Posted on

Tiny little gestures

Rachel Thomson

Just back from Leicester University on the hottest day of the year where we held an event on ‘Making & Using Sociological Archives’ supported by the British Sociological Association’s early career network fund. I was lucky to work with Laura Fenton and John Goodwin to shape the event – which brought together great speakers and included two hands-on workshops, one from the Mass Observation and Archive and one by the RAD team. Preparing for the event I knew that I had just 1 hour. Influenced by reading Hannah Charnock’s (2025) Teenage Intimacies and her interest in the gestures and practice of the erotic life of youth, I thought why not gather together material on Dancing for this exercise in data sharing and secondary analysis? A few word searches later I had enough material – a diverse set of extracts from data capturing different experiences and levels of maturity as well as capturing the moment of 1989.

DANCING EXTRACTS from FAYS archive

At first you think he’s quiet but once he gets going he’s actually quite … not wild, but he’s very outgoing. You know, he likes clubs and things and he doesn’t mind dancing on the dancefloor on his own, sort of thing but he doesn’t look like that when you look at him. Fatima 20-1, British Turkish, mc 1989

A. I’d known him for a couple of years, for the same time I’d known my boyfriend, and I was ever so close to him, such good friends; like I’d tell him everything if I was having problems with my boyfriend, he’d tell me about his life and that, and we were always close, we mucked about and whenever we went out together, us two’d slide off and have chats and laugh and joke. And one night we had a party, we both had a little bit to drink; we weren’t absolutely out of our heads, just very very relaxed, and he started to – it – it just sort of happened, he started to stroke my arms and we were dancing, and then we all stayed at this person’s house, and it just carried on. He started to kiss me when everyone had gone to sleep, and we just went outside and it happened. It was like really – it just happened. It wasn’t like planned or anything. Claire LJH40 18, white British, lm 1989

No, but in his own way he’s got looks. And at the disco on Saturday there were all the girls staring at me, no not at me, at him, well they were looking at me because I was going out with him right, and I goes “why you …and so aren’t you going to do something like go and chat them up or something”, because some boys do do that, and he goes to me “look there is only one girl I’m going out with, and the only girl I’m going out with is you”, and he goes and “you’re not moving and I’m not moving”. So I said “alright then”, and he goes “what are you looking at” and they are all looking at me and giving me dirty looks and I’m giving them a smile and he goes, “the only girl I want to go out with is you and no one else”, and he is quite good looking. Rachel LSFS1213 16 white wc

A: – Well, it affects your brain, you feel completely different in, you know like, like if you dance or something you can’t feel – like say if I ran down the road now, I’d get to the end of the road and I’d be puffed, you know, I’d be going (gasp), my legs might hurt or something, I could feel all my bags, but when you’re like on an E you an’t feel the – your heavy bags, and you can’t – so you could run like – that’s – that’s why it’s associated with the dancing, ‘cos you could dance all night and not feel it until the next morning when your muscles are killing [..] like they say the music’s got nothing to do with the drugs, but it has; the drugs and the music, the rave music, like even some of it’s in the charts, makes your heart wanna go – you know, your heart goes at the same speed as the music so that’s why you really really enjoy it Lucy LSFS36 18-19 wc 1989


it was just a trip one night into the gay strip cos it was all like on the one street and it was quite sort of spectacular and exciting compared with, sort of, life in the suburbs. And a bloke at school … cos I sort of had a girlfriend at school at the time and he, you know … he was an enemy of mine at the time and he’d been watching me, you know, with this woman and he saw that we were getting quite close and then at school camp we sort of came out together in a little tiny gesture and we were dancing together at the school dance and things like that. We got loads of flack and ridicule and he came over to me, sort of on the quiet, and sort of said, you know, ‘Come out with me one night’. So he took me and this girl out in his car and we drove away and he showed me the gay bars and I never looked back from there. I think I went every night after that – it was just brilliant!
Justine LJH7 20-21, Australian, mc 1989


