THESIS

fv\ a 27 2Ò tq

Date

VED BY

bhi Malik, Ph.D., Chair

Lydia Cooper, Ph.D.

Matthew Reznicek,

I

Gail M. Jensen, Ph.D., Dean

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Crossing Borders, Crossing Genders: Queer Approaches to Popular Culture

___________________________________

By Steven Stendebach

___________________________________

A THESIS

Submitted to the faculty of the Graduate School of the Creighton University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the Department of English

_________________________________

Omaha, NE

May 22, 2019

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Abstract

Popular culture poses the most direct route to understanding how everyday people grapple with identity and power. Popular culture simultaneously promotes inclusion and diversity, while constricting it into an easily consumable and profitable form. This project approaches the popular from three different forms—music, film, and literature—to understand how queerness disrupts nationalistic narratives. Traditional liberal depictions of nation have depicted progress moving upward linearly, with equality and living standards consistently improving. This line of liberal, “progressive” thinking uses neoliberal and advanced capitalism as a tool to achieve multiculturalism. My project argues that queerness holds the potential to undermine this linear and liberal approach to history by collapsing temporalities, allowing the legacy of colonial violence to connect with contemporary inequality. The popular, being the form most associated with everyday national subjects, offers complex and conflicting insight into queerness’s role in critiquing media’s complicity in conservative policy.

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Acknowledgements I first would like to thank my thesis chair, Dr. Surbhi Malik for her essential advice on countless paper drafts and theoretical frameworks. This project could not have come together without her guidance toward films, scholarship, and theoretical text. To Dr. Lydia Cooper and Dr. Matthew Reznicek, thank you for taking the time to read and critique my writing, not only as part of my committee, but also in the classroom and on a regular basis. To the remainder of the Creighton English Department staff and faculty, you continue to shape my intellectual development. Thank you. To my mom and dad, who never cease to support me in my personal and academic life. “Finally we’d like to stop and thank our roots, respect the Specials, Maytals and Toots! Wailing Wailers, Laurel Aitkens, and the Beat, but most of all the Skatalites, they’re music complete!”

-“Skank by Numbers,” Mustard Plug

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Table of Contents Introduction 6 Chapter 1: Try Wearing a Cap!: Maternity, Ska, and Thatcherism 12 Chapter 2: “I’m not a Professional Pakistani!”: My Beautiful Laundrette within the Queer Optic 29 Chapter 3: “Be Meek”: Subversion of the Feminine Pariah 48

Bibliography 68

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Introduction

Popular culture poses the most direct route to understanding how everyday people

grapple with identity and power relations. Popular culture is at the center of this dilemma,

simultaneously promoting inclusion, diversity, and “wokeness,” while maintaining it into an

easily consumable and thereby profitable form. Stuart Hall, for instance, describes popular

culture as an “arena of consent and resistance.” (192). In practice, popular culture is littered with

contradictions, thus leading to the “consent and resistance” paradox Hall speaks of. The

following three essays draw upon Hall’s dichotomy as a means to critique liberal forms of

progressive media. These forms often depict colonialism’s influence on the present in linear

terms, with history marching forward and equality continuously rising upward. Through a queer

methodology, these essays push back against this linear vision of progress by demonstrating the

conflicting relationship popular culture has with both liberal and conservative values, such as

demonstrating how progressive movements can remain complicit in neoliberal politics (chapter

one), how former Colonial empires can function as home and breed racial violence

simultaneously (chapter two), and how traditional gender roles can be queered for subversive

purposes (chapter three). This project ultimately seeks to highlight the conflicting “consent and

resistance” in popular culture to demonstrate how queerness destabilizes an upward

interpretation of national progress.

As neoliberal ideology continues to support globalism via international capital, gender

remains a point of tension. For instance, Jack Halberstam’s discussion of the “bathroom

problem” in Female Masculinities notes how at airports “people are literally moving through

space and time in ways that cause them to want to stabilize boundaries (gender) even as they

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traverse others (nation)” (21). Halberstam’s claim suggests that gender allows a critique of the

patriarchal status quo that nationality cannot. In other words, he asks why people are comfortable

crossing national borders but not crossing gender borders? In his later piece, In a Queer Time &

Place, Halberstam posits the notion of “queer time” to explain this push back. For Halberstam,

queer time is an alternative viewing of region and temporality that is “in opposition to the

institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction” (1). Queer time suggests a logic that is

inaccessible to heteronormativity, thereby its perceived threat and the compulsion to “stabilize”

gender boundaries (FM 21). Queering, then becomes a means to resist the traditional

reproductive time that emphasizes stereotypical and suppressive gender roles.

Yet, while I emphasize a methodology that is attune to queer and gender studies, I do not

wish to obscure the role race and nationality play in power structures, as the two are intrinsically

linked, creating intersectional identities. Gloria Anzaldua’s work becomes helpful in this regard:

she builds upon Halberstam’s understanding of queer time and place by applying it directly to

national borders. Her Borderland La Fontera the New Mestizas draws a comparison between

mixed race identity and queer sexualities, in between both nations and sexualities. She writes that

A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue

of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and

forbidden are its inhabitants. los astravesados live here: the squint-eyed, the

perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulato, the half-breed, the

half dead; in short, those who cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of

the “normal” (3).

For Anzaldua, adhering to rigid national boundaries correlates with adhering to traditional

gender roles: both are rooted in violent and arbitrary histories, with the in between nature of

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borderlands being a site of residence to both. In this sense, like in Halberstam’s discussion of

“reproductive time,” queerness offers a site of resistance that can demonstrate how strict borders

continue to harm “los astravesados,” those subjects that cannot fit neatly into one category.

Nations, like gender, are contested sites that require participants to actively create them.

Popular culture’s emphasis on understanding who becomes powered and disempowered

by media provides a fruitful landscape to interrogate questions of race and gender. Part of

popular cultures complexity is that it is designed to be a consumable commodity, yet to

commercially succeed, it must “reflect genuine popular dreams and aspirations, struggles, and

discontent” (Duncombe 187). If as Duncombe posits, popular culture provides a glimpse into

“genuine popular dreams,” then as a field it provides insight into how everyday people interact

with questions of identity. The three essays each represent a different form—music, film, and

literature—and seeks to understand how differences in medium allow for different critiques of

the system alongside the different contradictions. By juxtaposing these pieces together, I hope to

create what Gayatri Gopinath dubbed a “queer archive” or celebrating the “insignificant” texts

that “reveal, interrogate, and transform the ways in which hierarchies value archival production”

(9).

Chapter One focuses on the second wave of British ska music and the conflicting ways

the genre depicts single mothers, a sign viewed as antithetical to the family structure promoted

by Thatcher’s Britain. Second wave ska musicians promoted themselves as a leftist and

decisively anti-Thatcher voice in the punk rock music scene. Scholarship on the genre tends to

follow this ideology, focusing on the genre’s inherent transnational value and how it connects to

70s and 80s music scenes, notably punk. Gender remains a blind spot for scholarship, which I fill

by exploring two of the songs that topped the British charts: The Specials’ “Too Much, Too

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Young” and Madness’s “Embarrassment.” Both of these tracks depict teenage pregnancy under

an increasingly limited welfare state, but take opposite stands; The Specials lyrics speak harshly

against teenage mothers, thus being complicit in the family oriented conservative administration,

while Madness uses motherhood as a way to show the racial and gendered prejudices of the

middle class. These conflicting meanings coming out of the same music scene illustrates

Grossberg’s “empowering and disempowering” dichotomy of popular culture; while the

musicians self-identify as progressive, their depiction of gender demonstrates a more complex

relationship. Scholarship will then have a more nuanced understanding of ska’s function in

Thatcher’s Britain than the limitations of the current, mostly transnationally minded scholarship.

Chapter two further understands how gender can undermine progressive narratives by

analyzing Stephen Frears and Hanif Kureishi’s My Beautiful Laundrette from the perspective of

Gopinath’s “queer optic” (9). Furthering the queer time discussion Halberstam proposes,

Gopinath posits an alternative mode of reading history that “deviates from a forward-looking

directionality and instead veers toward multiple objects, spaces, and temporalities” (emphasis

mine, 174). In other words, Gopinath stresses the importance of finding connections between

history, region, and current inequality as a way to highlight the wide reaching influence

colonialism continues to have. In Laundrette, we see a distinct shift in temporal gazes—the older

generation, Papa and Nasser, fall into the trap of linear historical gazes, Utopian Nostalgia and a

vicious adherence to neoliberalism respectively. The younger generation, most wholly

represented by Omar, hold a more complicated relationship with their homeland and their place

in history. Notably, Omar forms a romantic relationship with a former National Front member, a

moment in history that continues to trouble Omar. His transtemporal gaze, his queer optic,

allows him to recognize his lover’s racist history while still maintaining his present intimacy. In

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this sense, as we see in the ska movement, Omar exhibits a conflicting relationship with Britain;

on the one hand, it is his home and the only place he has ever known, while on the other hand, it

continues to breed racial violence.

Chapter three poses a similar transtemporal argument as the previous chapter, focusing

on how Emma Donoghue’s The Wonder coopts and redesigns Mimi Schippers’ “feminine

pariah” theory into an empowering symbol (95)l. Schippers coined the term “feminine pariah” to

illustrate societal reactions to masculine women. For Schippers, masculinity is defined by what it

is not, the feminine, thus female masculinities are perceived as threatening to the patriarchal way

of life. As a result, Schippers posits that female masculinities are not excluded from their

societies, but instead demonized and shamed into conforming to traditional gender roles.

Donoghue’s heroine, Lib, intersects with the feminine pariah when she travels to nineteenth-

century Ireland and performs doctor duties, a coded male occupation, in a small town. I compare

Donoghue’s contemporary treatment of the pariah trope alongside an early twentieth century

example of Katherine Cecil Thurston’s Max (1910), a novel that conforms to the more

problematic aspects pointed out by Schippers’ theory in order to demonstrate how Donoghue

applies contemporary feminist theory to queer the gender perception in the long nineteenth-

century. Lib’s movement from England to Ireland may constrict her into a traditionally feminine

occupation, but by subverting the trope and using her “meekness,” as she calls it, to manipulate

the Irish council, the pariah feminine becomes an empowering concept.

By placing these works alongside each other, I hope to illustrate Michel Foucault’s claim

in The History of Sexuality that “homosexuality threatens people as a ‘way of life’ rather than as

a way of having sex” (310). Each of the above examples queers temporality and nationality, to

some extent, that suggests an alternative “way of life” than a status quo that values capitol over

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subjectivity. In bringing together popular culture studies with queer theory, this project attempts

to articulate the messy ways popular media empowers and disempowers people who cross

borders and genders.

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Chapter 1

“Try Wearing a Cap!”

Maternity, Ska, and Thatcherism

While British ska musicians promoted themselves as a progressively liberal voice toward

immigrants and working class struggles, the gendered implications of the music are more

complicated and at times problematic. Two-tone ska, named after the Two-Tone record label that

released most of the movement’s major releases, remains a significant artifact for scholars

because of its perspective encapsulating of the early years of that Thatcher administration;

starting in 1979 with the release of The Specials “Gangsters” single, the movement rose to

dominate the British music charts before beginning to fade in 1981 (Stratton 192). Despite its

brief popularity, the two-tone movement captures a musical response to and critique of the early

years of neoliberal practices under the Thatcher administration. While the label released many

hits in their career, my interest is understanding the creation and political messages of two songs

in particular: The Specials’ “Too Much Too Young” (1980) and Madness’s “Embarrassment”

(1980). Unlike the majority of ska music’s lyrics, these singles both tell narratives of teenage

pregnancy and young mothers. The tone of these two songs take toward the young mothers may

be quite different, but they demonstrate the return to the nuclear family encouraged by neoliberal

economic practices. Through analyzing these songs, I argue, music critics gain a deeper

understanding of how popular culture reacted to the start of global conservatism by paradoxically

critiquing and being complicit in the policies that limit which spaces mothers can occupy. The

Specials and Madness, I argue, illustrate how the pregnant body became an economic scapegoat

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under Thatcherism, shouldering the blame for a strained welfare state and privatized social

security.

