letters quoted contain the following passages:-

Don’t fail to let me know if you are going to Town Hall, Battersea, on Thursday, and if S. P. will be there.

Sincerely trust that you suffered no ill effects from the wrestling bout in which I hear you took part, – old boy, try and go up and find out all you can re G- and D- (the names of two officials of a men’s union), or anything else going and let me know either by letter or tell me where and what time I can see you as I want to defray your out of pocket expenses. I am enclosing a postal order for you to have a drink, and hope you got the one I sent last week. In the meantime, – old boy, send anything you get to hear of concerning intentions of your union addressed to me at Scotland-yard, which will be opened and afterwards sent to me.

P.S.-In case anything is on during opening of Parliament, don’t forget to lot me have a line at office.

The same journal announces that Mrs. Pankhurst’s next public meeting will take place at Lowestoft on Wednesday, April 15.

The content of this article is startlingly contemporary: police gradually infiltrating activist organisations, gradually gaining trust and acceptance of their members and becoming trusted friends, but reporting everything to their handlers. This article, however, was published in 1914. I was reminded of it as I read this article about present day surveillance of activists. In it, Ellie Mae O’Hagan describes a conversation she had with a friend:

And then the conversation turned to something less unremarkable; something most people will never talk about with their friends. What if none of the memories we share, the secrets we’ve told each other, or the histories we’ve disclosed to one another were real? What if everything we knew about each other was based on a lie, so that one of us could extract information from the other that would eventually be used against them?

I am also based in Nottingham, and the uncomfortable fact remains that while I never met Mark Kennedy/Mark Stone, I have marched and occupied and planned and stood in the cold alongside those who did. In light of that, why should they trust me? Why should I trust them?

While there are lots of things activists can do to guard against surveillance – the Reporters Without Borders Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-dissidents offers a good introduction to online and digital security – infiltration is very difficult to guard against. Is there much point in setting up elaborate email encryption if an infiltrator has access to the account password? Is there much point in carefully setting up meetings or using clean SIM cards and phones if someone has your details anyway?

Closely linked to police infiltrators is the role of the agent provocateur – someone from outside the activist organisation pretending to be part of the organisation and engaging in or encouraging acts that the activists themselves would be wary of. This can range from an agent provocateur slipping in amongst the black bloc to an embedded police infiltrator helping to plan and organise acts of direct action.

One of the posts I’ve read about police infiltration is this one discussing four main dangers resulting from infiltration. The problems of evidence gathered by the infiltrator, the emotional harm to activists and the potential for an infiltrator to disrupt, divide or derail the activist organisation seem pretty obvious but there’s a fourth danger – that of activist organisations becoming less trusting, more closed and more difficult for newcomers to get involved. As the article points out, it’s not newcomers who pose a threat; it’s our friends, lovers, co-workers, housemates – people embedded in our community – who are more likely to be infiltrators. As Mark Kennedy shows, it’s the people who put money into funding campaigns, dedicate a lot of their time and energy towards campaigns and are most enthusiastic about direct action who should worry us.

No Police Spies campaigns for an end to “political policing”; however police infiltration has been going on for a very long time. Suffrage campaigners were among the first to have their photos taken as part of police surveillance. These days, we call them Forward Intelligence Teams (FIT).

This newspaper article indicates a different form of police surveillance that again continues to be used today. It also raises interesting questions about the nature of police surveillance almost a hundred years ago – who was doing it? how extensive was it? were women among the hireling spies? and, perhaps inevitably, what was the relationship between the police infiltrators and direct action?

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“Suffragettes storm the Houses of Parliament”, 2012

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Very quickly because I’m in the middle of bashing at this chapter, but saw this today and thought it was interesting (I am nothing if not predictable): In pictures: Suffragettes storm the Houses of Parliament for feminist lobby, with more background on it from the Olympics Opening Ceremony.