I was dancing with my friends the girls, I mean I don’t particularly need anyone to dance with me, I was dancing away. I was Acid dancing; I don’t like Acid dancing music! I cringe if it comes on the radio or the television, I cringe. My mum loves it. And I was Acid dancing, I think I was, if there’d have been a competition, I’d have won. I was doing the lot. And at the end of the night, this, I think he was Arabian or Asian, man, and when I say ‘man’, I say 40-45, like my dad’s age, he just grabbed me. And swinging me around, I’ve got my chin on his
shoulder.. And this lad that, this lad had been smiling at me all night, and I’d been smiling back…. dancing away and he’s smiling again. And I wasn’t having no go with this lad. I mean it just didn’t click with me what he was actually smiling at me for, because it never entered my head, anything like that. It didn’t click with me that he’d actually like to, you know, treat me as a come-on! It was a come-on what he was doing now…dancing away. So this lad’s got me in a grip like this, this fella. And this lad’s sat down, just next to the dance floor, and he says – Come here, come here. I couldn’t hear him. I said – Excuse me? I disentangled myself, you know. And I went, he said – Sit down here and wait until that fella’s gone. What for? He said – Do you want to dance with him? I said – No, you’re alright. He goes – Alright. And when this fella had gone, he said – Right, would you dance? I’ve been smiling at you for nearly two hours and you’ve not asked me to dance. I said – Why would I ask you to dance? He said – Haven’t you heard of women’s lib? I said – No, I don’t believe in that. EDD135 Michelle, white British wc 20.


It did not take me long to gather together some images from the pages of City Life (one of the other archives consulted to complement the WRAP data). Armed with coloured paper, glue and scissors I sincerely hoped that I would be able to deliver a meaningful yet speedy workshop with the help of Kate Watson and Niamh Moore. The first 10 minutes were dedicated to the approach. Then participants sitting together at tables were invited to create their own collages using data extracts and images shared. As ever, the workshop helped us understand the method and I wanted to use this blog to capture some of the learning:

Dancing as a topic was a breath of fresh air. Approaching the data side on – rather than through the focal themes of sexuality, sexual health and power in relationships allowed us to be playful and to see the original young women at play. It also encouraged us to see the what the space of the dance floor might have meant to these young women in 1989 – a space of erotic possibility and excitement. A space of display and of being watched and watching other. But also a dynamic and contingent space where norms move quickly or where we need to find those other dance floors that might be more welcoming and fulfilling.

Tearing data: We found we didn’t have enough pairs of scissors. The group all needed the scissors at the same time so some participants resorted to tearing their transcripts to capture their chosen words and phrases. One who had previously taken part in a similar RAD workshop explained that tearing the transcript made her feel more involved and connected to the material. It seems that breaking the wall of formality around ‘data’ is essential for this method. Whether that involves throwing pages of data into the air or tearing, re-voicing or rearranging – some kind of physical entanglement with the words of others brings liveliness to the process. Another participants reflected that she underlined and cut out words that captured the tone of the data extract. Yet when she rearranged these on the page she began to also tell her own story. This is something we see happening often with reanimating practice.


The time bind is something that we explain during the introduction to the workshop, but which came alive in our discussions. The time bind is a felt connection with the material. We don’t know what that will be in advance. It is almost as if the research questions only emerge in the encounters that are staged between data and participants and that these may be diverse and personal. For example, for one of the participants this day, the date 1989 could only mean the Tiannamen Square demonstrations and he worked with words cut from the text to write a poem to connect his feelings about this historical juncture.

For another participant it was the name ’Fatima’ that drew her to the material and the idea that she could have so easily known this young women, arriving in Manchester the following year. Perhaps they moved together on the dancefloor. Her collage spoke of a longing for a friendship missed – using contextual material yet none of Fatima’s words.


Titles: As part of the workshop we ask people to name their collages. We have found this to be a valuable stage in the process of collaborative analysis as participants reflect on and condense meaning for what has been an exploratory – and often rather hurried – process. In this collage a word is taken from the text used, yet in doing so sensitises us to something particular – the sensation of being synchronised or at the ‘same speed’ as others – a prerequisite for intimacy and for dancing together.

The title ‘Slide off’ also sensitises us to the embodied and relational dimensions of romantic and erotic interaction – as the young couple ‘slide off’ the dance floor to find somewhere quiet to be together. Something that both chimes and undermines the loud and brash.


