Without any parliamentary notice, the disgusting ‘Contagious Diseases Act’ was suddenly passed in 1864. Effectively ‘legalising’ prostitution and placing it under police control, it allowed the stop and search of any woman suspected of being a prostitute. Such a ‘search’ included a bodily examination, totally violating and humiliating anyone forced to participate.
Toni Morrison, beloved American author and literary scholar, is best remembered for her razor-sharp prose. In the wake of her death in 2019, scholars have revisited her life’s works, revealing a depth of understanding of black American history previously unappreciated.
To be a woman is not a place of neutrality. To be a woman in literature, to read of your body as a site of battles and uprisings, of famine and protest, destroys any sense of impartiality. There is a long-standing tradition of gendering the nation: the motherland, the mothership, the innate feminine sense of home. But what happens when this sense of gender becomes so deeply tied in with a sense of nation that the two have become almost inseparable?
In 2022, people who identify with the label ‘gay’ do so in a world that is perhaps more confused than it has ever been about what it wants to do with ‘gay’ people. In the UK, homosexuality was partially decriminalised in 1967, and more than two decades ago the age of consent for same-sex partners was brought down from 21 to 16 (equal to that of straight couples). It wasn’t until 2014 that same-sex marriages were allowed to take place in Britain. But, more recently, the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill was passed in Florida, preventing classroom discussion of gender identity and sexuality in public schools, and the latest bill to be drafted by Republican lawmakers would see a similar legislature implemented at a federal level.
In an English Literature Modernism module somewhere inside a Science Faculty building on Oxford Road in 2022, we are being asked to consider how much the Harlem Renaissance was a modernist movement. My lecturer notes that the likes of T.S Eliot, James Joyce and Katherine Mansfield were exiles from their home countries. By choice, they left their birthplaces. Their writing grapples with questions of rejecting and embracing identity. It is non-traditional and novel work.
