Escaping from the radiant sunshine and relentless din of the traffic outside, I took refuge in the British Library café, the perfect backdrop for a serious and stimulating conversation where, over a medium latte, I had the great privilege of talking to Professor Liz Kelly of London Metropolitan University, one of Britain’s foremost experts on violence against women.

 

Chameleon: Could you tell me a little bit about your background and the research you have been involved in?

LK: I come from a working class family in the north of England; I’m the first woman in my family to go to university and I do find it astonishing that not only did I do that, but I ended up a professor. I never had a career plan about academia and I certainly didn’t have a career plan to be successful in academia. I came to feminism because I was pregnant when I was nineteen – I got pregnant the first time I ever had sex. It was consensual, it wasn’t an issue, but I was still negotiating my way out of Catholicism, and so whilst I’d got as far as abortion was OK for other women, it certainly wasn’t OK for me, so instead of going to university at nineteen, I had my daughter. I don’t regret it now at all because I did something different at university than I would have done and I have a sister who is also a daughter. I feel very lucky that we got to spend her childhood together at a time where I wasn’t trying to do two things at once. What I did was be around her and become a feminist, and those two things were actually quite compatible. How I became a feminist was through going to a meeting of a women’s liberation group – reluctantly – I didn’t think it had anything to do with me, whereas of course, it had everything to do with me and changed my life. I have always been somebody who loves ideas and talking about ideas, but they’re never enough. I want to do something. I want to make a difference, so, within about a year, I was itching to do something with these ideas and someone came to talk about whether we might need to have provision for abused women in the small town that I lived in. It sounds ridiculous now to say this, but we didn’t know; we didn’t know whether there were any women who were experiencing that kind of violence in the town where we lived, so we had to go and ask lots of services whether they ever encountered anybody and in the end we opened the second shelter outside of London in this small town called Norwich. Since then my academic life and my activist life have always centred around issues of violence, but, from the time I did my PhD, I’ve been trying to look at violence against women as a whole, the connections between forms of violence – you can isolate them conceptually, but actually in women’s lived experience they’re not, they have histories of encounters with violence, sometimes with the same perpetrator, sometimes with different ones, and so I have worked with this idea of the continuum, that there is a continuum of kinds of violence on the conceptual level, from the normalised and almost acceptable through to the obviously criminal and lethal, but also a continuum in women’s lives, that some of us are relatively fortunate and that we only encounter the low level kinds of violence. They still teach us lessons in femininity and in the gender order. Then there are other women whose lives are suffused with brutality and who I think struggle to have a sense of personhood in the aftermath of all of that. There are obviously women who are killed, but there are also women who I think take their own lives because they can’t live with the history of what’s happened to them and its meanings and how they feel others see and treat them because of it. So I would say my intellectual and activist life is connected to these issues in a very profound way. It’s connected to all aspects of it, both the normalisation and in certain circumstances glamorisation of violence in popular culture and what that means for all of us, but particularly what it means for young women and men growing up with that cultural discourse, a very strong cultural discourse, through to working with women who have actually killed their abusive partners. For the last almost twenty years, in fact it is twenty years this year, which I find very scary, I’ve worked in a research unit, which I’m now director of, called the Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit. We were the only research unit in the UK, and Europe, that looked across all forms of violence against women and also linked it to abuse in childhood. We’re still quite rare in doing that. We’ve worked on domestic violence; we’ve worked on trafficking; we’ve worked on prostitution; we’ve worked on child sexual abuse and in the last eight or ten years we have dedicated ourselves to working on rape. With the death of Sue Lees [author of Carnal Knowledge: Rape on Trial] there was really nobody in the UK, apart from Jennifer Temkin [author of, inter alia, Rape and the Legal Process] working in the legal field, who was actually researching rape. We carried out an analysis for Claire Short before the Labour Party won the election in 1997, in which we demonstrated that – and we didn’t know this at the time – we’d had an unbroken increase in reporting here in the UK, a slight increase in prosecutions, but a virtually static number of convictions and what that means over time is that your conviction rate falls year on year on year and part of what we’ve committed ourselves to doing is not just exposing that, but also trying to explore what’s going on and why that might be the case. We’ve had a number of pieces of research where we’ve tried to look at what we think is going on, also to look at it in terms of Europe, and we’re just about to start a project with colleagues from seven different countries in Europe where we simultaneously track a hundred cases in our own systems and see whether the same things happen at the same points in time or not – that’s exciting.