The title ‘Hip Joints’ appears to play with the language of the popular culture (with certain club nights characterised as hip joints rather then ‘hoover halls’) while also directing our eyes and minds to the literal hip joints of dancers and exercisers as they move their bodies. I can’t help thinking about how those dancing with ecstasy in 1989 may well be suffering for sore hips joints in 2025.

It is interesting to look at the collages together and to ask what they tell us as a body of material. We might focus on the specificity of the participants – for example ‘the work produced by a group of academic researchers interested in active methods’. Looking at this selection I was interested in how queer dimensions of the archive were amplified in the re-use with several picking up in the idea of coming out.

I was also struck by questions about how and where the erotic potentialities of the dance floor have moved within youth culture if the dance floor is not long what it was. We spoke in the room about where it might have gone – online, into fan cultures, gaming intimacies, sports, gym culture…?

I am also struck by how the WRAP project was itself an intervention into a culture where doing/being rather than saying /explaining was the norm. As a feminist sexual health project the study incited a ‘speaking out about sex’ that was part of a wider belief in talking that can be see in the advice of agony aunts and health educators (Gahnstrom et al. 2024) Could sex education do a better job of engaging with the gesture, the euphemism, the look-taking seriously the non verbal dimensions of sexual cultures? But should we draw our attention back to the potentialities of the dancefloor – could these be reanimated. What would that look like and whose work would it be?


References
* Gahnstrom, R., Robinson, L., & Thomson, R. (2024) Is sex good for you?, reward, and responsibility for young women in the late 1980s’ in Froom, H., Loughran, T., Mahoney, K, & Payling, D. (eds) Everyday Health, Embodiment, and Selfhood since 1950. Manchester University Press.


* Charnock, H. (2025) Teenage Intimacies: Young Women, Sex and Social Life in England 1950-80. Manchester University Press.

Posted on

1979

Mark Erickson

1979 was the pivotal year in the post World War 2 UK for employment and employment relations. Many commentators will cite 1979 as being the beginning of neoliberalism in the UK, with the new Conservative government bringing in ideologically-driven policies to reconfigure the relationship between state and society. We can still feel the effects of this today in the form of the legacy of public service privatizations (water, energy, telecoms, housing) and a shift in societal attitudes towards more individualist and consumerist positions. Yet these seismic shifts have been underpinned by changes in modes of employment, the labour market, and industrial relations.

We should note four key transformations whose emergence can be dated to 1979, all of which are presaged in the Sue Sharpe Working Mothers archive. Firstly, deindustrialization; the demise of the UK’s heavy industries had already started but now picked up pace as coal, steel, shipbuilding and large-scale car production all went to the wall. There was an attendant steep rise in unemployment to peak in 1984, which remained high (above 7%) until the late 1990s (https://www.statista.com/statistics/280236/unemployment-rate-by-gender-in-the-uk/). Secondly, trade union decline. Trade union membership reached its peak in 1979 (13.2 million) and then went into a steady, and ongoing, decline (Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy 2022: Trade Union Membership UK 1995-2021: statistical bulletin page 5). Thirdly, fragmentation of careers and an end to ‘jobs for life’ dramatically changed the experience of many workers in the UK, and saw the dismantling of historic occupational communities. Fourthly, the feminization of the workforce takes off in 1979 with women increasingly being drawn into full-time and part-time work, a trend that has increased year on year since 1979 (ONS 2019: 7). 

The long term changes to work and employment that started in 1979 are still at work today, and the consequences of these transformations are still not fully understood. Looking back to help us look forward is a vital task if we are to be better equipped for the coming changes that the UK labour market and workforce will face. 

Posted on

Other archives

Rachel Thomson

One of the joys of this project has been to learn new skills. Having been trained as a sociologist I have a particular set of methodological skills.  Sociologists are good at producing data: this might be in the form of conducting and recording interviews, groups discussions, ethnographic field notes, questionnaire returns, creative projects with participants. We co-produce documents/ data. That is our starting point and then we use these documents as our evidence – often drawing strong boundaries around this body of evidence asking hard questions about what it represents, how it can or can’t be generalised as well as distinguishing this primary source of evidence from other secondary sources.

