L-Shaped Rooms and Other Bends: Queering the Home in the British New Wave
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This paper examines the distinctly domestic emergence of queernesses across the films of the British New Wave. Whilst much has been written on the cycle’s confrontational masculinities and anxieties over effeminacy, my research shifts focus to its queer figures and their capacity to challenge rigid patriarchal structures through irreverent subversions of the material and ideological space of the home. I argue that the queer circulates within the British New Wave both as a spectre that haunts the home, threatening at any moment to expose the fragility of the patriarchal family, and as a creative insurgent through whom new and enlivening forms of kinship, care and relationality might be imagined. I begin by examining the sometimes subtle invocations of queerness-as-threat within male-led films such as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Kind of Loving and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, in which signs of gender subversion, homosexuality and transness make the home a primary site of ideological conflict for the patriarch-in-waiting. I then turn to The L-Shaped Room and A Taste of Honey, in which queer(ed) domestic spaces become sources of ludic release to the unpartnered pregnant protagonist. These unfinished, marginal, or ‘bent’ homes occasion an un-making of the ‘traditional’ family and point towards possible re-makings of kinship. Ultimately, the narratives of the New Wave films conspire to ward off these queer kinships: the spectre of the queer within the patriarchal home is defeated through the reinstatement of the patriarch, and the unruly kinships of The L-Shaped Room and A Taste of Honey dissolve into impossibility. Yet, I argue, the queer lingers within these films as query: the pleasures, ironies, and questionings of queer domesticity that these films offer work covertly against the ideological currents of their own manifest closures, asking whether these spaces may be not only possible, but desirable.
Dr Melissa Oliver-Powell is a lecturer in Film and Literature in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York, where she teaches on topics across world cinemas, literature, and feminist and queer theory. She has previously lectured in film and literature at the University of Exeter and UCL, where she received her PhD in 2018, with a dissertation on motherhood in British and French film in the 1960s and 1970s. Her research focuses on issues of mothering, politics and social justice in film. She has published on topics including representation of abortion, care and visual ethics, mothering subjectivities, mother-blame, and mothering, migration and racism in British, French, Senegalese, and American film. Her debut monograph, Pepsi and the Pill: Motherhood, Politics and Film in Britain and France, 1958-1969, was published by Berghahn Books in 2023.
Dr Melissa Oliver-Powell (York)