Chameleon: That sounds really interesting. You talk about low-level violence, how do you define it? Is it wolf whistling in the street when a woman walks past a group of builders?

LK: I meant low-level in the sense that it doesn’t result in a physical injury, or a physical harm. There are, however, harms connected to it which are more social and psychological. They are enactments of masculinity, a particular kind of masculinity, at women’s expense. It also includes things like the presence of pornography in the workplace, the pressure by partners to look at pornography when women don’t want to, a whole series of intimate intrusions, which don’t involve any kind of physical or sexual assault on the body.

Chameleon: Is Susan Brownmiller’s analysis in Against Our Will [Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1976] of rape as a weapon to keep women in line still holds true? Or has any progress away from this been made in the meantime?

LK: I think as a piece of feminist rhetoric – and we need rhetoric – it was actually profound, challenging and remains important. As a sociologist and a researcher, I don’t think it’s sufficient to understand the motivations of men, or why some men don’t. I am increasingly thinking that in critical men’s studies what researchers ought to be doing is looking at why some men don’t buy into hegemonic masculinity, and it’s not just that they are from a subordinated group, it’s that they make conscious choices. Why do they do that? What’s the social context in which they make those choices? What I think is most important about it was what she said afterwards, the fact that some men rape, all men benefit, because all men benefit from the social control that it then exerts on women and women’s behaviour – and they benefit from the male protection myth. At a very complex, often unspoken level, women seek the protection of a male partner to stave off the supposed threat from the predatory stranger. Ironically we know that she’s actually more at risk from the male partner, which is not to say that there aren’t predatory men – there are – but what we know more and more is they’re not the stereotypical stranger. They’re quite smart, clever men, who target women in particular ways, in particular contexts and they’ll have strategies that they adapt, depending on whether they’re in a bar, or at a party, or whatever. I’m interested now in exploring those complexities of male behaviour across the entire spectrum, from the ones who eschew the powers that are invested in them to ones that exercise them as a sense of entitlement and then to the few who, one could say, have some kind of diagnosable mental health issue, who are not actually acting rationally.

Chameleon: When we talk about rape myths, the image is always of the pathological stranger, the man who commits the rape is always cast as a demon or a deviant, but that isn’t always the case, is it? A kind of background violence exists.

LK: It’s very rarely the case, which is not to say that there aren’t some men who fit that stereotype. There are. The trouble is that the media, and to an extent also popular fiction, present them as much more commonplace and every day than they actually are, because they give you the dramatic material that you want in a film or in a book. The fact that the guy next door is an everyday sexist isn’t dramatic enough. Even feminist authors, I think, find it difficult to write the everydayness of a lot of violence and I would say the fiction writers who have done so most powerfully and most consistently are actually African-American women in the US and also some Indian women writing fiction in India. I don’t understand why some of my friends are so preoccupied with reading about serial killers. There’s a very odd engagement with that by some feminists. I wonder whether that means that, inadvertently, we get caught up in some of these mythologies too, even though we know rationally that they distort. But they have a very powerful cultural resonance. Maybe it’s that they symbolically represent the kind of threat that women perceive. I think it’s interesting that we’ve moved away from cultural representations of what the majority of violence is to this extreme. I also think it’s probably a cultural response to the feminist challenge in a way. Our challenge was, sorry, no, these are everyday guys, these are our partners, our fathers, our brothers, our uncles, our work colleagues, the men we sit next to on the Tube, and I think that was a very shocking message. I think there was a point at which in the Eighties a willingness existed to engage with it on some level. Increasingly I feel we are pulling away from that recognition. Because everybody now wants to use the word paedophile. I hate that word, no feminist should ever use it because it literally means “lover of children”. I can’t think of anything more misnamed. But we should also not use it precisely because it distances people from the message we were trying to get across, that it’s not these weird deviant guys, it’s our fathers, our grandfathers, the guy next door, the music teacher, the sports coach, the religious leader. These are the men who abuse and they get away with it precisely because of their normality. The more we focus on these weird guys, I think, the less children are protected.

