Seminar – Solitudes: Past and Present

Public Seminar – Professor Thomas W. Laqueur ‘Revisiting Solitary Sex’

Tasha Pick — Fri, 13 May 2022 09:51:29 +0000

The 2003 publication of Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation stimulated academic and popular discussions about masturbation which have increased our understanding of this under-discussed human behaviour. This paper revisits the arguments of the book in the light of these discussions and considers the implications of solitary sex – its practice, its reputation, its friends and enemies – for the history of human solitariness in general.

Co-sponsored by ‘Pathologies of Solitude Project’, Centre for 18th Century Studies, Sexual Cultures Research Group (SED)

Professor Thomas Laqueur, based at Berkeley, University of California, is the author of Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (1990), Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (2003), and The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (2015), among many others.

Professor Laqueur is the Distinguished Visiting Fellow with the ‘Pathologies of Solitude‘ project at Queen Mary, University of London.

All are welcome but registration is required. Please click here to register your attendance.

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Seminar – Sarah Knott on ‘Maternity, Care and Solitude’

Tasha Pick — Fri, 12 Nov 2021 16:20:34 +0000

In a recent and valuable history of British working women, Helen McCarthy suggests that the loneliness of mothers first entered the public domain in the early twentieth century. Forced to contend with a new bloc of voters, runs her argument, politicians identified what they saw as a dilemma of isolation. Perhaps policy could respond to the housewife’s needs. The public discussion was agnostic on several points, most tellingly on whether children could be companionable. Was a mother alone when she was with her children? Did they cause or alleviate her sequestration at home? What, exactly, needed solving? This paper takes the early twentieth-century discussion as prompt to a broader exploration of how we give a history to maternity, care and solitude. Focusing on the care relations of middle childhood, the paper brings into conversation usually divergent histories of solitude, labour and social reproduction.

This seminar will take place online.

All are welcome but booking is required. Please click here to register your attendance.

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Seminar – Akshi Singh on ‘Mrs Palfrey Must Fall: Empire, Loneliness, and Melancholy in Elizabeth Taylor’s Novels’

Tasha Pick — Fri, 12 Nov 2021 09:51:25 +0000

When she was young, she had had an image of herself to present to her new husband, whom she admired; then to herself, thirdly to the natives (I am an Englishwoman). Now, no one reflected the image of herself, and it seemed diminished: it had lost two-thirds of its erstwhile value (no husband, no natives). Elizabeth Taylor, ‘Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont’

Through a reading of Elizabeth Taylor’s novel Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, this paper offers an account of the way in which Elizabeth Taylor describes a particular form of loneliness and melancholy—one that is connected to loss of empire. Drawing upon Freud’s account of melancholia, and writing by Paul Gilroy and Anne Anlin Cheng, I make a case for why Elizabeth Taylor is a writer for our times.

This seminar will take place online.

All are welcome but booking is required. Please click here to register your attendance.

The post Seminar – Akshi Singh on ‘Mrs Palfrey Must Fall: Empire, Loneliness, and Melancholy in Elizabeth Taylor’s Novels’ appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

Seminar – Michael Rowland on ‘Sociable Bodies, Solitary Minds: Men and Belonging in Eighteenth-Century Culture’

Tasha Pick — Thu, 11 Nov 2021 12:43:27 +0000

This paper looks at the much-articulated public sphere of the eighteenth century in Britain, and argues that its ideals of masculine personhood revolved around a necessary duality of external sociability and internal solitude. Examining the shift from Hobbesian ideas of individualism to notions of man as a necessarily social animal, articulated in the works of Shaftesbury, Smith and Hume among others, I examine how these ideas play out in the lived experiences of men of the time. What are the pressures of the social worlds of friendship, love, professional and material success, on their internal lives? In works by philosophers but also private individuals, I explore how both lives and societal ideals are shaped by a conflict between the sociable exterior and an interior where men are sometimes strikingly alone.

This seminar will take place online.

All are welcome but booking is required. Please click here to register your attendance.