Critics have not failed to notice the transnational value of ska music and its ability to

promote an older, distinctly Jamaican genre to an international white and black audience. Paul

Gilroy notes that ska “transcended the various definitions of ‘race’” within Britain and formed

unity within “the hinterlands of youth culture” (171). In contrast, Jon Stratton argues that punk

and two tone associated ska and reggae with “the Caribbean and with black migrants,” creating

an “exotic musical form” (193); the music may have been commercially successful, but it existed

as a novelty that “reinforced a sense of the Otherness in the West Indies in Britain” (202). While

Gilroy and Stratton primarily focus on race, Joseph Heathcott approaches the music from its

ability to advocate working class values, positing that ska was able to connect with its audience

through the “processes that turned peasant families into a rural and urban proletariat” that

“unfolded within the development of U.S. and British colonialism in the Caribbean” (185).

Heathcott continues that this connection to the proletariat allowed ska to begin its spread across

the Black Atlantic, including to the “white working-class British youth in urban centers such as

London and Manchester” that were “exhausted by a stagnant economy and alienated by a remote

national political life” (199). As these critics demonstrate, while ska music has been interrogated

from racial and class perspectives, gender has not been properly explored.

First, I will examine from a gendered lens the two subcultures that the two-tone

movement drew inspiration from: Jamaican first wave ska and the British punk rock scene.

While women existed in both of these subcultures, they are notable for being hypermasculine,

both in lyrical content and in performance. Next, I will close read the lyrics of “Too Much Too

Young” and “Embarrassment,” to demonstrate the economic blame placed on mothers during the

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early years of Thatcherism. Aiding in connecting the ties between popular music, single mothers,

and Thatcherism, I will be building off the work of Gillian Pascall, who explores the role of

mothers in stable family units under Thatcherism. While the mothers depicted in the ska songs

may be unwed at conception, they are united to Pascall’s matriarchs through raising children in a

society that believes “these is no such thing as society; there are only individuals, and families”

(Thatcher, qtd. in Pascall).

While this essay is primarily about British music and government, the movement

precedes the conservative trends of the 1980s. Duncan Webster asserts that “the entrepreneurial

culture that Thatcherism sought to produce … [including] tax cuts, privatization, and an

onslaught of the welfare state,” while subtly influenced by a Victorian sensibility, “was more

obviously influenced by a wistful gaze at America” (1). The “wistful gaze,” ultimately works

both ways, as Reaganomics adapted Thatcher’s economic practices to America. Even musically,

America began to adapt the British two-tone sound toward the latter half of the 80s, leading to

the Third Wave of Ska that featured numerous mainstream and cult hits like Reel Big Fish and

the Mighty Mighty Bosstones. Thus while this paper focuses primarily on British ska and its

influences, the cross cultural pollination between Britain, America, and the Caribbean carries the

gendered implications into a transnational context.

Rude Boys and X Rays: Femininity in First Wave Ska and British Punk

The first wave of ska music fans referred to themselves as “rude boys,” and emphasized

aggression, crime, and hypermasculinity in their lyrics. Dick Hebdige argues that the rude boy’s

violent fetish stems from their clashes between young Jamaicans and authority figures: “the

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ganja, the guns, and the ‘pressure’ produced a steady stream of rude boys desperate to test their

strength against the law” (124). For instance, Derrick Morgan’s “Tougher than Tough” (1967)

functions as a rude boy anthem endorsing destructive behavior. The single tells the narrative of a

group of rude boys on trial for “gun shooting” and “ratchet using.” The song’s judge character

asks the accused, “now tell me rude boys. What do you have to say for yourselves?” to which the

rude boys defiantly reply that “your honor. Rudies don’t fear.” The chorus proceeds that rude

boys are “tougher than tough, rougher than rough, strong as lion, we are iron. Rudies are free.”

The single lacks punishment for the rude boys’ behavior, instead ending with the judge

proclaiming that “court is adjourned,” with the hardened rude boys appearing to lack any

punishment. Functionally, the song glorifies depiction of crime and macho stoicism as

demonstrated by other music of the disenfranchised, a music where “street fights, sexual

encounters, boxing matches, horse races, and experiences in prison were immediately converted

into folksong and stamped with a ska beat” (Hebdige 124).

Dandy Livingston’s “Rudy, a Message for You” (1967), however, provides a social

critique to the rude boy movement, hinting at the violent misogyny behind the subculture.

Hebdige posits that “in the world of ‘007,’where the rude boys ‘loot’ and ‘shoot’ and ‘wail’

while ‘out on probation,’ […] in the final confrontation, the authorities must always

triumph”(124). In other words, while the glorified rude boy anthem acted as a cathartic release,

the reality of Jamaican crime and poverty lurked within the subculture. Thus, Livingstone’s

“Rudy” single acts as a warning to the growing rude boy subculture. He directs to “stop your

messing around, it’s time you straighten right out, it’s time you stop … making trouble in town.”

As the song moves into its second verse, Livingstone reveals the titular “message” he has for the

violent and macho rude boys: “you ought to think of your future, or you might end up in jail, and

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you will suffer.” For Stratton, at times the rude boy genre displayed “social realism” to the

struggles of postcolonial subjects. The strutting of “Tougher than Tough” may function as

escapism for rude boys, but “Rudy” underscores the reality of Jamaican; colonialism’s influence

and poor economic conditions created a system where young working class Jamaicans are

trapped between poverty and complex.

The influence of postcolonial economic structures and the rude boy subculture, then,

explains the vastly different levels of social mobility granted to female ska musicians as opposed

to their male counterparts. Jamaican ska was a heavily male genre, and the women that did

perform experienced much worse contracts that stripped them of agency over their music careers.

Brad Klein posits in the film Legends of Ska: Cool and Copasetic (2015) that female musicians

were treated as “living in the shadow of their male counterparts” and that this prejudice

“extended into the recording studio.” Patsy Todd’s stunted music career illustrates Klein’s

assertion. Unlike the male ska vocalists, who were free to record solo songs, Todd’s early career

was exclusively a duet partner. Todd’s debut single, “Love not to Brag” (1962), was recorded

with Derrick Morgan under the name “Derrick and Patsy.” Klein notes that while the success

from their duets allowed Morgan to move into a successful solo career in both Jamaica and

Britain, the company’s head producer, Duke Reid, relegated Todd to remain as a duet singer, this

time with Stranger Cole as “Stranger and Patsy.” While men were able to grow in their musical

career and experience cosmopolitan movement to Britain, women were never allowed to

experience success; even as her singles were successful, Todd’s career as perineal duet partner

underscores the sexism in the Jamaican music industry.

The disenfranchisement Todd experienced in Jamaica ultimately caused her to abandon

music and Jamaica as a whole, illustrating a pessimistic outlook on what spaces women could

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occupy in rude boy ska. In Legends of Ska, Todd reflects on the treatment she received as a

female musician:

I never heard a female say, “I want this done” or “I want that” “could you give me

some horn” or “a little more guitar” or something like that. It’s just something you

don’t say. The male could say, “well, could you play someone, could you do so,”

you know how about this” … A lot of the songs I made I wanted to sound

different, but that was not the case. You had no say in your record.

In addition to the lack of creative agency female ska musicians had over the music, the prejudice

extended to the profit that the music generated. Todd notes that her singles were successful in

Belize, “four of my songs were one, two, three, and four” she recalls, but she did not receive any

profit for the foreign success. Ultimately, Todd left Jamaica and music as a whole to pursue

clerical work in New York City. By abandoning ska, Todd illustrates a highly pessimistic

perspective on the spaces women musicians were allowed to occupy in the rude boy subculture.

Punk rock, two-tone’s other main influence, has likewise been categorized by its

masculine attitude. Caroline O’Meara notes that rock as a whole is a masculine format: “from the

ejaculatory discharges of heavy metal’s guitar solos, to the pounding thrusts of standard rock

beats, the music maps neatly onto western ideas of the masculine” (303). Punk rock’s interest in

distilling rock to its most basic form amplified the masculine qualities, as the “virtuosic display

was replaced by aggressive simplicity and macho posturing” can be “found in both the music and

the lyrics” (O’Meara 303). Punk’s masculine qualities have been the primary focus when

establishing the punk cannon. Cogan notes that “The key British bands, or at least the British

bands that were most heavily promoted, were the male dominated bands” and that “many of the

first British groups listed in critical histories of punk were exclusively male” (122); women punk

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rockers were the “marginalized among the marginalized” (125). Similarly to the female rude

boys in Jamaica, women punk rockers remained on the fringe of a movement dedicated toward

lashing out against the status quo. While punk bands may be quick to criticize political

conservatism, in gendered terms, the music continued to exclude female participation and

contributed to patriarchal attitudes in music.

There were exceptions to the punk movement, of course, as artist like London’s X-Ray

Spex created a distinctly feminine form of punk that defied the male dominated conventions. The

opening spoken lines to their debut single, “Oh! Bondage Up Yours” bluntly articulates the

strikingly feminist ideology in their brand of music: “Some people think that little girls should be

seen and not heard, but I think,” here singer Poly Stryene switches to yelling, “Oh Bondage, Up

Yours! One, Two, Three Four!” as the punk rock guitar leads into the introduction. The song

prominently features tenor saxophone from Lora Logic, breaking from the traditional punk rock

instrumentation. When discussing female punk, Cogan posits that female musicians strived to

create a form of punk that was “authentically female” within the masculine space” (132). Logic’s

distortion of the punk rock formula via the saxophone makes it distinct from the “three chord,

two minute” style of the majority of male punk bands. Lyrically, Stryene criticizes cultural

sexualization of woman as victim: “Bind me, tie me, chain me to a wall. I wanna be a slave to

you all. Oh Bondage! Up Yours! Oh Bondage! No More!” and ends each chorus on a falsetto

wail. The militant lyrics attack the notion of women as passive cultural participants, and act as a

call to action for female representation in the young counterculture. However, as Cogan notes,

artist like Stryene and Logic are the “exception to the rule, as opposed to [being] the rule” (122),

as the punk rock “boys club” remained the status quo (122). Artist like X-Ray Spex were pushed

to the fringes of the scene and denied the cultural impact their male counterparts experienced,

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predating the social shift that Thatcherism would push in the upcoming years for women to be in

support of “traditional family values” (Pascall 291).

Thatcher, Teenage Mothers, “Pickney” Depictions

The two-tone stated purpose of leading the punk and ska movement away from racist

skinhead and neofascist organizations caused scholarship around the movement to focus only

from a racial framework. The National Front, Britain’s largest neofascist organization, had an

increasingly stronger presence in 70s Britain, fielding ninety total candidates in 1974 and

receiving 10% of the vote in some London districts (Gilroy 118). Jerry Dammers, the founder of

The Specials and the Two-Tone label, was cognizant to the growing racist sentiment in the punk

and skinhead subcultures and tried to use ska to combat racism. Dammers recalls, “I was trying

to find a way to make sure [punk rock] didn’t go the way of the NF [National Front]” and that he

started playing “ska rather than reggae” as a way “to get through to” the growing skinhead

subculture (qtd. in Stratton). By fusing ska and punk, black music and white music respectively,

Dammers created a fusion genre that, as Gilroy articulates, “Transcended the carious prescriptive

definitions of ‘race’ which faced each other in the hinterlands of youth culture” (171).

As Thatcher ascended to the prime minister position and ushered in the neoliberal

movement, two-tone’s stated objective became the disempowerment of the conservative

administration. The English Beat’s “Whine and Grine/Stand Down Margaret” (1980) single acts

as the most obvious example of anti-Thatcher sentiment. The first half of the single covers

“Wine and Grine” (1969) by Prince Buster, and establishes the two-tone message of racial

harmony through the repeated “love and unity, it’s the only way.” As the song moves into the

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second half, though, the lyrics shift from abstract concepts, to a more precise critique on the

Thatcher administration: “You tell me how can it work in this all white law, what a short sharp

lesson, what a Third World War. Stand down Margaret, stand down please, stand down

Margaret!” By juxtaposing the two halves of the song, Thatcher symbolically becomes the

antithesis to the “love and unity” preached. Even though Margaret Thatcher was prime minister

for only a year at this point, the ska and punk rock subcultures were already advocating for a call

to action against her administration. Popular music and culture, then, functions as the first

avenue of criticism against the new administration, voicing the frustrations of the general public.