Chameleon: Because you’re homing in on the one who doesn’t fit in, who’s hanging around the playground, rather than, as you say, the father or the brother who’s sneaking into the bedroom at night and wreaking havoc.

LK: Absolutely, and their advantage is that they have access. Most of the reason these guys can do it and can do it often is that they have regular access and legitimised access to children or women.

Chameleon: They are invisible, whereas the “paedophile” is very visible indeed. If you look at the articles in the Daily Mail, they’re terribly hostile towards and dismissive of feminism. What a surprise! For example they would say that Brownmiller’s contentions in the past were merely that, contentions and that we’ve got equality now, so why don’t we just shut up and get on with life? How do we counteract this kind of argument?

LK: My response to that would be if we had equality, I would shut up, I would be very happy to shut up. I wish I could think that in my lifetime I would have the opportunity to shut up, but everything tells us that we don’t have equality, from the evidence from our most recent Women in Work Commission, which showed that the gender pay gap hasn’t reduced significantly for the last fifteen years, we had a fall, but then it stayed static, to the fact that we have more reported rapes than we have ever had in this country. That doesn’t necessarily mean that there are more rapes, but it certainly doesn’t mean that there are less, and if the Daily Mail is right, then there should be less. I still encounter women, both students and in other places where you can see they don’t have the same sense of entitlement, the same sense of worth as men. I still sit on the Tube and men take up three times as much space as women do.

Chameleon: (Laughs) They spread their legs aggressively.

LK: Absolutely. Space invaders, as somebody calls them. I think it’s those things, things that you notice every day – if we really had equality, they wouldn’t happen. Men wouldn’t need two or three times as much space as women. They might need a little bit more if they are significantly taller, but they don’t need two or three times more.

Chameleon: If people read the Daily Mail and they start getting lulled into complacency by its constant barrage of claims that we’ve achieved equality, how can we then overcome such complacency and the denial of inequality that’s implicit in the articles?

LK: I think we should take the fact there is such a consistent and deliberate engagement as evidence of success. I don’t agree that we should just talk the language of backlash and undermining. It’s not necessary to do that if you don’t think that something is changing and you’re trying to resist change. We should see this as part of the process of change and transformation – our gender order, our patriarchy or whatever we want to call it, is changing and this change is contested. It is contested at all sorts of levels. It’s contested at the level of individual relationships, it’s contested in classrooms and it’s contested in the media. We have to be smarter about how we engage with that. The response of some women is to be really frustrated and angry that it’s happening rather than to engage with it and to make sure that there’s not just one voice. For example, can we find a journalist in the Daily Mail to whom one could feed some different information and who might develop a slightly different voice in the newspaper? You’re not going to absolutely change the political tone of a newspaper, but you can affect some of the content. I don’t do enough of this, I know I don’t, but I do think we have to find smart ways of engaging with these contested areas and we have to do more. Robin Morgan once said that if every feminist wrote a letter a day to the newspapers, or to their political representatives we would be a serious force to be reckoned with and it’s still true. If every day each of us did a small piece of activism about what moved us the most we would see different voices. Not every letter gets published, not every response or little campaign has an impact, but the more there are the more there is a sense that yes, there are these voices of resistance, but they’re not going uncontested. There is still a women’s movement. That’s how you sense that there’s a women’s movement because you sense women engaging in disputation in the public sphere. I think we got pulled into establishing organisations working at more strategic and policy levels and I’m not saying we shouldn’t have done that, we should have done it and we need to continue doing it, but we also need to do the things that seem smaller, not so significant, that actually make those who are not feminists feel that there is a feminist voice. Because otherwise they don’t hear or see it.

