and works of creative artists con tributed significantly to the appreciation of certain medical, psychiatric and psychological phenomena. Such an undertaking was supported by readers who were variously invested in medical discourse – perhaps as patients of sexologists, or as cultural critics, such as Max Nordau, who popularised and generalised degeneration theory to serve his own pessi mistic views of contemporary society. At the same time, the idealising majority of Germany’s educated middle class perceived the psychiatrists’ deliberations on genius and
Education in Spain in the early 1900s had been dominated by the clergy for centuries. However, the times were changing. The foundation of Ferrer’s Escuela Moderna in Barcelona, and the publication of his book The origins and ideals of the Modern School led to a movement which spread rapidly through Spain and France and even reached the United States. ‘In every country,’ wrote Ferrer, ‘the governing classes, which formerly left education to the clergy, as these were quite willing to educate in a sense of obedience to authority, have now themselves undertaken the direction
this work. Only Paula. . . . Ten years ago there wouldn’t have been one black woman on this bus – less than ten years. It would have been Paula and women like Paula. Same age, from the same area, same kids. Where are those women now? Carmel used to do cleaning and now she’s buying flats in Bulgaria. (p. 56) Paula answers our question ‘What does it mean to be Irish?’ by stating that she is not Irish: she is a subordinate just like the Africans, Romanians and Latvians in Ireland. The immigrants and Paula are tethered to bottom of the economic class system in Ireland
, conflict resolution, and even national army and police provisioning). By taking control of these services, subordinate classes are simultaneously articulating modes of political authority and social organisation in a way that denies, mitigates, ‘de-totalises’ and provides alternatives to state authority (Bayart 1983: 119).7 This is not necessarily an attack, or a direct denial. Rather, it is a selfregarding activity, a form of aikido, that subverts forms of extraction by enacting Figure 6.1 Home-made broom, photo taken June 2010, private dwelling, Yolo Nord, Kinshasa
romanticism, politics, class, masculinity, sexuality and social problems. Durgnat writes appreciatively about Hammer and Gainsborough, purveyors of despised melodramas and horror films; he takes Powell and Pressburger seriously and gives sympathetic consideration to directors like Val Guest, Roy Baker, J. Lee Thompson, Basil Dearden, Roy and John Boulting and John Guillermin who were regarded as irredeemably
obese far outnumber the undernourished and middle-class homes are filled to bursting with goods and possessions. Our consumer marketplace is driven into perpetual motion, as we watch today’s valuables turn into tomorrow’s trash. Overflow, or perhaps surfeit, is also the best way to describe the wealth of new ideas circulating in these essays. Trained as an archeologist, I always think about overflow in terms of material stuff; but this book takes us in other directions, into overflows of time, emotions, attention, and activities – describing a proliferation of new
wearing their hearts on their sleeves. When relating these non-romantic relationships, men rarely expressed their feelings explicitly in terms of love, struggling to find adequate words to demonstrate their affection. Sisters experienced a similar restraint, Naomi Haldane professing that her older brother Jack was ‘the person I loved best – though I never formulated this’. 4 Absorption of family values did not make the expression of fraternal closeness less problematic for men and women. With a nod to respectability, the working-class parents of Sidney M. encouraged
mobility, and meritocracy used to occupy’. It is part of ‘an objective and sensed crisis’.14 As she points out, writing in 2011: The current recession congeals decades of class bifurcation, downward mobility, and environmental, political and social brittleness that have increased progressively since the Reagan era. The intensification of these processes, which reshapes conventions of racial, gendered, sexual, economic, and nation-based subordination, has also increased the probability that structural contingency will create manifest crisis situations in ordinary
Normal breathing for whom? During one of the Life of Breath project research meetings in 2018, consultant Dr Sara Booth recounted the story of a school teacher who felt such pressure to consistently hold her stomach in when standing in front of the class that her subsequent propensity to breathe costally (from her chest) impacted on her ability to breathe in fully – with the result that her respiratory problems were exacerbated. As I sat listening to Dr Booth talk, I wondered: how much does such lived experience of being a woman in the world impact on the
-eight at the time]. I have always been bourgeois, conservative, reactionary—or whatever you wish to call it. 10 In spite of his self-confessed lack of interest in politics, 11 in so far as Bergman was referring to an actual political stance he might have inherited this outlook from his upper-middle-class upbringing in the 1920s and 1930s. By the 1950s, however, Sweden was very heavily influenced by the Social Democratic Party and the impact of its—at that time