Yet despite the strides in racial progressivism and critiques of Thatcher, from a gendered

standpoint, the music reinforced the patriarchal status quo. For instance, The Specials’ “Too

Much Too Young” is a loose cover of a first wave ska song, Lloyd Charmers’ “Birth Control,” a

novelty song that tries to elicit humor from its crude misogynistic lyrics. Charmers’ song is

mostly instrumental, but the lyrics and vocals that are present, included for comedic effect,

displays the female character, Doris, as nothing more than her sexuality. The song opens with the

male character speaking to his lover: “Doris, where de pill? Doris, move dat pussy from der. Go

on in that bedroom and put out that pussy right now, come on.” While Charmers speaks these

lines, audio samples of cabinets rapidly opening and closing play, illustrating the male’s

frustration in trying to find “de pill,” as well as loud cat “meows,” referencing the not-so-subtle

double entendre. Doris is presented as a completely impotent character, forced to produce her

“pussy” at her husband’s request and his control of “de pill” signifies his control over the

woman’s body itself. As the spoken introduction concludes and the instrumental begins,

sexualized female moaning is sampled on top of the ska rhythms. The only other spoken line is

the chorus, which remains in the Specials’ rendition of the song: “no gimme no mo pickney!

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Gimme de birth control, me no wan no pickney!” While the song was released as little more than

a novelty song, the violent lyrics depict women as powerless beings with no claim to their own

bodies or sexualities. By choosing to modernize this track without the intent of critiquing it, the

Specials symbolically endorse the problematic lyrics and reintroduce its message in a new

context and to a new generation.

The Specials cast the problematic lyrics of the song as simple manifestation of a failed

relationship to a married woman, and in doing so disavow the song’s misogyny and its

problematic reproduction of racial politics. Jerry Dammers, founder and lead songwriter for the

group, explained the writing process for the song in a BBC interview:

I can remember, obviously, what the song was about … I nearly had a thing with

a married woman and it didn’t happen in the end-obviously because she was

married-so there was all that sort of rage and frustration of a young man … The

song kind of got a happy ending because, obviously, the kid came first. So behind

all that rage, it’s actually quite nice because we both walked away from it for the

sake of the kid. (Othen)

Despite the “happy ending” that Dammers asserts the song has, for audiences, it is the “rage and

frustration” that is most prevalent. The opening stanza of the song depicts the story that

Dammers explained about the married woman: “You’ve done too much, much too young. Now

you’re married with a kid, when you could be having fun with me,” while the original Charmers

chorus, “oh no, no gimme no pickney” and “Gi we de birth control, we no wan no pickney”

functions as a call and response to Dammers original lyrics. Much like the original song, the

Specials’ lyrics objectify the mother and represents her as a tool to be used by men; not only

does she not have control over her body (“gi we de birth control), but saying that she has “done

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too much, much too young” insinuates that having a child fundamentally broke her, preventing

her from by having a normal life, as seen in the lyric “you could be having fun with me.” As the

song continues, however, the stakes are raised higher, as Dimmers’ shifts the mother’s fault from

a personal issue to a societal one: “Ain’t he cute? No he ain’t! He’s just another burden of the

welfare state!” The mother, and women in general, become incriminated for overpopulation and

economic turmoil on a global level. The song closes with the background vocals joining the lead

singer in unison, implying the audience’s participation similar to a barroom chantey, as they

ridicule the mother and continue to scapegoat women for societal problems:

Ain’t you heard of the starving millions?

Aint you heard of contraception?

Do you really want a program of sterilization?

Take control of the population boom!

It’s in your living room!

Keep a generation gap!

Try wearing a cap!

Dimmers’ lyrics completely alleviate men’s involvement with issues regarding starvation and

population, leaving women’s bodies as the place that crumbles society. While women are

anatomically unable to “wear a cap,” they are perceived as the ones responsible for the closing

“generation gap.” The song was released as a live single, ending with the audience’s applause at

the command “Try wearing a cap!” furthering the isolation between British society and young

mothers.

The threat of the maternal body could stem from the Thatcher administrations emphasis

on the nuclear family, causing someone who has done “too much, too young” to become a social

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burden. Pascall’s work articulates the rigid structure of the nuclear family under the Thatcher

administration: “The postwar welfare state wrote the male-breadwinner/female-carer model of

the family into the structure of social security and policy” (294). She continues that “Married

women were assumed to be housewives. […] Motherhood was important work for the empire”

as “nurseries were closed” while the state provided “minimal social provision for children under

five” (294). The closing of nurseries underscores the importance of the stay at home mother.

Without the proper resources for care, mothers are then forced to care for children themselves,

limiting their non-mother abilities. Thus, married women were subscribed the role of mother and

nothing else, or risk the health of the child and symbolically Britain’s future.

The paradoxical valuing of motherhood and defunding of childcare services possibly

explains the hostility in Dimmers’ lyrics and why the song concludes with demonization of

young mothers. The mother was assumedly pregnant out of wedlock, given Dimmer’s emphasis

on her age, and her marriage would then be to prevent being “ostracized and unsupported”

(Pascall 294) due to her sexuality. As the song title notes, her status as mother prevents her from

straying outside of traditional mother roles; her romantic involvement with Dammers or her

creative association with the punk and ska scene, the woman must only perform as mother within

the nuclear family or risk becoming a social pariah. As the song moves toward its conclusion,

Dimmer’s lyrics transition into the demonization of young mothers in general, punishing them

for their transgressions. While the Specials promoted themselves as an anti-Thatcher voice, the

punishment of the mother demonstrates their complicity in a patriarchal society.

The Special’s misogynistic lyrics hint at a working class anxiety about unemployment,

but ultimately compounds the gender inequality began by privatization. Alexis Petridis notes that

unemployment rose from “1.5m to 2.5m in [1980]: unemployment among ethnic minorities

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[rose] 82% in the same period.” Yet while unemployment figures continued to rise, the reaction

from the newly elected conservative administration was to deregulate and privatize social

security. Deborah Mabbett posits that the Thatcher administration approach to welfare was “that

everything that could be privatized would be privatized, leaving only a residual role for that state

in securing living standards to the population” (43). In other words, while the British working

population and the black population in particular, were facing increased financial crisis, the

social security that they could have relied on in the past was increasingly becoming unstable;

without the government’s involvement, there is no guarantee that there would be proper living

standards. Thus the Specials use of misogyny to vent economic frustration ultimately hurt the

group most affected by privatization.

In this light, “Too Much Too Young” uses images of motherhood as a scapegoat to

express the economic anxiety caused by neoliberalism’s increased privatization. For instance, at

face value, Dimmers’ interaction with the song’s mother, “Ain’t he cute? No he ain’t! He’s just

another burden of the welfare state!” reads like an attack on the women’s bodies and underscores

the state’s role in regulating sexuality. Read against the grain, however, and the crudity of

Dimmers’ lyrics demonstrates not just the “rage and frustration” of women, but the frustration

from an oppressive economic system that punishes poverty; the child may be a “burden of the

welfare state,” but that is because privatization has caused the social programs that assist with

childcare to close. Dammers returns to economics in the song’s final tirade against the mother.

Amidst his attack on the woman, asking if she’s “heard of contraception” and shouting “try

wearing a cap!”, he questions if she’s “heard of the starving millions?” Again, taken on face

value, such a question may be seen as simply scapegoating mothers, but underneath the

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misogyny, it is an economic and political system’s willingness to allow 2.5 million residents to

remain unemployed and risk starvation.

In contrast, Madness’s “Embarrassment” completely separates the audience from the

speakers ridiculing the young mother, allowing the song to stand not as a misogynistic attack on

mothers, but as a critique against a deeply racist society. Written by saxophonist Lee Thompson,

the song depicts the true events as he observed his nuclear and extended family disown his sister

after she becomes pregnant out of wedlock with a biracial child. As Pascall notes, the emphasis

on the nuclear family structure caused “the unmarried mother and her illegitimate child [to be]

ostracized and unsupported” (294).While there are moments in the song where Thompson

references himself as an observer, such as the repeated “our dad don’t wanna know” and “our

mum don’t wanna know,” the majority of the song’s lyrics are fragmented moments of

conversations and letters directed at or about the young soon-to-be mother. The aunt tells her in a

letter that “you’re not to come and see us no more, keep away from our door,” while worrying

“what will the neighbors think?” The uncle’s fragmented speech is much more direct and

personal, reminiscent of the final stanza of “Too Much Too Young.” He tells her “How can you

show your face, when you’re a disgrace to the human race?” In an endorsement of Thatcher

gender norms, the uncle interprets unwed maternity as fundamentally against British society,

thus she is the “disgrace to the human race.” Finally, the woman’s mother and father continue to

judge and insult her, saying that “Thought she had a head on her shoulders” and that “No one’s

gonna wanna know ya.” The song concludes with the line “you’re an embarrassment” without

any family member attributed, implying that it could be said by anybody in Britain.

By placing racism within the domestic space via the middle class white family’s reaction

to a mix raced child, Thompson articulates the ingrained racist sentiments that were held by

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much of the white British population. While both the children in “Too Much, Too Young” and

“Embarrassment” were born from young mothers, Thompson’s narrative adds the fear of

biracialism onto the maternal body. In her discussion of mixed race identity in Britain, Sara

Ahmed argues that “The mixed race subject is a hybrid subject; a subject determined by a radical

mixing of different ‘races’; a subject whose impurity is a sign of its inability to belong to any

singular time or place” (156). While Ahmed’s writing speaks of the mixed race child,

Thompson’s descriptions of his sister notes a similar race based “inability to belong” (156). The

pregnant mother, noting the ingrained racial prejudice of urban London, experiences “an acute

sense of being inadequate to any available cultural identity,” (Ahmed 157) leading to the

demonization experienced by mothers who do not strictly follow the nuclear family model

during the Thatcher administration.

Indeed, considering the Brixton Riots that would erupt the following year, Thompson’s

depiction of the maternal body allows him to prophetically speak to the racist attitudes held by

much of the white, middle class British population. On April 10th 1981 hundreds of English

citizens, primarily black youths, started rioting in south London, and as Darcus Howe describes

it, “At the end of this engagement Brixton town Centre lay in scorched ruins, firebombed almost

to extinction” (26). He continues that while the press represented the incident as a “work of an

uneducated and hysterical mob,” cultural critics interpreted the attack as “two decades” of racial

tensions within London finally erupting (Howe 26). Poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, in fact,

described the incident as “di great insohreckshan” and that “It is noh mistri/we mekkin histri”

(qtd. in Howe 26). Stratton signals the riots as the moment that white Brits were forced to

recognize the “demands for equality being made by the second-generation black British” and

unofficially marked the end of the two-tone ska revival.

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Anticipating that the Brixton riot was on the horizon, the mother signifier becomes a

cultural mirror, showing the primarily white audience the institutional racism that still existed in

Britain. Thompson explains on the BBC One series The One Show, that he observed racial

prejudice first hand through his sister’s pregnancy, and that “I was in a position to have a pop

back … [the lyrics] had to hit home, particularly in that era.” Unlike in “Too Much Too Young,”

the fragmented structure of “Embarrassment” does not invite the audience to participate in

ridiculing the “disgrace to the human race,” but instead are used to show that ingrained racial

prejudice is the actual cause of British suffering. Ultimately, this subverts the contemporary

notion of single mothers of biracial children. Instead of the cultural marginalization that

Thatcher’s nuclear family promotes or the inability to belong felt by the mixed race subject,

Thompson’s interpretation makes the biracial pregnant body an empowered symbol; if the racial

prejudice that “Embarrassment” brings to life leads to British suffering, then in contrast, the

biracial pregnant body becomes Britain’s hope.

Conclusions

The “Too Much, Too Young” and “Embarrassment” singles demonstrate that ska’s

political influence extends beyond just the race and class consciousness approaches that have

comprised the overwhelming amount of scholarship. Reacting against the National Front’s

racism and the privatization of the welfare state, the Two-Tone movement positioned themselves

as a progressive leftist voice in the popular music space. The Specials’ anti-Thatcher message,

however, is problematized by their complicity in patriarchal views toward women. Their lyrics

simultaneously uphold traditional notions of mothers while demonizing and insulting women hat

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step outside of this depiction. Following in the footsteps of the Lloyd Charmers and the

hypermasculine rude boy culture, the mothers in their lyrics become objects that are victimized

and blamed for privatization.

Madness’s single rectified much of The Specials’ misogyny by using maternity as a

means to illustrate the engrained racism of British Society. The fractured narrative of the

speakers illustrates the racism that simmered inside the British middle class; the mother becomes

the signifier for biracial identities. While both the Specials and Madness released singles in the

same year and from the same movement about maternity, their treatment of young mothers are

opposite. One blames the mother for Britain’s financial uncertainty, while the other uses to

reflect the racist ideologies that threaten the future of the state.