This is part of a wider story about the evolution of the social sciences, the emergence of the ‘sample’ as a device for generalisation that has been written about in interesting if controversial ways by Mike Savage (Identities & Social Change OUP 2010) and Peter Burke (Sociology & History, Routledge, 1980). But it is not the only story of sociology, as argued by Niamh Moore, Andrea Salter, Liz Stanley and Maria Tamboukou in The Archive Project  (Routledge 2017) – who trace an alternative sociological tradition that takes in life histories, oral history, genealogy and community archiving.

As a sociologist I have been responsible for making (or contributing) to a number of important data sets which have in turn been archived both at the UK data archive and in digital formats that make them available online: this includes the WRAP data set that is the focus of this project, but also the 15 year longitudinal Inventing Adulthoods data set that operated as a demonstrator project for the social science archiving and the Everyday Childhoods project literally ‘started with the archive’, inviting participants to make a public archive with researchers to be deposited within the Mass Observation Archive. But what I have never done before is work with an existing paper archive.

The rationale for the Reanimating Data project included a commitment to recontextualise the WRAP data set, in particular the 70 odd interviews generated in Manchester during 1988-9, conducted by myself and Sue Scott. One route back to this time was the field notes written by the researchers, the time sensitive references in the interviews (for example mentions of Gillick, the Rosie Barnes campaign to get rid of topless images of women on ‘page 3’ of tabloids and a health scare around the IUD ‘Dalkon Shield’).  Elsewhere on this blog I have written about the strange wormholes of memory that I found myself falling through when working with the original research documents, needing to place them into diachronic order as a starting point for triangulating my narrative memories with archival traces. I found myself needing supervision and guidance from a historian, how could I begin the process of connecting the WRAP archive with other sources that helped me escape the confines of my own biography and memory. Claire Langhamer, a critical friend of the project, suggested that I start with the local press, the Manchester Evening News and the weekly cultural round-up ‘City Life’.

Claire and I were interested in the relationship between sociology and history. I had invited her to be involved as a critical friend because of her doctoral work exploring women’s postwar leisure in the greater Manchester area, imagining her oral history interviews as capturing some of the intergenerational back-story of the lives of the WRAP  young women (Langhamer, Claire (1999) Manchester women and their leisure: changing experiences from youth to married adulthood, 1920-1960. Manchester Region History Review, XIII. pp. 32-42). But my approach to the archive was highly boundaried. I wanted to focus on the time period covered by the original fieldwork, to gain a sense of synchronicity – what was happening at the same time, possibly on the same day as an interview. This gave me boundaries (Claire said I was lucky to have this focus) as well as allowing me to take an inclusive approach – hoovering up depth and detail to contextualise the ‘moment’ of the original research.

I spent several days in Manchester’s central reference library pouring over the bound volumes of City Life for 1988 and 1989. My narrow focus on the two years meant that I did not need to ‘sample’ the volumes – for example focusing in one edition for each month – rather I immersed myself in the whole collection,  flicking through as one does with magazines – reading some articles, making copies of things that caught my eye, noticing connections and disconnects between the Manchester portrayed the magazine and the Manchester emerging from the interviews. My key ‘method’ in the archive was using my camera as an aide memoire, capturing snapshots to be made sense of later. Over the course of two visits I snapped 200 images, which I then catalogued and made into my own personal archive. What I collected was heterogeneous, but the guiding logic was material that expressed something of the sexual culture and politics of the city at that moment. This included:

  • small ads (I was interested for example in the new 0898 telephone lines being advertised for advice as well as sexual services),
  • personals (noticing how do people describe themselves and what are they looking for),
  • news stories (capturing activism around sexual violence, the closure of family planning clinics, activism around section 28, and the privatisation of public assets including worries about corruption),
  • event listings (a lively women-only feminist scene, concern with censorship, the eruption of house music, the arrival of ecstasy and the flourishing of a new service sector fuelled by cultural entrepreneurship),
  • reviews of books and films (the complicated politics of pleasure) and
  • opinion columns (the enduring nature of sexism and the reinvention of northern masculinities).