The post Seminar – Michael Rowland on ‘Sociable Bodies, Solitary Minds: Men and Belonging in Eighteenth-Century Culture’ appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

Seminar – Hannah Proctor ‘Lonesome babies in a collective society: Geoffrey Gorer’s ‘swaddling hypothesis’ and postwar theories of Russian national character’

Tasha Pick — Mon, 27 Sep 2021 11:41:52 +0000

In the early years of the Cold War, a spate of social scientific projects based in institutions in the US emerged that sought to define the ‘Soviet mind’. The People of Great Russia (1949) by anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer, with contributions by British psychoanalyst John Rickman, argued that the ‘national character’ of the people of ‘Great Russia’, on either side of the 1917 October Revolution, could be understood by examining experiences of early infancy.

Gorer, who had been conducting research as part of the Columbia University project Research in Contemporary Cultures since 1947, was struck in his discussions with his colleagues in New York, who were Russian emigres, that they had almost all been swaddled as babies. He claimed that swaddling practices in the region were distinctive because babies were regularly released from their bandages in order to be breast fed. Periods of lonely constriction were punctuated by moments of warm intimacy. He proposed that the oscillation between being tied and untied, constrained then freed, isolated then cuddled was a key that could unlock the psyche of adults in both the Tsarist Russian Empire and the Soviet Union who oscillated ‘between unconscious fears of isolation and loneliness, and an absence of feelings of individuality so that the self is, as it were, merged with its peers in a ‘soul-collective’.’

This paper will explore Gorer’s methods, his theoretical discussions with Rickman (whose contribution to The People of Great Russia consisted of vignettes about Russian peasant life written while he was stationed as a doctor with the Friends’ War Victims Relief Unit in 1916-1918, prior to his psychoanalytic training), and the critical reception with which the theory was met both in the Soviet Union and among Russian emigres in the US and UK.

This seminar will take place online.

All are welcome but booking is required. Please click here to register your attendance.

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Seminar – Anna Harpin on ‘Being a Mess: Performance and The Tender Loneliness of Kim Noble’s You’re Not Alone’

Tasha Pick — Thu, 09 Sep 2021 10:38:39 +0000

CW: abstract contains explicit content

In Kim Noble’s 2014 You Are Not Alone, performed at the Soho Theatre, we see inside the shower cubicle at his father’s care home at bath time. We hear audio of his neighbours having sex via a microphone drilled through the boundary wall. We watch Noble shave his balls and create a fake vagina out of a skinless chicken breast as part of his practice of sexting as ‘Sarah’. We see him shit in a church. We listen to Keith, the cashier at Morrison’s, gratefully receive his numerous local hero awards from Noble. And on. Structured around a series of futile attempts at grasping intimacy, the performance strews Noble’s life across the stage in the form of tender provocations. As an audience, we are invited go where we ordinarily do not or are not supposed to. Private actions, feelings, experiences, spaces are thus made public, available, visible. In their cumulative exposure to the daylight, Noble’s social-artistic experiments prompt a re-evaluation of the politics of the hidden, the concealed, the shut away. This paper is interested in the presumed ‘insideness’ of difficult feelings and what might be lost by understanding experiences such as loneliness or distress as interior phenomena. In particular, through an examination of Noble’s performance work, I aim to draw attention to the paradoxically relational and world-directed nature of loneliness. In so doing, I will argue that Noble’s work turns our attention to both what emotional pain is and also what it wants. If we accept that ‘being a mess’ might be a political, public event, as opposed to simply a personal catastrophe, then we can begin to ask what such an event is calling for and calling upon us to be or do. Put more simply, this paper will consider how far Noble’s work stages the political value of turning ourselves and each other inside out.

Anna Harpin is a lecturer at the University of Warwick. Recent publications include her monograph, Madness, Art, and Society: Beyond Illness, an article on Katie Mitchell (CTR) and a chapter on Shane Meadows’ cinema (The Routledge Companion to Literature and Disability). She is also a theatre maker with her company, Idiot Child.

This seminar will take place online.

All are welcome but booking is required. Please click here to register your attendance.

The post Seminar – Anna Harpin on ‘Being a Mess: Performance and The Tender Loneliness of Kim Noble’s You’re Not Alone’ appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

Seminar – Melissa Alexander on ‘ ‘We talked about solitude’: Modernist Female Authors, Solitude, and Affective Bonding’

Tasha Pick — Tue, 07 Sep 2021 10:08:27 +0000

A 1920 conversation between Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield serves as a springboard for our own “talk about solitude,” an exploration of female modernists’ ambivalent approach to the experience and expression of solitude. This suggestive encounter predates and informs Woolf’s relationship with another important, but often neglected, author, Vita Sackville-West. These writers were each keenly attuned to the value of solitude as an aid to creativity, independence, self-reflection, and personal growth, finding solace in the natural world. Nevertheless, they also meditated on the problem of existential loneliness, seeking new, meaningful modes of intimacy with the human and non-human world.