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Chapter 2

“I’m not a professional Pakistani!”:

My Beautiful Laundrette within the Queer Optic

Stephen Frears and Hanif Kureishi’s My Beautiful Laundrette follow the romantic and

financial growth of Omar (Gordon Warnecke) and Johnny (Daniel Day-Lewis) as they attempt to

escape poverty by opening a laundromat at the height of Thatcher’s administration. The two

characters grapple with their histories and relationship with modern Britain. For Omar, this

history involves agreeing to his Uncle Nasser’s (Saeed Jeffrey) obsession with gaining wealth by

any means, including stealing and drug dealing. For Johnny, this involves attempting to reconcile

with his participation in anti-immigrant neofascist rallies that protested in Omar’s neighborhood.

These histories cause the two to hold a tense relationship that alternates between a tender

compassion, and tense rivalries, often at the expense of Omar’s cousin and potential fiancée,

Tania (Rita Wolf). The older generation, Omar’s Papa (Roshad Seth) and his Uncle Nasser

(Saeed Jaffrey) push the three younger cast members into heteronormative roles, pairing Omar

and Tania together for marriage and creating business opportunities for the young men. After a

brawl between Johnny’s former neofascist friends and Omar’s family, Johnny’s current

employers, the film concludes with the two lovers cleaning Johnny’s wounds, playfully splashing

each other, highlighting the rebirth imagery and implying an optimistic outlook on their

relationship. Cultural studies scholar Stuart Hall is among the chief proponents of the film,

famously praising it as

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One of the most riveting and important films produced by a black writer in recent

years and precisely for the reason that made it so controversial: its refusal to

represent the black experience in Britain as monolithic, self-contained, sexually

stabilized and always ‘right on’—in a word, and always and only ‘positive,’ Or

what Hanif Kureishi has called, ‘cheering fictions.’ (449).

By refraining from creating a “cheer fiction,” Kureishi’s characters possess deeply flawed

perspectives on empire, including framing the past in utopian nostalgic terms, buying into

capitalism at the expense of regional history, or even suicidal behaviors. Omar, I argue,

becomes the character with the clearest vision of connections between history, empire,

and capitalism, effectively queering the immigrant narrative. This queering presents

itself, metaphorically speaking, through Omar’s vision being mediated through windows,

one-way mirrors, and doors, allowing him to see space in a frame unavailable to the other

characters, be them immigrant, first generation British, or native British.

While the films historical importance is widely accepted, critics have criticized the film

for presenting a conservative take on homosexual romances that complicity adheres toward

patriarchal status quos. Gayatri Spivak, for instance, critiques the relationship in My Beautiful

Laundtrette for presenting the interracial homoeroticism in a “very lyrical way” that has all “of

the erotic furniture that one associates with romantic heterosexual love” (83). In other words, any

queering of the immigrant story or the romance story becomes lost in the homonormative

approach to the relationship, the least of which being the push toward upward mobility Omar

strives for. She continues that “the allegory is easy to read” in the film, implying that the film

offers a simple consolatory narrative between the white and Pakistani lovers, each representing

their race. Vinh Nguyen provides some much-needed nuance to Spivak’s allegory claim, positing

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that “To read Johnny as a stand-in for the nation and the dominant white group elides the

implications of his class and sexual positioning and how they might complicate the alignment of

white subjects with the nation-state” (159). Nguyen concludes that “Rather than producing a

sense of closure or a healing of the wounds inflicted by colonialism and racism, the queer desire

shared between the main protagonists creates space … for painful pasts to be acknowledged and

remembered” (153).

The function of queer sex in the film remains ambiguous, as Johnny wordlessly seduces

Omar directly after recalling Johnny’s fascist past. In Impossible Desires, for instance, Gayatri

Gopinath argues that “for Johnny sex with Omar is a way of both tacitly acknowledging and

erasing that racist past” (2). The idea of queer desire is key to Gopinath’s argument, giving the

relationship a sinister undertone, with Johnny using intimacy to essentially rewrite history.

Nguyen, again, takes a more optimistic approach to the queer desire, suggesting that

homoeroticism function as“recognition of the painful and long-lasting effects of racism.

Johnny’s wordless compliance displays a perception of how racism can harm racialized subjects

like Omar, similar to how neoliberalism renders Johnny and his working class friends

economically precarious” (161). In both Gopinath and Nguyen’s analysis, Johnny’s silent touch

and Omar’s acceptance lead the scene to be a destructive force that hides colonial history, or a

tender moment that demonstrates solidarity across ethnic and class boundaries, with

homosexuality being the lynchpin for resistance. While my reading leans toward the more

optimistic side, Gopinath and Nguyen’s disagreement illustrates how analysis of the film too

often focuses on Johnny and his motives. By shifting the analysis to Omar and his gaze,

audiences gain insight into the much needed other half of the relationship, and adds complexities

to the “erasing” vs. “perception of racism” argument.

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To help understand the queer desire, I will analyze this pivotal cinematic moment from

the lens of the “queer optic.” Coined by Gopinath in a later piece, Unruly Visions, the queer optic

is an alternative approach to viewing and reading that “deviates from a forward-looking

directionality and instead veers toward multiple objects, spaces, and temporalities” (emphasis

mine, 174). In other words, Gopinath suggests that queerness offers a nonlinear viewing of

history that stresses the interrelation between history and the present; to view them at the same

time. Notably, Gopinath’s use of the queer optic does not necessarily mean homoeroticism, but

instead any means of pushing against patriarchichal and heteronormative narratives of upward

mobility, assimilation, and making it. I analyze how the concept of transtemporalities functions

in the film, with characters such as Omar’s neoliberal family’s obsession with capitalist dreams

and fail to live in the present or past. Omar, metaphorically illustrated through his gazing through

windows, represents the only character to properly inhabit multiple temporalities—his lover’s

racist past, running his current business, and planning for an economically stable future. By

evoking the queer optic, Omar maintains a stable, though at times strained, relationship.

First, I will explain how queer time operates in the film. Building off the “Queer Time

and Queer Place” philosophy of Jack Halberstam and Gopinath’s “Queer Optic,” the film posits

that to understand the present political moment, one must have a transtemporal view of history,

where the history of colonial is intimately tied to present racism. Next, I will analyze the older

generation of characters in the film, Nasser and Papa, and how they fail to achieve the queer

optic, thus leading to tragedy. Finally, I will close read the pivotal homoerotic moments in the

film by paying special attention to the launderettes one way mirror to demonstrate how Omar,

and not Johnny, is the character who can view multiple temporalities at once, can hold his gaze

through the mirror. Ultimately, I wish to complicate and add nuance to the scene that has been

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written off as a “simple allegory” by Spivak, but perhaps overly recaptured by Nguyen as a

“perception of how racism can harm racialized subjects” (161).

Queer Approaches to Temporality: Halberstam and Gopinath

Jack Halberstam’s In a Queer Time and Place makes the “ambitious claim … that there

is such a thing as ‘queer time’ and ‘queer space’” (1), or in other words, that a queer

methodology allows for alternative readings of history and spatiality. For Halberstam, queerness

functions as a radically disruptive force, one that achieves Michel Foucault’s claim that

“homosexuality threatens people as a ‘way of life’ rather than as a way of having sex” (qtd. in

Halberstam, 1). Separating queerness from its strict adherence to sexual orientation, as

Foucault’s comment argues, allows queer subject to be individuals that disrupt middle class

notions of “normal” family and life structures, often leading to these bodies being seen as

“expendable” (3). As such, the AIDS epidemic in the 20th century exemplifies Halberstam’s

definition of queer time: “while the threat of the future hangs overhead like a storm cloud, the

urgency of being also expands the potential of the moment” (2). With a health epidemic arising

in a specific marginalized group of people, Halberstam suggests that the very perception of time

changed between queer and heteronormative communities.

In particular, queer time shifts the progression of time away from the traditional nuclear

family structure, thus pushing against the patriarchal status quo. Halberstam posits that “Queer

subcultures produce alternative temporalities by allowing their participants to believe that their

futures can be imagined according to logics that lie outside paradigmatic markers of life

experience—namely birth, marriage, reproduction, and death” (2). The shift away from marriage

and reproduction questions the family structures that govern western middle class values.

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Halberstam continues by explaining the various forms of “time” implied by heterosexuality,

including the “biological clock” and “strict bourgeois rules of respectability and scheduling for

married couples” that govern “family time” (5), thereby reinforces a neoliberal model of

efficiency and working. By “queering” heterosexual notions of time, alternative forms of

analysis arise that resist capitalism. Gopinath’s own form of queer time—the queer optic—

expands on Halberstam’s methodology by advocating for interconnected models of viewing

history, current events, and the future.

Gopinath “queer optic” expands on Halberstam’s queer time and applies it to postcolonial

subjects’ relationship with empire. As the name suggests, vision is the primary signifier for

Gopinath’s methodology, in particular, “strabos”, or cross eyed condition metaphorically

represents the optic (174). This vision creates a “conflation of time and space,” one that shows

the “disordered, disorderly, multifocused, [and] unruly form of vision” (174). Much like the

cross eyed subject who sees in multiple directions, the queer optic strives to dismantle a linear

upward progression of history and rigid depictions of national borders, instead emphasizing the

connected intimacies brought by empire and colonialism. As Gopinath puts in, queer desire can

“excavat[e] the violences of the past and its forgotten possibilities. Thus, they attest to the

imprint of the past on the present and provide a glimpse of alternative social orders and political

imagination” (175).

My Beautiful Laundrette features a similar emphasis on vision as a metaphor for

collapsing temporalities, often framing gazes through windows and one-way mirrors. As I will

demonstrate below, framing apparatuses are a recurring element in Frears and Kureishi’s mise-

en-scéne, suggesting a significance in who is allowed to look through them and what they see.

Before discussing the characters that have the most complex relationship with queer optics—

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Omar, Johnny, and Tania—I first will analyze the older generation, Nasser and Papa. These two

characters feature the most straightforward temporal gazes in the film, a capitalistic future and a

Utopian longing for the past respectively. Notably, their story arcs end by gazing helplessly

through an open window as Tania, whether metaphorically or literally, kills herself. The next

section traces their relationship with temporality and empire that concludes with the tragic

window scene, suggesting that their linear gazes ultimately leads to sorrow for postcolonial

subjects.

Papa and Nasser: Nostalgia, Assimilation, and Linear Gazes

After a brief prologue establishing Johnny’s poverty, Papa becomes the first character to

speak and begin the plot of Laundrette, guzzling vodka and barely mobile in his sick bed. While

much of Papa’s past remains a mystery—audiences barely know more than that he immigrated

from Karachi and worked as a journalist—Papa blames his declining health on British life. The

cinematography mirrors Papa’s frustration with British society by emphasizing the train tracks

that run outside of his flat—the soundtrack features near constant train sounds and when Omar

takes the laundry out to the clotheslines, the trains are prominently displayed behind him running

in both directions. Trains, of course, carry heavy colonialist significance, often interpreted as

masking violence in prosperity. Nilak Datta in “Colonial Trains, Postcolonial Tracks,” for

instance, notes that “The colonial administration touted the Railways in India as a harbinger of

progress and as an emancipatory tool freeing Indians from archaic traditions, while masking the

element of political control over a subcontinent and the inevitable exploitation of India’s natural

resources” (xxiv). With the symbol of exploitation clearly present in Papa’s household alongside

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his dependence on Vodka, a distinctly western beverage, the cinematography promotes Papa’s

belief that European modernism contributed to his own failure.

With his present life falling apart before him, Papa looks back to Pakistan with fond

nostalgia, essentially limiting his temporal gaze strictly to the past. Szetlana Boym’s theory on

nostalgia posits two distinct strands, the “Utopian” and the “ironic”; “the former stresses the first

root of the word, nostros (home), and puts the emphasis on the return to that mythical place on

the island of Utopia where the greater patria has to be rebuilt” (qtd. In Gopinath UV 131).

Nostalgia, then, causes the lost “home” to become associated with an idyllic Utopia, devoid of

the place’s actual meaning. When Papa and Nasser finally have their reunion, Papa notes how

“this damn country has done us in. That’s why I’m like this [sick]. We should be there. Home.”

Despite the decades he has lived in England, Papa still refers to Pakistan as his home and

portrays it as a perfect, illness free world. Indeed, it is only the future “making it” driven

capitalist Nasser that reminds him of the flaws in their homeland—that it has been “sodomized

by religion,” to the extent of interfering with the flow of capital, of “making money.” Not unlike

the uncle’s vision being clouded with dreams of the future, the father’s vision fails to achieve

transtemporality as he is too obsessed with a utopian nostalgic view of history.