Chameleon: Or they get a very distorted notion of what that voice involves with phrases like “screaming sisterhood” or the image of the feminist with three moustaches and who only ever walks around in dungarees and bovver boots.

LK: Yes. I think it would be interesting to find out how far those images actually resonate with people because they are so extreme and so unlike real women whom they must encounter and they must see on some level. What is the rhetorical power of it and how long does it last? Does it last long enough to make them smile when they read that particular piece in a newspaper, but that’s all? Or does it have a deeper de-legitimising message? And how does that operate?

Chameleon: My impression is that they’re trying to undermine feminists and feminism, which I suppose could be looked on as a recognition, however implicit, of the fact that we’ve achieved something.

LK: And that we’re considered to be a threat. It always was thus. I sometimes talk to young women about the fact that we never ever were anywhere close to a majority; we were always a small minority. The question was, did you make enough noise? Did you do things that were newsworthy or challenging, and did we have a message that was interesting? But we were never, never ever I think anywhere close to a majority. You could have polls about particular issues where a majority of women would say they agreed about equal pay, they agreed about childcare, but if you asked them were they a feminist, they would say no. That’s OK. I don’t think we have to have the majority of women saying they’re feminists. We do have to have the majority of women on the same page about the direction that they want to go and the rights that they think women ought to have, as well as supporting, holding on to those rights if they’re threatened. That’s where we need the majority of women. They’re never going to be part of a movement that is so amorphous. That’s not the ambition, the ambition must be that they feel that feminist perspectives speak to them and of them.

Chameleon: We were talking about feminists being perceived as a threat. If you look at what the newspapers are printing now about abortion, using advances in medicine as an excuse to try to erode our right to terminations – to return to the backlash – it does seem like there’s a shift in the offing to try to assault the rights that we’ve managed to obtain through the work of feminist activists in the past. Do you think that’s a misreading of the situation, or do you think that there might be something to it?

LK: I think there’s always an attack on abortion and I think it’s always orchestrated by fundamentalist Christians in unholy alliances with other groups depending. I don’t think they have any chance of succeeding in a European country other than those where women still don’t have the right, such as Poland, for example, or where the right disappeared at that moment of transition. I can’t see, in any Western European country, where the right to abortion has been legislated for that it could be lost. I do think there are ways that inroads can be made into the number of weeks, the hoops that you’ve got to jump through in order to get one, how much of a right it is or how much of a bureaucratised, difficult process it’s made to be, so I think it’s possible for those groups, the Christian Right, to make it more difficult for women to achieve the right, to exercise the right and in so doing prevent some women from having an abortion, because the barriers are made so complex that women who are feeling ambivalent are deterred. Most women feel ambivalent on some levels about having an abortion. It’s not an easy decision; none of us make it without a heavy heart, so the more barriers that are placed there the more this can affect the ambivalence and shift it away from the abortion rather than towards it. So I think they can have an influence in that more subtle way. I don’t think we’re going to lose the right. Instead, the ability to exercise the right can be affected, which is a slightly different thing.

Chameleon: One of the aspects that has been highlighted in recent articles is that doctors are increasingly either invoking their conscience to refuse to perform an abortion, or they just say, “Oh well, there’s no money in it, there’s no prestige in it” or “We doctors are trying to save life, not destroy it”. The resources available for abortions could dry up.

