I'm fascinated by middle-English male hobbies. Steam train enthusiasts. Metal detecting. Train-spotting. The Sealed Knot. Neighbourhood Watch. Dogging. Brexit. Tight-knit groups generate their own cultures, factions, languages, habits, styles and power structures - a cultural studies dream. The homosociality of it all. The obsessions with accuracy and precision. Often the preference for exactitude over historical complexity. The centenary of Irish Independence and the Civil War is coming up. I wonder if the Daily Mail would think it too soon for squads of middle-aged Irish men to dress up as IRA flying columns…
I once taught a module on cultural representations of the Vietnam War. A highlight was discovering a local group which spent every weekend in the woods recreating key Vietnam battles. They all had authentic gear, from uniforms to Jeeps. Organised command structures, the right lingo - everything.
All they lacked was an enemy. So who did they enlist to play the Vietcong and to rather unhistorically lose every week?
Their wives.
I cannot even begin to imagine the psychological ramifications of this.
1 comment:
You've got me thinking about whether my own middle-English social pursuits were marked at origin with homosociality - and, if so, how they're negotiating the post-Women's Liberation* reality that you can't keep women out (and the even more unsettling reality that some women want to come in). Labour, I think, doesn't qualify as homosocial in the first place - women have been involved as far back as the Clarion Clubs. CAMRA, folk singing and pub quizzes, though... hmm.
This may shed some light on the statistically unusual number of lesbian folkies I know - although presumably it's a question of not being seen as 'available' rather than any affinity with the male majority.
*Women's Liberation was an achievement and a movement. Feminism is a philosophy and several different movements.
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