One of the most interesting sources were the cartoons that condensed and expressed this zeitgeist, speaking clearly to the middle class hip audience that made the magazine’s readership and which resonated with my identity thirty years ago as a 23 year old graduate student and researcher.  A series of cartoons by illustrator Martin Ridgewell were particularly generative, two of which are reproduced (badly) below. The first features a conversation between a young couple on a bus, talking about an old woman – amazed that the new language of body fluids and safer sexual practices would be foreign to her. For me this image captures the sense of change that was characteristic of the moment and the way that speaking explicitly about sex (as demanded by an activist public health response to HIV/AIDS ) became a marker of generational change that consolidated a range of assumptions about social class, religion and gender politics. The past (as embodied in the older working class northern woman concerned with respectability, speaking in euphemisms and shaped by demands of industrial capitalism) is pushed away as embarrassing and irrelevant. In doing so many assumptions are made about her and the past which are no doubt unfounded. Yet we hear echoes of this narrative in the interviews as young women distance themselves from the expectations and values of their mothers, recognising that as a generation they will need to forge lives of a very different kind. See for example Stacey (MAG12).

Cartoon by Martin Ridgewell, with permission of artist. Originally published in City Life 1989.

In the second cartoon we see a new mother – struggling to translate her progressive political commitments into a form of parenting, yet doing so alone at home suggesting that although ideas and identities may have changed continuities continue at the level of practice and the participation of men.[

Cartoon by Martin Ridgewell, with permission of artist. Originally published in City Life 1989. CPBF is the Campaign for Broadcasting Freedom, very active in Manchester at this time, holding weekly meetings and regular conferences.

It took me a while to understand the acronym CPBF, but looking at the listings helped me work out that The Campaign For Broadcasting Freedom was very active at this time holding regular meetings and conferences. In fact the whole question of censorship was a big deal to those who saw themselves as progressive. The Chief of Police in Greater Manchester (born again Christian James Anderton) had become infamous for his enthusiasm for eradicating pornography (including raiding an alternative record store and confiscating the 1984 album by the band Flux of Pink Indians ‘The Fucking Cunts Treat Us like Pricks). Section 28 of the local government bill which banned the promotion of homosexuality as a ‘pretended family relationships’ was also a focus for activism and understood in terms of censorship. In his book on Good As You: 30 Years of Gay Britain, Mancunian journalist Paul Flynn comments; ‘It wasn’t just gay sex he [Anderton] disliked so much. He had built up a habit of police procedures that included raiding local sex shops, gay and straight, and swooping into newsagents to divest them of top-shelf materials.’ (2017: 77)

The vocabulary of the cartoon is also vintage late 1980s with the term ‘discourse’ capturing the turn to language that swept up academics and activists, focusing attention on the way in which it was and was not possible to talk about sex. Understanding heterosexuality as a language that privileges masculinity was at the heart of the feminist politics of the late 1980s and early 1990s (Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble was published in 1990). We can hear something of this language in the interviews and the frustrations expressed by a group of self-consciously feminist young women, committed to social change but struggling to negotiate this within intimate relationships. Coming up against the problem of desire that continues to be calibrated to unreformed versions of masculinity [see for example Donna (NMC06), Hannah (ABC09), Simone (NMC12), Rebecca (THW50),  Amanda (MAG19).

Moving between the interview collection and the City Life archive has been valuable in many ways. It helped me pin down a chronology around important events. It also helped me think about the cultural currents of the city, the relationships between students and locals, the city centre, the neighbourhoods and the surrounding towns – what it might mean to go to different nightclubs, to travel, to be political. I also gained immediate access to the technological landscape of the times. The small ads gave me a visceral sense of face to face meeting, lots of clubbing, dangerous walks home, DIY publishing, landlines, walkmen and phone sex. It was a version of the city that made sense to me – I had been a reader of the magazine in 1988-9.