If Papa is too lost in the past, then Nasser’s capitalistic ambitions limits his gaze to the

future, essentially forgetting how colonial legacies continue to hurt black people. Nasser presents

an aggressively hypermasculine approach to economics, often leading him to describe making

money in crudely sexual terms. In an almost bildungsroman fashion, Nasser gives Omar his

philosophy on business and British life: “In this damn country, which we hate and love, you can

get anything you want. It’s all spread out and available. That’s why I believe in England. Only

you have to know how to squeeze the tits of the system.” As he speaks the final lines, his hands

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mimic the sexual act, further correlating capitalism with something akin to sexuality. Yet,

“believing in Britain,” for Nasser, means erasing colonialism’s violent history, assuming that

every person has equal opportunity to “get anything you want.” For instance, Nasser eventually

hires Johnny to forcibly remove a Caribbean immigrant from his apartment. As Johnny removes

the door to the apartment and physically pushes the resident out, the immigrant yells as Nasser

“Thieving Uncle Tom parasite!” and “Filthy, imperialist swine! Working Dog! Enemy of the

third world! You and your kind, your days are numbered!” As this happens, Nasser responds

with an almost gleeful adherence to protocol, throwing the man’s clothing and art out the

window. It is Johnny who finally confronts Nasser about his actions:

Johnny: Doesn’t look too good, does it? Pakis doing this kind of thing.

Nasser: Why not?

Johnny: What would your enemies have to say about this? Ain’t exactly

integration is it?

Nasser: I’m a professional businessman, not a professional Pakistani, and there is

no question of race in the new enterprise culture.

In Nasser’s outlook, “enterprise culture” has completely overtaken history. As he yells, “I’ll

forward your mail!” and throws an alarm clock at the immigrant, Nasser mixes a strict adherence

to policy (forwarding the mail) with a violent coldness (purposely throwing the alarm clock at

him), illustrating his embrace of neoliberal capitalism, being a “businessman” first and a

“Pakistani” second.

Papa and Nasser eventually have their reunion during the movie’s conclusion, notably

ending with the two gazing out the window, symbolizing a moment of clarity for them, as they

witness Tania’s suicide. While the two men have opposite temporal gazes, they both subscribe to

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the traditional immigrant narrative of having the next generation “make it” and economically and

culturally assimilate into the new culture. As such, the older generation pushes a typical

heteronormative immigrant narrative onto Omar. Papa dryly notes how “Only Omar matters”

while Nasser assures him that he will “make sure he is set up with a good business future” and

that he is “working on” arranging a marriage between Omar and his daughter Tania. The two

men’s own limited gazes cloud them to the homoeroticism that is clearly obvious to the

audiences. In Halberstam’s terminology, Nasser and Papa are subscribing to time based on

“reproduction,” a concept that is irrelevant to Omar and Tania’s “queer time.” As they foolishly

plan the future for their kids, they have a moment of clarity when they gaze out the window and

see Tania standing on the railroad tracks. The camera takes the perspective of the two men

looking at Tania in the distance; Nasser yells “Tania! What the hell do you think you are

doing?!” as a train briefly covers her image and she disappears. As Gopinath notes, “It is unclear

where she has gone, whether she has disappeared under the train tracks or is safely within the

train compartment en route to another life” (ID 4). Yet, Tania’s disappearance via train parallels

Omar’s mother’s suicide by jumping on the train tracks, thereby suggesting that Tania’s action

also function as a form of suicide. Through the frame of the window, Nasser and Papa finally see

the outcome of trying to force a heteronormative narrative onto the younger generation. At the

expense of our female queer subject, what Gopinath calls the “impossible desire “ (6), the

tragedy implies that the older generation’s linear gazes—nostalgia and neoliberalism—ultimately

leads to tragedy for the postcolonial subject, as they are unable to properly view how alternate

temporalities are affecting the present moment.

For Gopinath, Tania’s disappearance from the film functions as a mode of patriarchy and

gendered oppression creeping into the homoerotic narrative. She argues that Johnny and Omar’s

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relationship “crucially depends on a particular fixing of female diasporic subjectivity” (ID 4) and

despite the film being “ostensibly progressive, gay male articulations of diaspora run the risk of

stabilizing sexual and gender hierarchies” (5). As she continues, Gopinath describes narratives

like Laundrette as “homonormative,” as texts that “center white gay male subjectivity” while in

the process making the minority or immigrant characters “insufficiently politicized and

‘modern’” (11). And indeed, in the analysis I provided above, Tania’s death is objectified,

merely a punishment for Papa and Nasser trying to ignore history’s influence on the present.

Despite this, however, I would like to briefly push back on Gopinath’s argument, instead

focusing on how Tania’s death can be read as an indictment of patriarchy; in other words,

Tania’s abrupt silence demonstrates the limited avenues afforded to black women in Thatcher’s

Britain. Unlike Omar who has ample opportunities and choices ahead of him—Papa pushes the

importance of college, Nasser the importance of business, Johnny the importance of intimacy—

Tania’s only avenue is an arranged marriage, one where her father decides if “Tania is

available,” as Papa asks. The only future Tania can envision for herself is one where she moves

from serving her father to serving a husband. In other words, while British society allows

Pakistani men the ability to control their future, women are stripped of all agencies and are

forced into domestic roles.

Her death by train, even, emphasizes the desperation in her gendered experience.

Alongside the colonial implications, movement in general has been a site of rigid gender

adherence. As Halberstam notes in Female Masculinities, at airports and train stations “people

are literally moving through space and time in ways that cause them to want to stabilize

boundaries (gender) even as they traverse others (nation” (21). Tania and the rest of her family

may be able to assimilate into British society, but her desire to stray away from strict wifely and

40

motherly duties pushes against the heteronormative ideals pushed by her family. In this sense,

Tania’s death becomes the ultimate form of stabilized gender boundaries, essentially punishing

her for straying too far from what is acceptable behavior for a black woman. Thus, while I do

share some of Gopinath’s concern over Tania’s treatment in the final act, her disappearance

from the narrative does equally function as a critique of British society’s need to limit choice for

black women and stabilize which spaces they are able to inhabit.

Nasser, Papa, and to a lesser extent, even Tania’s story arcs in Laundrette serves in many

ways as a warning about how to view temporality. When postcolonial subjects are lost in the past

(Papa), capitalistic future (Nasser), or driven to desperation at a bleak future (Tania), then they

cannot properly understand the current historical moment. Next, I will discuss the two characters

that have the more complicated associations with history, Omar and Johnny. Ultimately, I wish

to demonstrate the differences in their ability to “see” multiple temporalities at once, with Omar

mediated gaze allowing him to see the connections between past, present, and future

temporalities.

Collapsing Temporalities: Omar, Johnny, Mirrors, and Windows

If the film condemns the older generation through their viewing of history, the younger

generation and particularly Omar represent a queering of the canonical immigrant narrative.

Omar’s introduction emphasizes his voyeurism, his gaze, and begins the motif of viewing secret

information framed through doors. Not unlike Papa, much of Omar’s own backstory remains

hidden from audience. We know that he was born in Britain and that he is “on the dole,” or

receiving unemployment benefits, but little else is given. The film’s opening, for instance,

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features extended scenes of Omar interacting with the rest of the cast—his father, Uncle Nasser

and Mistress Rachel, Salim—but remains silent throughout. Indeed, despite being featured in

virtually every shot of the introduction, Omar does not get his first line until over eight minutes

into the film. In the meantime, with the absence of his interactions, the film emphasizes Omar’s

witnessing, as he sees his family assimilate into Thatcher’s politics. Most notably in these earlier

scenes in the movie, Omar’s gaze leads to a voyeuristic peering into sexuality. While Nasser and

Rachel’s affair is far from secret, Omar is the one who gains access to their sexuality. The

camera slowly circles around Rachel on top of Nasser, treating him like her “trampoline,” while

various pieces of furniture and decor impede the viewer’s vision, leaving their dirty talk to be the

most explicit part of the scene. Omar, mimicking the viewers own take on the scene, is revealed

to be standing outside of the door listening to their lovemaking, smiling and perhaps even

looking at the cracks in the door. Functionally, the door offers Omar proof of Nasser’s infidelity,

something that is denied to Nasser’s wife and daughter Tania for the majority of the film.

Metaphorically speaking, the peeping tom begins, in a rather crude way, Omar’s gaze, his “queer

optic” allowing him to see information that the other characters are denied; Salim may see

Nasser and Rachel go on dates, but Omar is the one that can hear and see their sexuality.

Omar exhibits a similar privileged view at the highly gendered space of Nasser’s house

party. Rahul Gairola notes, in “Capitalist Houses, Queer Homes,” interprets Nasser’s home as a

“clearly gendered space” that “articulates the constitutive bonds between Thatcher’s capitalism

and the heteropatriarchal cogs that keep it running” (43). The “aunties” and other women stay in

the relatively docile living room, while the men inhabit Nasser’s bedroom, full of music,

drinking, smoking, and other signifiers of the British upper class. Just as the genders are divided,

so are the temporalities; while the living room reminisces about the homeland of Karachi, the

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bedroom continues to discuss business, or the future (the men may be discussing Karachi briefly

as Omar enters the room, but ultimately it is to discuss Papa’s failure to earn money in Britain).

As Gairola notes, because of Omar’s queerness, he remains somewhere in between the two

spaces. One of the aunties, Cherry, upon hearing that Omar has never been to Karachi, says

“God, I’m sick of hearing about these in-betweens. People should make up their minds about

where they are.” Cherry’s comment not only acknowledges his first generation British citizen

status, but also gestures towards his sexuality; as the only man in the room of the aunties, he

embodies a queer androgyny within the gendered household.

Even when Omar enters Nasser’s hypermasculine bedroom he maintains his “in-

between” status by remaining sober and standing close to the door, both physically separated

from the rest of the group but also giving him direct access to the window. Positioned so that the

men in the room cannot see her, Tania appears outside the window and, in an act of queer

rebellion against the neoliberal gendered separation, lifts her shirt and exposes her breast so only

Omar can see; Tania’s actions invoke and subvert Laura Mulvey’s cinematic gaze, not only

controlling who can see her body in the frame, but more significantly, who cannot. One member

of Nasser’s party, Zaki, does manage to briefly see her, but excuses the sight on his drunkenness,

exclaiming that he is “on the verge already!” For Gairola, Tania’s action “underscores her

agency as a queer subject who negotiates the terrains of her sexual desires in a scenario where

she is able to watch all the men” (47). While this scene demonstrates Tania’s own participation

in queer ideology, for Omar, the window framing builds upon the door framing during Nasser

and Rachel’s relationship. Omar’s queerness, his “in betweenness” as one of the aunties calls

him, affords him the ability to see parts of Britain heteronormative people cannot, such as the

infidelity of the bourgeoisie middle class and the agentic sexuality of black women.

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While the doors and the windows begin the motif of optical mediation, the one-way

mirror in the laundrette is perhaps the most significant symbol. As Omar and Johnny open the

laundrette, they place a large one-way mirror in segmenting the business’s office away from the

wash machines and cliental. The office becomes an extremely intimate place for Omar and

Johnny; Gairola, for instance, sees the office as a queering of the “home” space (39), while

Spivak emphasizes the private nature of the room, arguing that it implies that homoeroticism can

only exist in the private and not in public (83). Neither Gairola nor Spivak devote substantial

analysis to the mirror, a crucial piece of the laundrette’s architecture that allows subjects in

private to gaze and study the public.

This gap in proper interpretation leaves a crucial piece out of one of the most discussed

scenes in the film; Omar confronting Johnny about his National Front involvement before their

sex scene. Omar recalls Johnny’s fascism on the day of the laundrette’s opening. Omar recalls

“the bricks, the bottles, the Union Jacks. It was ‘immigrants out’ kill us. People we knew. And it

was you. Papa saw you marching and you saw his face watching you, don’t deny it we were

there as you went past.” During the whole of Omar’s monologue he stares through the one way

mirror in the laundrette. The emphasis on his outward vision recalls Gopinath’s own “cross

eyed” discussion of the queer optic; if the cross eyed subject can see and connect various

temporalities, so too can Omar remain physically intimate with Johnny while staring out in the

public space, mirroring their emotional closeness without marginalizing Johnny’s problematic

past.

If the mirror symbolizes Omar’s unflinching look at history, then Johnny’s reaction is

equally telling. In contrast to Omar’s view through the mirror, Johnny reacts to the monologue

by diverting his gaze, beginning by looking away from Omar until he is directly called out, Omar

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pronouncing “And it was you.” Johnny briefly looks up, through the mirror and through a queer

optic, but quickly diverts his eyes again as he does not react to Omar’s monologue by explaining

his past or apologizing for his deeds, but instead by physically touching Omar, by unbuttoning

Omar’s shirt and rubbing his chest, communicating in a way that language cannot. The camera

lingers on the moment for several seconds, until Omar finally tilts his head back, signifying both

his sexual pleasure but also ending his attempts to have Johnny remember his fascist history.