From the article:

When Gail Collins stepped out in front of the deafening 80,000-strong crowd watching the Olympics opening ceremony, wearing a high-neck Edwardian blouse and the purple, white and green sash that marked her out as one of Danny Boyle’s 50 suffragettes, she couldn’t hear the noise, just the beating of her heart. “It was one of the biggest days of my life,” she said. “Getting married, having my children and being in the opening ceremony. I felt proud, really proud that we had got there.”

In the months before the ceremony, the women forged a particular bond – with each other and the women they were representing. So when the experience ended, what did the Olympic suffragettes do? They kept marching.

Dozens of suffragette performers, led by Helen Pankhurst, great-granddaughter of Emmeline Pankhurst, plan to march on parliament, at the vanguard of a major feminist rally organised to urge MPs to stop “eroding erosion of women’s rights” and make more progress on women’s equality.

[…]

No longer under the guidance of Boyle – who included the suffragette section in the ceremony after becoming enthralled by the memorial plaque to Emily Davison, found on the back of the broom cupboard door where she once hid in the House of Commons – the group may treat observers to a scaled-down version of their performance. It may even include the critical moment, which to the annoyance of many wasn’t featured in the TV coverage, when the women formed a human scaffolding to carry a Christ-like Davison above their heads.

I find it fascinating because it demonstrates present day understandings of suffragettes very clearly. One of my chapters has the working title “Public figure and private nuisance: the problem of Emily Wilding Davison” and focuses on discourses of Davison and the WSPU in the days and weeks after her actions at the 1913 Derby. Davison, the WSPU’s wild child, often acted unpredictably and in ways that challenged the autocracy of the WSPU leadership. However, her actions were often innovative and headline grabbing – none more so than when she was struck by a horse at the 1913 Derby. I argue that the newspaper representation of this shows the WSPU bringing her under their aegis so they could make her their martyr. Davison occupied an interesting and complicated place within the WSPU and the wider suffrage movement, so I find the image of a “Christ-like Davison” intriguing.

I also want to find out more about remembering and history and what it means to summon these ghosts and remake them for present day issues, but that will have to wait until after I submit.

References:
Rosen, A. (1974). Rise Up, Women! The Militant Campaign of the Women’s Social and Political Union 1903-1914. London: Routledge
Stanley, L. and Morley, A. (1988) The Life and Death of Emily Wilding Davison. London: Women’s Press

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Doing interdisciplinarity

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Second in what seems to be an occasional series about interdisciplinarity. All posts can be found under the interdisciplinarity tag

One of the most daunting things about my thesis was that I essentially had to learn a new discipline. I could have treated my corpus of hundred year old newspaper articles like a contemporary corpus – the corpora I’d used until then (the British National Corpus, the Guardian corpus and two corpora I’d assembled myself, one of music reviews and the other of children’s stories) were of my time and cultural context and, while I obviously researched the area, I didn’t have to learn about a different time period.

However, I knew that if I was to do any kind of (critical) discourse analysis with these historical newspaper texts, I had to learn about the historical context they operated in. If I didn’t, I would be incapable of recognising discourses – they simply would not register as significant to my contemporary eyes. I would not understand their significance, or the impact they had. The nuances would be lost on me and my thesis would make for possibly an interesting corpus analysis, but useless for anyone interested in the historical or social aspects.

The trouble was that I hadn’t done any history since GCSE. At that age I was pretty sure that my interests lay in warfare, sickness, medicine, death and social history, and not in kings, queens and the nobility. The prospect of being taught by my history teacher for another two years was not a prospect I was willing to entertain. Despite loving history, I reluctantly chose not to study it at A level. As such, I had a lot to learn.

Be aware of the field(s)

My first task was simply to understand the historiography – who was writing about the suffrage movement and how they positioned themselves within the field. I tried to understand the debates within the field, and how people’s research responded to others’ research. I learnt something of the waves of research about the suffrage movement – the first waves comprising of personal memoirs and scholarship focusing on the WSPU, London-based organisations and leading figures of the movement, and a second wave starting in the 1970s and focusing more on hitherto marginalised figures, experiences, ideologies and organisations. There were also historians seeking to synthesise these various perspectives.