Another archive would tell a very different story of the city and may well connect with the interviews in distinctive ways. For example we have also worked  with the Feminist Webs archive which is held at the People’s History Museum and which consists of the pooled personal collections of feminist youth workers working in the northwest over this thirty year period and more. The collection is full of newsletters, posters and educational materials that would have been used by and with young women attending youth clubs in the city. Arguably these sources tell us more about the youth workers than the young people, in much the same way that City Life tells you more about me as the interviewer rather than the young women I was interviewing. Perhaps this is inevitable in that young women despite all being in Manchester in 1988-9, willing to be interviewed and aged 16-21, the WRAP interviewees are a wonderfully diverse group. And while they are shaped by place, that place is also incredibly heterogeneous, with the intersections of locality, religion/ ethnicity, social class and industry giving rise to micro cultures, which combined with family dynamics and personal agency presents through diverse biographical situations and projects. Understanding more about the cultural landscapes of the time is vital, but we also need to understand how and why particular cultural resources become important.

The cultural resources that were important to the young interviewees are not always the resources we might expect. In the interviews we hear about Jackie Collins novels rather than Just 17 and local pubs rather than city centre night clubs. Yet as Elizabeth Lovegrove shows us in her blog, there are ways of moving between cultural archives (such as magazines) and interviews that do not rely on direct relationships – but instead connects how it was (or wasn’t) possible to put sex into words (and images), defining certain kinds of problem and answers as featured in the popular problem pages of the magazines.

So what is the relationship between ‘our archive’ – the Women, Risk & Aids project collection and these ‘other archives’ that can be linked to, providing context. In an age of digital data it becomes possible to draw a range of digital sources together – presenting them as part of a time-line or a map. If the items are digitised we may be able to show and share them as part of our archive – but only if they are licensed in such a way that allows this. The WRAP materials are made available under a creative commons, educational, non-profit license which means they can be shared freely. The City Life archive is not digitised and in making copies of material I agreed to do so for personal use only. I have reproduced the cartoons above having had personal correspondence with Martin Ridgewell, who ironically does not have copies of the cartoons himself any more and asked me to send him my photographs.  The image from an 1989 edition of Cosmopolitan above is unauthorised and I may be asked to take it down. It is my own copy, but I do not have rights to reproduce it. I have included it here for educational purposes because it tells us a great deal: here we see the naming of a ‘problem’ in a new way, the relationships between a teacher and a pupil, something eventually criminalised by the 2003 Sexual Offences Act which codified such a relationship a breach of trust. We also see the 0898 number again – here as a monetised route to advice. British Telecom had been privatised in 1984 and by 1990 the problem of ‘0898’ numbers was being raised in parliament in relation to the circulation of ‘obscene material’ and fraudulent use of communications. Technology and intellectual property governance has a history, but it also shapes how we are able to show and tell our histories.

Posted on

Too much?

Rachel Thomson

The idea of working with a group of drama students came about when re-encountering the original data set and finding and remembering an interview (MAG50) with a young woman studying drama at Manchester University. MAG50 was eager to talk about her own complicated emotional life as well as the ‘false and forced intimacy’ of the drama scene.  She shared stories of non consensual sex as well as intense relationships with powerful older men. She also articulated her understanding of the sexual politics of the theatre industry where women may need to be sexually available in order to get work.

Reading this interview in a new historical moment framed by the #metoo movement and  the exposure of predatory men within the entertainment and creative industries encouraged me to take this material to todays drama students at Manchester University. I wanted to find out if they would be interested in the material and in collaborating in a project of reanimation that would help us think about social change and continuity. We began by making contact with Alison Jeffers in the drama dept at MU who put us in contact with Elena and Lea – two third year students who had recently taken over the stewardship of the Women’s Theatre Society – a student led theatre society for women.

The work began. We shared two further transcripts with the group – both interviews with young women who were drama students at UM in 1989.  After 6 weeks of workshopping the material I was able to join them.

Before leaving for Manchester I gathered some memorabilia to take with me – objects from my life at the time the research was done; an old diary, photographs and a copy of my handwritten Masters dissertation on Women and AIDS, which lead to me being part of the WRAP project. I also read MAG50 again on my way to Manchester as well as reading my dissertation. Through these objects I tried to remember my 23 year old self. When I met the young women that evening they jumped, as if they had seen a ghost. I understood that they had got to know a version of me in the interviews and that meeting the 53 year old me was strange for them. I tried to explain that it was strange for me too.