Nguyen interprets Johnny’s actions as a means of “creat[ing] space” to acknowledge racism in

nonverbal terms, and that the intimacy shared between the men speaks more than language can

convey. Nguyen’s analysis recuperates the queer desire in the film back from the homonormative

understanding Gopinath and Spivak posit (Gopinath 6, Spivak 84). Yet, Johnny’s inability to

look through the mirror as Omar does is telling; Nasser may look to the future and Papa may

reminisce about the past, but for Johnny, the only relevant temporality is the present, the

homoeroticism. Again, Omar is the one who is able to merge these temporalities by discussing

the neofascist rally of the past while maintaining present intimacy.

In contrast to Omar, Johnny’s interactions with the mirror are often scene from the

reflective side, signifying a difference in their temporal vision. As the two men enter the

laundrette’s office, moments before the pivotal reveal of Johnny’s past and the homoeroticism

that follows, Johnny stops in front of the mirror and starts fixing his hair, only stopping upon

Omar’s prodding to move into the “queer home,” as Gairola puts it, of the office. While this

moment may be small and fleeting, it does demonstrate a distinct shift in their literal and

figurative vision; if Omar looks through the mirror into multiple temporalities, then Johnny looks

at the mirror at only himself. The motif of Johnny looking at himself continues into one of the

more striking visual moments in the film; as the launderette finds its success, the camera frames

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Omar once again looking through the mirror in his office as Johnny approaches from the public

side. Omar’s stares at Johnny as he looks in the mirror, as their two images blur into one.

Nguyen writes that this moment “visualizes the queer intimacy that Johnny seeks to establish in a

moment of tension and pain” (161). For Nguyen, the visual moment exists as a represents how

love can heal the racial violence and the wounds of colonialism. Indeed, it is a powerful image

and one that demonstrates the bond that the two men form, yet one must remember that from

Johnny’s perspective, he is just looking at his own reflection – a linear gaze. Johnny’s economic

status and punk aesthetics may “disrupt any uncomplicated attempt to figure him as

representative of British whiteness,” but his linear, present based temporality similarly bars him

from seeing a queer optic as fully as Omar (Nguyen 159). As Johnny’s own image represents his

present moment, he risks framing his relationship with Omar in ahistorical terms.

Conclusion

Approaches to discussing queer desire within My Beautiful Laundrette have taken

extreme stances. Gayatri Spivak’s famous critique of the film, where the film mimics “Greek

stuff where boys could be boys and so on” (82), has set the tone for much of the diasporic queer

scholarship on the film. Vinh Nguyen’s “reconsideration” of the film provides one of the few

interpretations of the film that argues against the homonormative (6) and “simple allegory”

(Spivak 84) of the homoeroticism. For Nguyen, the two character’s cultural and economic

outlooks—poverty and homeless for Johnny, and Omar’s participation in neoliberal tenants—

prevent them from standing in for their respective nations. While Nguyen’s argument provides

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balance with the Spivak line of analysis, at times it overcorrects the homonormativity placed on

the romance.

Much of this chapter, then, has focused on finding middle ground between these critics

by shifting Omar as the central character of analysis instead of Johnny. Gopinath’s, one of the

harshest critics of the film, theory of the “queer optic” helps not only shift the focus of

scholarship, but also illustrates the differences between Omar’s queer vision and Johnny’s. The

queer optic posits that a queer methodology that stresses viewing multiple spaces and

temporalities functions as an act of queer resistance by demonstrating the connection between

colonialism, racism, violence, and neoliberalism. While critics on both ends of the argument

lump the two members of the relationship together, by stressing their different approaches to

viewing temporalities, I frame them as wholly different characters. Omar, I argue, fully realizes

the queer optic; even within the arms of his lover, or in other words, living in the present, he can

maintain a transtemporal vision that includes Johnny’s racist history and his own economic

future. Violence, economics, and empire are all within Omar’s gaze. Johnny, in stark contrast, is

unable to speak about his own history and does not really care about his economic future. He

lives only in the present, with Omar and in the space of the laundrette, thus failing to truly queer

the empire in the way Omar can. Frears and Kureishi utilize framing apparatuses such as mirrors

and windows to underscore optical temporalities. The film’s most notable moments—Tania’s

queer nudity and her suicide, Nasser and Johnny’s eviction of the Caribbean immigrant, and the

reveal of Johnny’s history—are all mediated in some way by a window. The one way mirror in

the laundrette provides perhaps the most significant and recurring mediator. While Omar can

gaze through the mirror multiple times in the film and during his monologue on fascism, Johnny

consistently either diverts his eyes away from the mirror or gazes it from its reflective side.

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Their differences in viewing the mirror demonstrates the flaws in lumping the two male

characters in the Greek “boys could be boys” (Spivak 82) or as “creating space” where “pasts

may have bearing (but not prevent) present intimacy” (Nguyen 156). By framing Omar and

Johnny as distinct characters with distinct views on history, academics gain a richer and more

nuanced approach to how homoeroticism functions in one of the most significant queer films of

Thatcher era Britain.

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Chapter 3

“Be Meek”: Subversion of the Feminine Pariah

During the nineteenth-century gender ambiguity and androgyny threatened the very

structure of masculinity. Androgynous women in particular, known in retrospect as the “feminine

pariah,” were demeaned for performing roles that were traditionally held by men. As expected,

the patriarchal status quo reacted to androgynous subjects harshly, forcing them back into

feminine roles. To understand how the feminine pariah was criticized in this era, I will be

utilizing two texts—one written during the fin-de-siècle and one a twenty-first century novel set

shortly before then—to see how attempting to perform gender and perform gendered occupations

led to the suppression of female voices. Both Katherine Cecil Thurston’s Max (1910) and Emma

Donoghue’s The Wonder (2016) each depict a woman performing masculinity and then having

their societies criticize them for it: for Thurston’s heroine, an exiled Russian princess adopts a

male persona, the titular “Max,” after fleeing from her homeland; Donoghue’s protagonist, Lib,

is hired to serve as a nurse for an Irish child, quickly moves from performing as nurse to doctor,

as the Irish community ignores the child’s symptoms. In each of these novels, I argue that the

men perceive the masculine femininities as a perceived threat to their own masculine identities.

By forcing the women to resume a feminine position, then, they reinforce women as being

subservient to men and continue the patriarchal status quo.

Scholarship on these novels is limited, and the works that do approach these novels do

not discuss them in terms of female masculinities. Matthew Reznicek argues that Max’s gender

acts as a “remarkably subversive representation of gender fluidity and performativity,” but

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ultimately resorts to reaffirming a heteronormative patriarchy (141). My aim in this essay is

understand how and why the nineteenth century novel returns to heteronormativity by expanding

the scope of the feminist theory of the feminine pariah. First used by Mimi Schippers in

“Recovering the Feminine Other: Masculinity, Femininity, and Gender Hegemony,” the

feminine pariah traces the cultural reaction and patriarchal oppression of the masculine woman.

The trajectory, as outlined by Hélène Ohlsson in “Representing Pariah Femininity: Sexuality,

Gender, and Class at the Fin-de-siècle,” is that a woman, knowingly or unknowingly, adopt and

perform aspects of the “hegemonic masculinity,” or what the culture believes are the most

masculine feature (94). The hegemonic masculine figures react to the “feminized,” and thus

undermined, features by the “demonization” of the masculine female (46). In other words, the

patriarchal figures react to the pariah by criticizing her features and characters in an attempt to

lead the rest of the society against her.

First, I will examine Schippers-Ohlsson model of feminist theory to properly expand on

my methodology used in the textual analysis. Jack Halberstam’s work on the female

masculinities further expands and enrichens the pariah conversation by discussing the person of

ambiguous gender, a key concern for the patriarchal masculinity. Next, I will apply these

theories to the gender fluidity of Max. Through Max’s trajectory of social acceptance, gender

deviance, and finally gender constriction into a socially acceptable female role, Max illustrates

the limited view of feminine masculinities accepted during the beginning of the 20th century.

Finally, I will use Donoghue’s lead female to see the narrative of the pariah femininity subverted

by a contemporary author. While Lib’s trajectory is similar to Max’s in many ways—acceptance,

gender deviance, and finally a suppression to an acceptable female role—Lib’s suppression acts

as a calculated political action, simultaneously acknowledging the limited spaces a woman can

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inhabit in the end of the nineteenth century, while also manipulating hegemonic masculinity for

her own empowerment.

Female Masculinities during the Fin-De-Siecle

As Jack Halberstam posits in Female Masculinities, “masculinity must not and cannot

and should not reduce down to the male body and its effect” (1). He continues that “female

masculinities actually afford us a glimpse of how masculinity is constructed as masculinity” (1).

The following essay draws inspiration from Halberstam’s work and intends to understand how

masculine oppression was held against women who attempted to enter in male spaces.

Thurston’s heroine especially lends herself to a Halberstamian reading, as her entrance into the

masculine space is quite literal. Halberstam writes that “Ambiguous gender, when and where it

does appear, is inevitably transformed into deviance, thirdness, or a blurred version of either

male or female” (20). For Max, her ambiguity is not apparent from the beginning; for most of the

novel, she successfully passes for male and develops a close friendship with the Irishman Blake.

Yet, as Halberstam argues, when Max’s gendered ambiguity surfaces, Blake’s affection quickly

turns, scorning Max’s identity unless she returns to a stereotypical feminine role, “that one thing

is everything” as Blake puts it (375).

To properly understand how Thurston’s and Donoghue’s novels portray gender

performance, understanding the relationship between pariah femininities and hegemonic

masculinities is paramount. Schippers argues that “[t]he idealized features of masculinity and

femininity as complementary and hierarchical provide a rationale for social relations at all levels

of social organizations from the self, to interaction, to institutional structures, to global relations

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of domination” (91). In other words, the perception of gender identity forms the basis for culture,

leading those who stray from the hegemonic depictions to be perceived as threatening. Masculine

hegemony is the qualities most associated and valued that are “first defined in its difference from

femininity” (94). Furthermore, Raewyn Connell describes the concept of hegemonic masculinity

as “qualities that are considered the most masculine of a given culture at a given time and that

holds institutional power,” meaning that they are generally the most idealized attributes for males

(qtd, in Ohlsson 45-46). For Schippers then, the concept of hegemonic masculinity is chiefly

defined by being the inverse of femininity, especially in terms of social and cultural power.

Indeed, Halberstam critiques this oppressive approach to gender identity by noting that this

approach is “imbued with a pathetic dependence” on femininity (FE 17). Schippers uses the term

“pariah femininities” to describe women who perform aspects of the hegemonic masculinity,

thereby “threatening” the masculinities very culture; if hegemonic masculinity is defined by not

being feminine, then having a female masculinity threatens the patriarchal social order (95). Key

to this concept as opposed to other theories of defying gender expectations, however, is that the

pariah feminine are not exiled from the society, but instead are demonized for their actions: they

become a “lesbian, a ‘slut,’ a shrew or ‘cock-tease,’ a bitch” (95) among copious other terms

intended to demean. They are not kicked out of the society, but instead shamed for stepping

outside of traditional binaries, arguably with the intention of them reforming to the cultural status

quo.

Hélène Ohlsson expands on Schippers work by applying the gender theory to French

actresses, notably Ellen Hartman. Ohlsson’s analysis centers on an anecdote surrounding

Hartman where King Oscar II and his entourage were mesmerized by Hartman’s sexual

presence, causing Oscar to walk into a tree and suffer the “embarrassment of publically dropping

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his hat” (45). When Oscar scolded his guards for not warning him about the impending danger,

they responded by arguing “Your majesty, I was also busy staring at Mrs Hartman” (qtd. in

Ohlsson). This introductory anecdote illustrates, then, the fallacious logic that leads to the pariah

feminine phenomena; through her “excessive” and “unnatural” sexuality, Hartman’s body

destabilizes the unconditional supremacy of the monarchy by demonstrating that even royalty

can be foolish(Ohlsson 53). Through the personal letters of King Oscar, Ohlsson argues that the

King’s correspondence depicted Hartman’s “sexuality demonized and her appearance

downgraded to defuse the threatening presence,” thus leading her legacy to represent her sexual

history above her artistic career (60).