I also sought to understand the wider context of the time period – what was going on in terms of politics, family life, Empire, work, health? What were the assumptions about gender roles and how women were supposed to behave? These were the things that were going to come up in the newspapers and which I had to be acquainted with.

One of the ways I did this was to read – a lot. The other was to go along to undergraduate history lectures. These were useful in supplying context and when it came to the lecture on the suffrage movement, I was delighted that it was all stuff I was newly familiar with. This suggested that I was on the right track.

I am also immensely grateful to Dr Chris Godden and Dr Lesley Hall who were generous with their time and advice and who didn’t laugh at me when I described what I was researching, but were kind enough to give the impression I had something useful to offer.

Allow it to shape your research on a fundamental level

In my case, I’d played it safe and requested Times Digital Archive data from between 1903 and 1920. Choosing dates was always going to be arbitrary; 1903-1920 encompasses the period of time from the formation of the Women’s Social and Political Union to two years after the Representation of the People Act 1918 which gave women the vote. If I wanted a lot more data, I could have asked for 1860 – the decade in which the campaign for women’s suffrage emerged out of other social protest movements – to 1928, the year in which women were granted the franchise on the same terms as men. That was too much to take on for a PhD project, and I had to narrow my focus. I could have simply chosen a five or ten year period – say 1910 to 1915 – but this wouldn’t have made sense in the social context of the time.

My research in history quickly revealed that the outbreak of World War One led to a complete change in the suffrage movement; it forced them to engage with nationalism as revealed and understood through warfare. It was also clear from looking at the initial data that the newspaper’s shift in focus and the amount of news they actually printed changed after 1914. Including the years between 1914 and 1918 would therefore change the scope of the project and that was too much to take on for a PhD project. My research into history also gave me a starting year – 1908, on the cusp of suffrage direct action.

The historical background, therefore, played a crucial role in shaping the project and delineating its boundaries.

It’s not just the icing on the cake

Related to the previous point: I didn’t want the historical analysis to be something I only brought into play in conclusions.

This ties in with a corpus linguistics issue of having to know your data in order to do in-depth work with it. If you handed me a corpus from a culture that I know very little about – let’s say, for sake of argument, Arabic literature – I would probably be able to make some pretty graphs and identify some words which behave in interesting ways and which are perhaps worth further investigation, but because I don’t know the history and the context in which these texts operate, I would be unable to connect these interesting words to things that were happening that would affect the discourses. I wouldn’t know about events, wars, peace treaties, rulers and governments, innovations, philosophies, schools of thought, cultural shifts.

While my work is in (corpus) linguistics – my background is in linguistics, I’m (currently!) based in an English department and my thesis will be examined by linguists – I don’t think I could write a good linguistics thesis using this particular corpus without also writing about history. It’s something I’ve always had in mind when interpreting data – and not just in the sense of “writing about what I’ve observed”. In corpus linguistics, categorising and grouping your data can in itself be a form of interpretation; I found it was vital to understand the historical context in order to come up with meaningful categories. At the moment I’m looking at the news narratives of Emily Wilding Davison’s actions, hospitalisation, death, inquest and funeral procession; these were all reported, sometimes extensively, in the Times. However, a critical discourse analysis approach requires the analyst to be sensitive to what is missing as well as to what is present, and so it is vital for the analyst to be aware of the wider context of the text. This was where an understanding of the historical context is so important. For example, the Times notes that Yates represented Davison’s family at the inquest into her death. A passing comment, perhaps. However, with my knowledge of the suffrage movement, I was able to recognise this man as Thomas Lamartine Yates, husband of one of Davison’s close friends and unofficial WSPU legal advisor. In some ways, this raises more questions than it answers – was he providing his services because of his wife’s association with Davison or does it say something about Davison’s posthumous changing relationship with the WSPU? – but it makes for a richer analysis.

