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In 1974 the British Board of Film Censors refused to grant a certificate to the Swedish documentary More About the Language of Love (Mera ur Kärlekens språk, 1970, Torgny Wickman, Sweden: Swedish Film Production), due to its explicit sexual content. Nevertheless, the Greater London Council granted the film an ‘X’ certificate so that it could be shown legally in cinemas throughout the capital. This article details the trial against the cinema manager and owners, after the film was seized by police under the charge of obscenity, and explores the impact on British arguments around film censorship, revealing a range of attitudes towards sex and pornography. Drawing on archival records of the trial, the widespread press coverage as well as participants’ subsequent reflections, the article builds upon Elisabet Björklund’s work on Swedish sex education films and Eric Schaefer’s scholarship on Sweden’s ‘sexy nation’ reputation to argue that the Swedish films’ transnational distribution complicated tensions between educational and exploitative intentions in a particularly British culture war over censorship.
Whilst the focus of much criticism has addressed goth as a subculture, considerably less attention has been given to the gendered status of marketing and advertising in subcultural magazines, whilst ‘glossy’ goth magazines have enjoyed little concerted analysis at all. Subcultures are frequently represented by participants and critics as ‘idyllic’ spaces in which the free play of gender functions as distinct from the ‘mainstream’ culture. However, as Brill (2008), Hodkinson (2002) and Spooner (2004) have identified, this is unfortunately an idealistic critical position. Whilst goth men may embrace an ‘androgynous’ appearance, goth women frequently espouse a look which has much in common with traditional feminine values. Slippages between subcultural marketing and mainstream advertising are frequent and often neotraditional in their message regarding masculinity and femininity. In using critiques of postfeminism alongside subcultural theory, I seek to reevaluate how gender functions in these publications. By close inspection of scene representations of ‘goth’ in the twenty-first-century through magazines such as Gothic Beauty (US), Unscene and Devolution (UK), as well as interviews with participants, I argue women’s goth fashion, sexuality and body image often (but not exclusively) represent a hyperfemininity which draws from conventional ideas of womanhood.
a question. This chapter explores the religiously active believers on social media to understand and predict how they think about their faith and biblical epics. Prior research has shown that participants in online communities tend to be more enthusiastic and more invested on a given topic than non-participants (Duggan and Smith 2013 ). Furthermore, this chapter aims to assess whether certain religious groups are motivated to attend biblical epics than others. The chapter builds on the Theory of Planned Behaviour to predict attendance at biblical epic movies
Interlude 3 How it feels to be made a migrant: restrictions, frustration and longing This interlude is based on the discussions in which participants in Birmingham discussed how it felt to be made a migrant, and the constraints and frustrations they continually faced. Inspired by Frigaa Haug’s memory work, we took participants through a workshop process where we shared anonymised quotes, songs and video clips generated so far through the interview process with small groups of three to four people. We used this material to spark discussions about shared
Interlude 1 Global power and media absences During interviews with migrants in the UK and Italy, we asked how they felt about the media coverage of the countries they had left, both by international news media and by the local media in their countries. Participants were generally quite critical of news media, as in the following reflection on the state of news: So it’s like the world of journalism has gone upside down. They spend more time researching about celebrity news and making it more legitimate than the actual news that need to be told. (Nottingham, 19
Interlude 2 Songs, jokes, movies and other diversions This interlude will explore the conversations we had with migrants in the UK and Italy about fun and entertainment. Speaking to migrants about fun and entertainment may seem counterintuitive from the perspective of mainstream media coverage, in which migrants are rarely asked about anything other than their migration journey, which frequently involves testimonials of hardship. However, this reduces the role of migrants to one-dimensional figures of heroic suffering. Also, participants had experienced quite
as a space corresponds to the space it inhabits. Moreover, dance has a continuous element within it even when it is rapturous and disturbing. Dance as a world inscribes upon the bodies of its participants –audience members and spectators alike –and changes their embodied spatiality after they leave the theatre. Martin argues that taking dance seriously aids us in going beyond the despair of an arrested present towards thinking about an enriched social life. Further, ‘if one grants that along with dance, politics cannot have a solitary form or a unitary object, if
5 Refusing the demand for sad stories Introduction This chapter questions mainstream approaches to migrants as tellers of sad stories about their individual migration journeys. With this aim, it introduces performative methods used to de-construct the processes of migrantification through the creation of scenes. We argue that such methods, and the commitments to self-organisation and ‘speaking back’ that accompanied them, re-position migrants as full and critical participants in collective narrative processes. Within this context, migrants played the role of co
the band’s participation in public debate. Whilst engagement with English folk music or dance is not always openly or primarily articulated as a direct manifestation of a desire to express one’s English identity, it is significant that a growing number of English folk participants do talk about having actively sought out English folk music or dance, or about their folk activity as an expression of their English identity or search for their English ‘roots’. 135 Englishness 7.2.1 Englishness as historically rooted Looking towards musical and dance traditions that
the women’s movement and retains the democratising impulse of its formation. Haug, famously, developed approaches to collective analysis of social processes, bringing together the shared memories and analysis of groups of women. She has described this process as a collapsing of the binary of subject and object, instead uncovering participants in such collective projects as ‘experts on everyday life’. She explains this project: Since this everyday life is where society reproduces itself, an understanding of it would … modify each individual’s attitude towards herself