Donoghue’s take on the feminine pariah is more symbolic than Thurston’s literal

depiction. Instead of adopting the role of male the way that Max does, Lib begins to perform the

role of doctor, diagnosing and treating her patient against the wishes of her employer, the Irish

doctor McBrearty. In this sense, Lib’s actions are much more direct than Max’s in her

threatening of the hegemonic masculinity; by attempting to treat the child and “call off the this

watch,” Lib’s doctor performance directly undermines McBrearty’s medical skills, and his

masculinity, then, by extension (201). As Schippers notes, “when a woman is authoritative, she

is not masculine; she is a bitch—both feminine and undesirable” (95). By acting as the “bitch,”

from the perception of the rural Irish community, she functions as a threat to the patriarchy, and

by extension the culture as a whole. If Lib is correct in her diagnosis and treatment of Anna, then

the authority of the council and Dr. McBrearty are invalidated, thereby destabilizing the Irish

social hierarchy. Before addressing how Donoghue updates and subverts the pariah, I will

analyze how Thurston’s novel conforms to the more problematic aspects of Schippers and

Ohlsson’s theory.

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The Brother and The Sister

Katherine Cecil Thurston’s Max chronicles the urban adventures of a Russian Princess as

she pursues a career as an artist in fin-de-siècle Paris. Knowing that societal boundaries placed

on women artist, the princess travels to Paris under her male persona, the titular Max, to aid her

endeavor for “life and then fame” (85). While in Paris, Max meets and falls in love with an

Irishmen, Blake, and the novel shifts focus from Max’s gender subversion and art career, to a

more typical romance narrative with Max transforming back into Maxine. In this way, the novel

undermines much of the gender subversion of the novels first half by reasserting a

heteronormative status quo; Max’s play with gender and Blake’s homoerotic attraction toward

Max’s masculine side may be radical, but because the narrative concludes with Blake forcing

Max to abandon the masculine side for their relationship to continue, the subversions feel

hollow.

Max begins entering a masculine space to avoid physical violence from her Russian

fiancée, signaling the oppression that would resurface during the novel’s resolution. Max’s

ambiguous gender ultimately stems from marriage inequality; married women are not treated as

equals in a patriarchal society, and her experiences led her to be objectified by violent

hypermasculinities. As Max tells Blake the history of her “sister,” she says

One night a great court function was held; she was a present, her fiancé was

present, the atmosphere was all congratulations—like honey and wine. When it

was over, the fiancé begged the privilege of escorting her to her home, and they

drove together through the cold Russian night. […] Quick as a flash of lightning,

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the dignified, distinguished, unexacting lover was effaced, and in his place was a

man—an animal—a passionate egoist! He caught her in his arms, and his arms

were like iron bands; his lips pressed truth. The world had cheated her. (292-293)

The transformation of Max’s fiancée from an idealized male to a sexual predator demonstrates

how little gender equalities have progressed; Mary Wollstonecraft may have advocated for an

equal partnership in marriage at the turn of the 19th century, but at the turn of the 20th century,

women, and especially royal women, are physically still considered inferior, as they hold “terror

of life, terror of herself,” terrified of the inequality of marriages and how their potential husbands

will treat them.

Maxine’s gender identity in the novel’s first half is complicated, as she does not quite fit

the definition of transgender, as she still never fully adopts maleness as her identity, but cannot

reasonably be considered a cisgender subject either. In regards to ambiguous gender and women

who are interpreted as men, Halberstam writes that

For many gender deviants, the notion of passing is singularly unhelpful. Passing

as a narrative assumes that there is a self that masquerades as another kind of self

and does so successfully; at various moments, the successful pass may cohere into

something akin to identity. At such a moment, the passer may become. (21)

While Halberstam is critical of the term “passing” for the androgynous subject, for Max

the term can be quite helpful in understanding her two identities, the male and the female,

the brother and the sister. Masquerading as male may be a harmful concept for a

transgendered individual, but Max is not transgendered; the masculine persona is one that

she actively puts on to conceal her biological femininity. For example, Maxine keeps

strands of her long hair as a reminder of her feminine identity despite the ability to pass

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as male. As she opens the package with her long, cut hair, she “leaned forward, quivering

to a new impulse, and, raising the heavy coils, twisted them swiftly about his head. With

the action, the blood rushed into his cheeks, a flame of excitement sprang into his eye

and, drawing the candles closer, he peered into the mirror” (Thurston 258). The physical

reaction of being reunited with the strand of hair, a symbol of her femininity, as seen in

the blood rushing into her cheeks and the “flame of excitement” suggests that she still

views herself as a woman, despite performing masculine roles (Thurston 258). In this

case, Halberstam’s “masquerade” may not be inaccurate when discussing Max’s gender

in the novel’s first half.

The benefit of viewing Max as a “passing” gender instead of as a transgendered

character or even as ambiguous gendered is that we see her acceptance into Parisian

society. As long as Blake and the Parisian citizens still view Max as male and not as an

ambiguous sexuality, she is prevented from being seen as a feminine pariah and does not

suffer attacks on her character. Blake welcomes Max into the artistic, bohemian life style

of Paris declaring “These are the true citizens of the true Bohemia!” implying that Max is

an equal and accepted part of the community (119). During these early parts of the novel,

Max’s gender is never questioned by the male characters, most especially Blake, and as

such is not a threat to masculine values.

It is significant, then, that Thurston’s narrative opens by having Max ride on a

train, a symbol of physical as well as social mobility. Halberstam poses that airports are

one space where gender is heavily policed. She writes that is “where people are literally

moving through space and time in ways that cause them to want to stabilize boundaries

(gender) even as they traverse others (nation)” (21). Clearly planes cause a much more

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dramatic spatial and temporal separation as trains do, the concept still applies to Max.

Specifically, her physical composition on the train guards her body from others, thereby

guarding her gender as well. Max’s “rough overcoat” becomes a key symbol as she rides

the train. The coat, then, becomes a barrier between her ambiguous body and the innate

desire to “stabilize boundaries,” as Halberstam posits for airports. Not only does the coat

“cover him from his neck to the tops of his high boots,” essentially walling off her form

from other passengers, but Max was also “instinctively guarding something that lay deep

and snug in the pocket of his overcoat,” the hair that would symbolize her feminine self

(6). Because “travel hubs become zones of intense scrutiny and observation,” Max’s

protection of her own gender, through the package of hair, is heightened; should her

gender deviance be discovered, especially in a place of travel, her “thirdness” and

potential entrance into feminine pariah status would be exacerbated (Halberstam 21).

The ambiguity of Max’s own gender identity extends into the narrative itself, as the genre

oscillates between masculine and feminine forms. As Reznicek notes, the novel begins by

utilizing the tropes of “the masculine adventure narrative and Bildungsroman” (141). For

Reznicek, Max’s travels place her among the adventure heroes of the previous century, notably

Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. The Crusoe style adventure narrative, then, can be interpreted as one

form of hegemonic masculinity that Thurston’s heroine mimics. As Max enter Paris, the narrator

remarks that

The most splendid moment of an adventure is not always the moment of

fulfillment, not even the moment of conception, but the moment of first

accomplishment, when the adventure deliberately sets his face toward the new

road, knowing that his boats are burned. (32)

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Max’s actions demonstrate a highly active character, one who seeks adventure for adventure’s

sake, thus her glee at the notion of her “boats burning” (32). By participating in the adventure

narrative, a genre traditionally held my male characters, Max continues to perform the

hegemonic masculinity; while she may be literally performing male, by emulating a Crusoe-like

hero, what would have been considered the peak of masculinity, her adventure story acts as

mimicry of masculinity.

But being the pariah feminine, Max’s actions must ultimately challenge the masculine

status quo, and narratively this is illustrated through the novel’s competing genres and the

homoeroticism. While the novel’s narrative borrows from the masculine tradition of the

adventure narrative, those conventions are subverted by the novel, employing what Reznicek

describes as “the feminine romance narrative and the Künstleroman” (141). For instance, Blake

could symbolize Max’s teacher or adventure partner leading him throughout Paris, but the

romance narrative’s intrusion quickly dissolves this plot as Blake’s interactions with Max

become increasingly homoerotic. Blake confesses to Max that “you’re as amusing and spirited

and generous as any boy I’ve known, and yet you’re different from any boy. You sometimes fit

into my thoughts almost like a woman might,” all while Max physically becomes intimate by

“slip[ing] his hand though Blake’s arm” (174, 77). Blake repeatedly refers to Max in various

forms of “my boy,” underscoring the masculinity in their relationship, while paradoxically

treating him in romantic terms, seen by the physical contact. Functionally, the homoerotic

overtones challenges the hegemonic masculinity of the adventure narratives it draws inspiration

from, subtly suggesting a homoerotic reading of the canonical adventure narratives. If Max

participates in a Crusoe narrative and has homoerotic overtones, the hegemonic masculine genre

becomes sexually threatened, implying the genre’s homoerotic leaning.

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Though perhaps the most radical feminization on Max’s part is the fluidity of her gender

portrayal, creating an androgyny that feminizes masculinity as a whole. During the books final

act, Max fluidly moves between male and female, notably changing the pronouns used by the

narrator, thus offering readers insight into Halberstam’s “masculinity construct” (1). As Judith

Butler argues in Gender Trouble, “gender is a copy with no original” (qtd. in Halberstam 17). By

having no original, Butler asserts that gender is not only always being performed, but also

always being as risk; if there is no true original, objective masculinity, then it is always created

through its social relevancy and surroundings, a “pathetic dependency on their other

[femininity]” (17). Max’s fluid movement as the novel approaches its romance section echoes

Butler’s claim, as she notes the relative masculinity and femininity of the human body. She

pleads to Blake, “we have all of us the two natures—the brother and the sister! Not one of us is

quite woman—not one of us is all man!” (265). For Max, humans possess an inherent androgyny

and the choice to perform her masculine side demonstrates to attempt to construct a masculinity

that is free from the male body. When Max becomes her masculine self, the narrator notes that

she “became the boy again in mind and heart, enthusiastic, assured, thirsting for action” (352).

Max’s actions demonstrates the performance of gender, one where she chooses to adopt a

masculine “mind and heart” and chooses “action” over passivity. By demonstrating that

masculinity is a construction and thus at risk, as Butler and Halberstam posit, Max performs the

ultimate act as a pariah feminine, illustrating the arbitrariness in gender and threatening the very

identity of the hegemonic masculinity. By doing so, Max’s actions naturally “feminizes”

masculinity, by demonstrating the relative instability of masculinity, implying a criticism to the

patriarchy.

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Yet despite the novel’s more radical notions of gender, the resolution returns Max, now

Maxine, to the patriarchal status quo. For Reznicek, the construction taints what could have been

a “remarkably subversive representation of gender fluidity and performativity” (141). While I

certainly do not disagree with Reznicek’s disappointment, I would argue that Max’s fate remains

consistent with other instances of masculine women. As Ohlsson describes, the pariah feminine

is “demonized” for her actions and in the case of actresses in particular, their “appearance[s are]

downgraded to defuse the threatening presence of her pariah femininity and class in aristocratic

circles” (60). Halberstam argues a similar point in regards to ambiguous gender appearance. She

writes that “ambiguous gender, when and where it does appear, is inevitably transformed into

deviance, thirdness, or a blurred version of either male or female” (20). Blake’s discovery of

Max’s biological feminine body causes a shift in his perception of her; she no longer can be

considered “passing,” always constructing her gender. Now, to Blake, she is that thirdness and

sexual deviance. Thus, as Max finally confronts Blake about her gender identity, we see a similar

“downgrading” of appearances. Max pleads “Ned! Ned! Look at the truth in life! There is in me

everything but one thing,” to which Blake sharply responds “Then, my god, that one thing is

everything!” (375). That “one thing” that Blake refers to, then, must be Max’s gender

performance, or in other words, her appearance. Max’s masculine performance threatens the

hegemonic masculinity that is Blake, causing him to criticize, demonize, and downgrade Max’s

masculine half. Thus, while readers may be frustrated as Max’s gender regression and

exclaiming “Take me away to your castle, like the princess of old,” the downfall of masculine

femininity was a reality of the pariah feminine during the fin-de-siècle (444).

Max’s conclusion ultimately leaves a pessimistic outlook on what roles women were able

to occupy in the fin-de-siècle. While the adventure narrative at the novels inception poses a

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radical stance on sexuality through its homoeroticism, as the novel moves into the final half and

Max’s gender surfaces, the feminine pariah’s downfall takes its hold as Blake’s insistence on the

“sister” destroys the relationship of equals that Max aspires. As the 21st century writers looks

back at the era in retrospect, the patriarchal oppression of the era remains, but the female

characters become savvy enough to manipulate their assumed weakness for their own political

gain.