LK: I think that’s a very convenient argument for the Right to make. I’m not sure what I think about this, because on the one hand, I think we ought to be able to require doctors to deliver the health service that they are employed to deliver. On the other hand, I would not want to go to an incredibly committed Catholic doctor and try to get him to give me an abortion, so in terms of my dignity, my integrity I don’t want to have to ask for it from that person. I think the more we move into the subtleties and complexities of the positions, the more we have to move away from absolutes and the more we have to negotiate the balance between the right that I have and that I want to exercise in a way that doesn’t stigmatise me, that doesn’t make me feel bad and what we have the right to demand of people we are paying to deliver a health service. It’s not always obvious which way to make that work. I do think that if you’re going to go into gynaecology you have to be willing to carry out this procedure. If you’re not, then don’t be a gynaecologist. There are lots of other fields of medical expertise that doctors could develop, so again we need to think in a smarter, strategic way about it. I say this because I have a father who is a fundamentalist Catholic and, although I love him very much, we do clash about issues and we have to agree to differ about them. I’m never going to change him; he’s never going to change me, so how do we reach some kind of accommodation where the things that we do share, the connections we do have aren’t destroyed by this other thing. On particular occasions sometimes they are because it’s too fraught. Maybe what we need to be focusing on is how do we let these doctors practice medicine in the ways that they are skilled to do, but don’t let them deny services to women who want them. I would say the same about contraception as well. I would say that if you’re a Catholic who doesn’t believe in contraception then you can’t practice certain kinds of medicine. There are lots of Catholics who square their conscience in their own lives, let alone in anybody else’s, in different ways and not everybody sees that as a point of doctrine, but if you do, how then do you provide appropriate health care?

Chameleon: If we turn to Sue Lees and her wonderful book Carnal Knowledge, she talks about the stranger rape myth [The reference is to the following passages from Carnal Knowledge: Rape on Trial, Revised Edition, London, The Women’s Press, 2002: “One explanation for the drop in the conviction rate seems to lie in the fact that a steadily increasing proportion of reported rapes do not conform to the stereotypical rape scenario of the psychopathological stranger rapist, seizing women in dark streets. A far higher proportion of the women reporting nowadays are, by contrast, raped by men they know, often in their own homes, and these are precisely the cases where it is most difficult to secure a conviction (…) Such acquaintance rapes have increasingly been termed ‘date rape’ by the media. Such a term carries the implication that such rapes are not as serious as ‘stranger rapes’, but there is no evidence to support this. There is, however, evidence that acquaintance rapes can be just as traumatic as stranger rape for the victim” (pxii).
And: “Most of the women were raped by men they knew. Of these, more than half were friends, colleagues, neighbours or casual acquaintances – men with whom they had never had consensual sex. Most assaults appear to have been carefully planned. Men approached the women in a variety of situations, but most commonly in the social setting of a pub, club or party. Many women were taken unsuspectingly to a place where the rapist would not be disturbed. With regard to the men the victim knew well or fairly well, first contact with the victim was most likely to be made in the man or woman’s home (60 per cent), or an inside public place (17 per cent), and least likely to be made on a date (3 per cent). Yet many people believe that a woman who goes to the home or flat of a man on the first date implies she is willing to have sex. Others believe that it is the woman’s fault if she gets herself into the situation where she is likely to be raped”, p11]. These myths are really very tenacious and persistent so how can we overcome the prejudices contained in the misconception that rape, “real rape” or whatever label people want to put on it, has only happened when it involves a stranger that jumps on you from the bushes? What can we do about counteracting that, because to my mind that’s the undercurrent in all of these articles in the Daily Mail when they cast aspersions on the victims. There’s a chronic problem of the justice system not believing the women: when it comes down to her word against his, it always seems to be his word that prevails.

LK: There are two things here. I want to come back to the “her word against his” question, but I suppose I want us to move away from just thinking about these issues in terms of myth to actually thinking about them in terms of how rape has been historically constructed, both legally and in terms of heterosexual ideology. It has been constructed as this narrow range of behaviour in order to protect the more coercive aspects of heterosexuality. We need to take seriously therefore the challenge that we’re actually making. This isn’t just about myths, this is actually about challenging the foundational principle and set of practices that maintain a particular kind of masculinity and maintain certain relations between men and women. That’s why they’re so tenacious, that’s why the beliefs and constructions are so tenacious, because they are at the foundation of intimate relations between men and women. Sometimes we remember this. Sometimes I talk about sexual violence as the fault line of patriarchy and that, in challenging it, we are exposing the ways in which gender relations are coercive, unpleasant and harmful to women. When we do it well, it’s very powerful and very disruptive to the gender order. Sometimes we forget that that’s what we’re doing and almost get caught up in only talking about rape in the criminal sense. I don’t excuse myself from this: there are ways in which doing particular kinds of research, or trying to influence law reform reflect that. You are on a terrain where at some level you have to work with the discourse as it is and attempt to push it further. Underneath, as feminists, our challenge is far deeper, far more profound. On some level the responses in the Daily Mail, from the Right come from a maybe even implicit understanding that that’s actually what’s going on, this is about saying we no longer support male entitlement. You do not have the right to sex, you don’t have the right to take it, you don’t have the right to buy it, sex should be negotiated, it should be communicative and it involves two parties who have the same rights and responsibilities. We’re not there yet, but that’s our challenge. It’s not an inconsiderable challenge and we need to remember that, we need to remember that it questions behaviour that men and boys are taught to take for granted, that they can just behave like that, it’s OK. We are in that sense a threat to privileging this kind of masculinist sexuality. One of the horrible paradoxes and ironies at the moment is that women are being invited to pretend that they can operate like this…