To go with the cake metaphor, I don’t think of my research as a linguistics cake with a tasty history icing. Nor do I think of it as a linguistics and history battenburg cake, nor a linguistics and history marble cake. instead, the two are inseparably mixed.

Be humble

I am not a historian by training. I have undoubtedly made mistakes and been blind to things – interpretations, undercurrents – that a person with 5+ years of intensive study of history behind them would notice. There’s a lot that I don’t know, and if someone asked me to discuss in detail the politics of Empire during this time period or the campaign for equal franchise in the 1920s, I’d struggle. I hope that I’ve been a respectful and sensitive outsider and my work can offer some useful insights to “proper” historians, but I also hope I can accept their inevitable corrections with grace and humility.

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The organised(ish) PhD researcher

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Recently I was in a cafe with a friend who is just starting her PhD. Talk turned to what we were lugging around in our bags: the usual annotated journal articles, academic books, phone, keys, wallet, railcard, pens, notepads…and my organiser. I’m one of those sad people who still uses a paper organiser. To add to that, it’s also a filofax. I am either so very cool no one else recognises my coolness (yet) or I am just a bit of a loser.

I like writing on paper for several reasons. A diary is harder to lose, my style of scribbling in diaries doesn’t lend itself easily to electronic means, I find actually writing something helps me remember it, I like my handwriting and pens and the smooth trail of ink over paper. I don’t like feeling dependent on a phone for all my needs and already feel somewhat over-reliant on it. Laptops are often more cumbersome and heavier than I want to carry around with me all day, a tablet is prohibitively expensive and ultimately, I like having something that doesn’t run on batteries and therefore won’t inconveniently die on me and force me to hunt around for a coffee shop that has a plug point I can borrow.

I like using a filofax in particular because of its flexibility. I can add more stuff, shift the diary from a Jan-Dec to a Sept-July format, rearrange bits within it, and create new sections if I need them. I am also ridiculously fussy about the diaries I use, and when I bought a bound diary each year I would get slightly obsessional about finding exactly the right kind of diary – week to two pages, either faintly ruled or unruled paper, not-hideous fonts, decent quality paper. While the filofax diary inserts aren’t perfect they are at least consistent.

The set-up I have at the moment:

  • a page with my name, address and contact details
  • a section for my to-do lists
  • a section for my diary
  • a section of plain and lined paper for general notes
  • a section of paper for thesis notes
  • two spare sections that I can use for something if necessary
  • plastic pocket, card holder and map at the back

filofax coverfilofax inside

I live in a household of two medical doctors and two academics so we have a good stash of stationery! Perhaps appropriately (or not at all appropriately, depending on your sense of humour), Aricept is used to slow down the progression of Alzheimer’s disease. And therefore, they give out post-it notes to help doctors remember things (like their brand).

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I have a front card with my name, permanent address, personal email and phone number. I don’t like the front sheet that comes with filofax organisers as it’s too much detail that I don’t particularly want to share. I made the dividers out of card then laminated them so they’re hopefully durable enough to last.

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This is the first page in my general notes section and is my “you’re leaving the house in 15 minutes, have you got everything you need?” list. Trust me, it’s not good to have your laptop in one county and your laptop’s charger in another!

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This is the first page of the thesis notes section, complete with scribbly 4am writing. I try not to take my work to bed with me, but sometimes it happens.

You don’t get to see my diary because there’s too much personal stuff in there! I use it to keep track of where I’m supposed to be when – so meetings, research seminars, my various bits of paid work and deadlines as well as meeting up for coffee, reminders to buy cereal, eye appointments and so on. When I’m very busy it’s a relief to be able to write these down and not worry about forgetting them. The downside is that unless I write these down, I forget them.

My organiser is pretty minimalistic compared to some – if you want a look at how other people organise their things, I recommend looking at Philofaxy and particularly their regular Reader Under the Spotlight profiles.