“Be Meek … and Just Maybe They’ll Let You Go”

Donoghue’s The Wonder differs from Thurston’s novel in that it was not written during

the fin-de-siècle, but instead takes place during the time period. With the hind sight of knowing

trends in feminist theory and patriarchal oppression, The Wonder and its main female character,

Lib, has the opportunity to illustrate the feminine pariah while also subvert its narrative. Lib does

not adopt masculine roles as literally as Max. Instead, Lib’s gender performance relies more on

cultural signifiers and how she communicates. She is hired by the rural Irish town committee to

serve a passive role, thereby feminine in the 19th century sense, of watching a starving child

Anna. After Anna’s health begins to deteriorate, Lib begins taking a more active role in the

child’s health, leading to the Irish community becoming increasingly cold toward the nurse.

Lib’s ethnic and religious background as a non-religious Englishwoman undoubtedly contributes

toward her pariah status to the Irish, but the gender politics, represented by the constant

questioning of Lib’s ability to care for Anna, demonstrates the patriarchal oppression

constraining her. Donoghue’s novel continues the threads Thurston started over a century earlier,

as female masculinities are socially forced back into non-threatening forms of gender.

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Historically, nurses frequently cite the balance between caring for patients and their

autonomy to perform their job in the medical community as posing as issue in the job. Paola

Galbany-Estragues’s “Care, Autonomy, and Gender in Nurses’ Practice: A Historical Study of

Nurses’ Experiences,” notes the common “power struggle between nursing and medicine”

experienced by nurses when caring for patients (361). Galbany-Estragues’s study focuses on the

20th century nurse, but as Donoghue’s novel features the same nurse-doctor relationship over

power, the social scientific background helps understand Lib’s communication. While all nurses

seek autonomy to treat patients as they most see fit. Galbany-Estragues uses the term “fragile” to

describe nursing autonomy; while some nurses have it, because it is earned through social factors

and not training, it is always in jeopardy of being broken.

Lib’s lack of nursing autonomy causes her to begin performing the role of Lib’s doctor,

thereby inhabiting a masculine space. After Dr. Standish gives his diagnosis about Anna, Lib

notes that he “had years, no, decades of study and experience that Lib lacked, that no woman

could ever obtain” (108). Lib acknowledges that the doctor role cannot be obtained by women,

let alone in the socially conservative rural Irish village she is currently is in. When McBreaty,

then, is incompetent in his position, Lib begins to act as a doctor figure for Anna, thus beginning

to perform masculinity. In Schippers’ feminist terms, she begins to “embody and practice […]

features of hegemonic masculinity” (95). Lib begins diagnosing and telling the Irish village

through the media that Anna is “in grave danger” and could be lying on her “deathbed” (212).

The Irish people push back on Lib’s medical opinion, however, as Rosaleen remarks “Oh, ‘tis

you who knows better than the girl’s own physician, is it?” (212). Because of being a nurse, an

inherently gendered position, Lib cannot properly communicate to the community Anna’s

danger, thus she is met with mocking criticism such as in Rosaleen’s comment.

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In contrast with Lib’s logic being met with mockery, her employer, Dr. McBrearty, is

portrayed as a buffoonish character, but with his proper gender performance, his clearly incorrect

deductions are praised by the community. McBrearty’s theories about Anna are often laughably

unreasonable, such as when he believes that Anna’s abstaining from food causes her to “[alter]

at a systemic level … It stands to reason that a constitution powered by something other than

food would operate differently” (200). In other words, she is turning into a reptile. The

ridiculousness of his diagnoses clashes with the respect that he holds in his Irish community.

This clash between his incompetency and his social standing reaches its zenith when he begins to

patronize Lib’s more reasonable deductions, thereby effectively stripping her of her occupational

autonomy. When discussing Lib in front of Anna, he refers to her as “our good Mrs. Wright

here” and the narrator even describes his tone as “An indulgent father reproving a child” (200,

124). Other times McBrearty’s criticism of Lib forgoes any subtly in regards to her gender

causing her “delusions.” He notes that “I suppose the duties of a nurse, especially with a patient

so young, must stimulate the dormant maternal capacity” (196). If relegating her to a nurse role

was not enough in subscribing her gender performance, citing her “maternal capacity” as a

detriment to her ability to care for Anna further illustrate McBrearty as a symbol for the

hegemonic masculinity. Lib may be the far more competent health care provider, but because she

does not have the social relationship that Galbany-Estragues describes, she does not have the

ability to treat Anna despite her obviously correct, non-reptilian deductions.

Because of the hegemonic masculinity’s incompetence, personified through McBreaerty,

Lib begins to perform the duties as a doctor, thereby furthering her divide from the Irish

community. When Lib begins to suspect that Anna’s starvation is harming her, she uses logic to

try and prove her point. She argues that “The child I met last Monday was vigorous […] and now

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she’s barely able to stand. What can I deduce but that you must call off the watch and bend all

your efforts to persuading her to eat?” (196). Even though her logic is sound, by commanding

that the watch should be disbanded, a decision that falls onto the community’s committee, Lib

enters the doctor’s role, thereby asserting her autonomy and threatening the patriarchy. As Lib

tries to persuade McBrearty to end the watch, he brushes aside her arguments in the same

patriarchal tone analyzed above. Lib, however, is acutely aware of her threatening stance to the

patriarchy. As she grieves of her failure to end the watch, Lib notes that she “botches the

interview. She should have brought McBrearty around gradually to the point where he thought it

was his idea—his duty—to abort the watch” (197). Here, Lib demonstrates an awareness of her

own status as a feminine pariah. Whether she uses the terminology is irrelevant, as she

acknowledges that her assertiveness and forcefulness and nor her ideas caused her to fail. If she

was gentler and less threatening with McBrearty, let him think it was his “duty,” the watch could

have ended from Lib’s own symbolic hand. Instead, she stuck to her own performance as doctor,

causing her social standing and ability to care for Anna to suffer in the process.

Yet even though the pariah feminine threatens masculinity, the criticisms they receive are

not just limited to men, demonstrated by Lib’s interaction with the maid Kitty. In terms of power

within the Irish community, Kitty is perhaps the lowest in terms of class. Not only is she a maid,

but she is a maid for an impoverished farming family. Perhaps it is her low social standing—far

away from the hegemonic masculinity of the town committee—that Lib appeals to her for

believing Anna’s condition. Again, Lib approaches her using logic and science, neglecting the

typical pathos appeal associated with women of this era, citing plainly “All God’s children need

to eat” (231) before clearly articulating how Anna has been alive for so long. Just as

demonstrated at the assembly, Kitty continues the demonization of Lib, telling her “Shut your

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lying gob. […] Like a sickness you came into this house, spreading your poison. Godless,

heartless, have you no shame?” (232). Lib’s belief in science and medicine, associated with

doctors and masculinity by extension, becomes the “sickness” Kitty abhors. Despising the pariah

feminine, then, is not exclusive to men or the higher class, as Kitty’s feminine poverty joins in

the demonization. Even her list of adjectives, “Godless, heartless, have you no shame” is

reminiscent of Schippers list of insults as the contemporary pariah, “a ‘slut,’ a shrew or ‘cock-

tease,’ a bitch” (95).

Lib’s isolation from the Irish community reaches its apex when she makes her final

appeal to the committee to end the watch, continuing to threaten the patriarchy and having her

character criticized in the process. As Lib approaches the committee, she once again returns to

scientific data to assert her case. She asks Dr. McBearty “have you told the committee that

Anna’s so swollen up with dropsy, she can no longer walk? She’s faint and freezing and her teeth

are falling out. […] Her pulse is higher every hour, and her lungs crackle in crusts and bruises,

and her hair comes out in handfuls like an old-“as the committee interrupts her “We take your

point, ma’am” (238). From Lib’s perspective, outlaying Anna’s symptoms is the most logical

and persuasive measure to influence the committee. However, as I established earlier, by using

science as her primary argument, she continues to appeal to the committee in a masculine

fashion, thereby mimicking, “challenging,” and “feminizing” masculinity (Ohlsson 45). As we

see in Lib’s testimony, the facts are logic of her argument is meaningless because of her gender.

The fate of the pariah feminine is to be have here character brought low, demonized for

attempting to subvert the social, patriarchal hierarchy. For Lib, despite the fact that she intends to

help a dying child, the committee posits that she is “dangerously imbalanced,” that she needs to

“restrain yourself,” and that “for the sake of science, for the sake of mankind” they cannot end

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the watch (242). By criticizing Lib’s character while advocating for science at the sake of a

child’s life, the committee attempts to reclaim their “right” to stable masculinity, however

foolishly it appears to the reader. In doing so, they set the stage for Lib to enter the final stage of

the feminine pariah: the downfall.

Knowing that continuing to inhabit a masculine space would only lead to continue

ridicule; Sister Michael’s advice transcends shallow religious humility and becomes a political

statement against patriarchy. As Lib approaches the council one last time after hiding Anna from

her parents, Sister Michael speaks to Lib about the night that Anna “died.” Sister Michael

describes to Lib how she “had a vision […] I seemed to see an angel riding away with the child”

(282). In essence, Sister Michael is admitting to Lib that she saw her kidnap Anna from the

house, but what is significant is how she does. She uses religious imagery to communicate the

radically subversive idea of being complicit in Lib’s crime. By introducing the religion, Sister

Michael achieves being both politically radical, while still feminine and thus able to influence

the Irish community, a feat Lib could never achieve. Sister Michael tells Lib two pieces of advice

before she speaks with the committee: “Best not say anything until you’re called on. Humility,

Mrs. Wright, and penitence” (281); “Blessed are the meek. […] Be meek, Mrs. Wright, and

maybe they’ll let you go” (281). Sister Michael clearly is willing to use religious doctrine to

express political positions in a socially acceptable way, and in this instance, her comments on

“meekness” demonstrates as acute awareness of the theory behind the feminine pariah. The

Oxford English Dictionary defines meek as “quiet, gentle, and always ready to do what other

people want without expressing your own opinion” (“meek”). In other words, Sister Michael

advises Lib to forgo acting like a doctor and return to acting like a nurse. To return to Schippers-

Ohlsson terminology, only then will she cease being a threat to the hegemonic masculinity and

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be welcomed back into society. At that point, Lib will stand a chance at being able to properly

communicate with the Irish patriarchy.

Thus, Lib accepts Sister Michael’s appeal to meekness and approaches the committee one

final time as an acceptable, feminine role, allowing her to let the committee come to the

conclusion she wants on their own and subverting the downfall of the pariah. As she addresses

the committee after Anna’s apparent “death,” Lib’s method of persuasion switches to relying

primarily on pathos, a method that gives the committee the impression of being in control and is

more palatable. In a voice that “could hardly be heard” (283) and while “producing a series of

racked sobs” (283), Lib explains Anna’s death and how the house burned down in a way that

emphasizes her weakness, such as claiming “But the lamp—my skirt must have knocked it over”

(284). By appearing to regress into a sexist depiction of nurse hood, Lib finally succeeds in

communicating with the committee, the hegemonic masculinity. The Committee members notes

“the nurses bear no responsibility for the child’s death” and “They were only servants of this

committee, working under the authority of myself as the girls physician” (285). Here, Donoghue

demonstrates a clear shift in how a contemporary writer can play with the formula of the pariah

feminine, as opposed to a fin-de-siècle writer such as Thurston, by using the gender regression to

serve a political purpose. Ultimately, then, Lib’s use of meekness subverts the function of the

pariah feminine. While she was demonized for assuming the doctor role earlier in the novel, now

that she reverts to a stereotypically feminine role, the rural Irish begin to accept Lib, and she

gains a political power unavailable to her in her masculine form. While this

Conclusion

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Ohlsson’s research into French actresses demonstrates that the cycle of the pariah

femininity was a reality for women who were too assertive. This oppression would naturally

bleed over into literature, as writers such as Thurston had her characters demonized for their

masculine features. As contemporary authors, such as Donoghue, reflect on the era and the

gendered spaces women were able to occupy, the suppression of the masculine self became a

political action. Through Lib, Donoghue illustrate the intelligence women needed to gain

political agency under a strict patriarchy. By accepting “meekness” as an identity, Lib’s could

manipulate the hegemonic masculinity to better not only herself, but save the lives of others

harmed by patriarchy. In this way, the tropes of the feminine pariah are repurposed for a

subversive, feminist agenda.

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