Comparing the biographical and literary writing of these three key modernists, this paper suggests that – paradoxically – solitude is the hallmark of a widespread community of feeling. Diaries and epistolary exchanges indicate that solitude was both the ground and the limit of these uneasy but mutually enrichening sisterhoods, so often complicated by rivalry, misunderstandings, and absences. It played a part in how they staged their identities, how they perceived one another, and how they were portrayed in posterity. It serves as the emotional centre of much of their fictions, illuminating a shared imagistic vocabulary. It raises questions about performativity, language, and genre. Most importantly, the feeling of solitude stimulated poignant conversations about how we might connect with others and with the world.

This seminar will take place online.

All are welcome but booking is required. Please click here to register your attendance.

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Seminar – Anna Maguire on ‘Hostile Environments: Refugees, Asylum Seekers and The Politics of Loneliness’

Tasha Pick — Tue, 07 Sep 2021 09:42:11 +0000

Claims to a historic tradition of ‘sanctuary’ in the United Kingdom are contested by the long, entangled roots of the hostile environment, long before its official announcement as policy by the 2012 Coalition government. What happens if we frame this hostility or inhospitability as the structural enforcement of loneliness? Solitude and isolation have seen refugees ‘fall through the cracks’ of welfare statutory support. Loneliness is the consequence of racism and xenophobia. It is a weapon used by the state, to construct borders, to separate families, to imprison, to detain, to deport, to take away belonging.

In this paper, I take the experiences of refugee loneliness in the second half of the twentieth century as a lens through which to historicise resettlement in Britain. I examine how isolation and loneliness has been articulated, especially in critique of the UK’s response to refugees, and attempts to ‘solve’ loneliness by charities and community organisations striving to welcome refugees and asylum seekers.

This seminar will take place online.

All are welcome but booking is required. Please click here to register your attendance.

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Seminar – Marie Kolkenbrock on ‘Hedgehog Humanities: On the Ethics & Cultural Politics of Distance’

Clare Whitehead — Mon, 18 Jan 2021 14:38:44 +0000

Through the current pandemic, my project on the cultural history of ‘distance’ has gained a new and rather uncomfortable urgency. The project’s leading goal is to examine the following question: what function does the concept of distance have in the twentieth and twenty-first century responses to the fundamental question of how to live together? The pandemic throws into sharp relief how spatial, social, and emotional conceptions of distance intersect and how these intersections inform our ‘ethics of cohabitation’ (Judith Butler). In the current crisis, we have experienced first-hand how a lack of conceptual clarity regarding distance has profound implications. Early injunctions to ‘social distance’ were eventually replaced with the awareness that it would be more precise to speak of physical distancing, and that excessive interpersonal distance may lead to wide-spread mental health problems that could arguably be as harmful as the virus itself.

The talk will introduce the key hypotheses of my project and give an account of the concept of ‘distance’ in twentieth century and contemporary political ethics, showing that ‘distance’ is not a neutral concept but functions as a shifting metaphor in different ideological contexts. As we now are forced to cultivate several new forms of distancing practices, it may be worth taking a look at some examples from the cultural theory and history of distance in order to reflect on their potential impact on our sense of ‘togetherness’ in private relationships, within our societies, and across nation states.

This seminar will take place online.

All are welcome but booking is required. Please click here to register your attendance.

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Seminar – Sarah Garfinkel on ‘Emotion in Body and Brain: the Biological Basis of Empathy’

Clare Whitehead — Mon, 18 Jan 2021 14:37:29 +0000

Signatures of emotions are captured in body physiology, And as social beings, both our own and others’ emotions are expressed in the brain and body, thus revealing the biological basis of empathy. This talk will detail how emotion is shared between individuals, and how loneliness is entwined with states of depression and anxiety.

This seminar will take place online.

All are welcome but booking is required. Please click here to register your attendance.

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