I shared my memorabilia and to began a Q&A session that lasted over an hour where we did the work of weaving feminist webs between our shared relationship with this interview and our shared co-presence, uncannily in the very building where the original research had taken place. There were a number of moments in this conversation when connections were made between the old me and the new me, between the young women and MAG50, between 1988 and 2019 in that building. I felt like we were doing a collaborative analysis.

Making sense of the boldness of the sexual discourse.

A burning question for the group was how it was possible for the original conversation to have taken place. It was so bold, intimate, open. At first I thought that they were telling me that from their perspective the research was unethical, that the questions too direct, transgressive. But over the discussion I began to understand that they were curious about how such a discourse became possible. They wanted to know about the staging of the interview and the lead up to the conversation (did they know what would be asked?) and about whether I had supervision to prepare me for the ‘heaviness’ of the discussion. It became evident that having a conversation like this now would be very difficult, constrained by concerns about safeguarding, consent and triggering. But rather than chastising me for bad practice I discovered that the young women were eager to re-enact this way of talking.

Rachel: I think that’s really interesting because I think now we would see a study like this through the prism of mental health and it absolutely wasn’t how we looked at it. So, we would now … I don’t know, tell me what you think, I think we would think about triggers things like that, is it triggering? Could you ask that because that might…? Whereas in a way this was the stuff that happened before that whole way of looking at  the  world  came  about,  this  was  much  more  political  I  think  in  a  straightforward way, well nothing is straightforward is it? But it was much more about trying to say, “That’s not fair.” Or, “Put that into words; what words does that…?” Because we didn’t really have any vocabulary to talk about sex, people didn’t know what to call bits of their body, they didn’t know how to name power, and I say ‘they’ I would speak of myself as well, you know, like we didn’t really have a vocabulary to describe any of these things so it was the basic work.

Together we worked out the relationships between now (2019) and a time (1989) where speaking out about sex and about power was a project of making the personal political, naming the unnamed and developing a new vocabulary. As threads connected the two moments in time the young women articulated that this formed a necessary foundation for a future culture that is saturated in the knowledge of sexual violence. Yet we also mused that something had been lost in the reframing of sex from a political to a more psychological register. We realised that there is a complicated new kind of silencing that reigns in the young women’s worlds in which sex is both seen as casual and no big deal, as well as too much trouble, too difficult and too important.

#metoo

At the end of the session I asked them about the #metoo movement and about the sexual politics of the drama world and the entertainment industry. Again the young women told a story of unevenness and contradiction. In many ways things are better for young women – there are pockets of feminist practice and areas of the business dominated by women (documentary film was given as an example). Yet elsewhere in the industry things are worse then they have ever been, with market forces determining what it valued and valuable. An actress still has to rely on her body and her youth. It is not sexism as such that is to blame, but the laws of the industry and the preferences of the audience. We talked about women withdrawing from exposed patriarchal spaces, deciding that it is just ‘too much’ and not worth it. I began to understand what they were trying to tell me about contemporary sexuality and to grasp how what came before is part of what is now in a way that escapes the linear narratives of progress and decline that stand in the way of generational connection.

Urgent mini interviews

The evening culminated in an urgent series of mini interviews, with young women choosing fragments from one of the three interviews to revoice and discuss or simply asking me to ask them questions like I had asked the WRAP young women. The interviews were double documented – I recorded them as ‘data’ for our reanimating project and Elena recorded them as useful material that the group might use for devising a performance.

I learned a lot from these conversations: that it was still hard to be a virgin; that it was hard to find a ‘middle ground’; that the protection of men and families is vital for many people still; that loving oneself can be harder than loving someone else. It was an overwhelming and moving experience that I am in the midst still of understanding.  These re-enactments were the frenzied culmination of a long slow process of engagement which I would like to think of as a single method spread out in time and space and certainly a kind of co-production that we both documented and made our own.

Watching the performance several months later I could see how strands of our conversations in the workshop had been worked with creatively and brought to life through performance. Although the performance did contain extracts from the three interviews, reperformed by the young women, the focus was on the 2019 young women’s stories. In the discussion after the show the young women told us that engaging with the material gave them permission and a desire to tell their own stories and to think that someone out there might be interested in listening.

Watch the live performance of The Reanimating Project.