Chameleon: Raunch culture!

LK: …and I think it’s an illusion, but it’s also an invitation, “You can behave like men too, you can have sex with no consequences”. Unfortunately, to have sex in that way means something different still if you’re a woman than it does if you’re a man. I also know young women, young lesbians who want to call themselves bois [See Ariel Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs, Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, New York, Free Press, 2005, especially, From Womyn to Bois, pp118-138] and think that somehow being sexist about other women shows how cool they are. I find it a kind of paradoxical tragedy in a way. At the same time I don’t think it helps just to be outraged, I think we have to engage in critical conversations with them in the same way that we need to have critical conversations with young men about what does this mean? What kind of relationships do you want? I also want to ask what’s transformative about it?

Chameleon: It simply shores up the old order. It’s just you taking a slice of the privilege without contesting the privilege.

LK: Exactly. It’s some women wanting to claim male privilege in relationships with other women. That’s not very transformative. Business as usual. It’s just that the sex of one of the players has changed.

Chameleon: So what should we be doing? Let’s say a feminist mother has a boy and she wants to bring him up to respect women and have a different view of relations between men and women. She can be as careful and honest about trying to bring this boy up in a different way and yet we are embedded in this culture that does everything to undermine such an upbringing.

LK: I think we mustn’t be totally pessimistic because if everything were so totally determined there would be no feminists. Everything is not totally determined and we all know – we might not know very many – but we all know the odd good man here and there, so it is important to work out how they get where they do. One of the things I say at the end of talks to general audiences these days is that we’re never going to change the situation if we continue to excuse the worst of men and not expect the best. I give them an example of what I think the best is, and it’s the example of two sons, friends of mine who are now in their early twenties. Feminist mothers, lesbians, the boys had opportunities to reject conventional assumptions. It’s not been easy or without conflict, but there’s always been an engagement. Both of these young men are found by their mothers, when they come down on Sunday morning, sleeping on the sofa. They’ve got used to what it’s about now, but at first they asked what’s going on. The sons had been out in a mixed group with a young woman. They knew her, but not very well, she was getting really drunk. They didn’t trust their friends not to take advantage of her so they brought her home, she’s asleep in their room and they’re on the sofa. That’s the best [Chameleon smiles warmly in approval]. It ought not to be a shock, you ought not to smile, it ought to be ordinary, but it’s not. Once that’s the norm, then we can shut up [We both laugh]

Chameleon: Germaine Greer wrote an article in 2006 about rape [The reference is to Rape, The Independent on Sunday, 2^nd April 2006: “The law of rape is anachronistic, unworkable and should be struck down. Tinkering with it has resulted in a huge expenditure of resources and effort by police forces which have little enough of either, in return for no improvement whatsoever in women’s chances of redress. The fault lies in the very concept of rape itself.
The crime of rape is not committed against the victim, but against the state, the victim is Exhibit A in the case of Regina vs the rapist. As a piece of evidence, the victim must be interrogated and tested in every possible way, because rape is considered to be so grave, second only to murder.
It is not women who have decided that rape is so heinous, but men. The only weapon that counts in rape is the penis, which is conceptualised as devastating. Yet a man can do more harm with his thumb than he can with his thin-skinned penis. But it is his penis that is to him the symbol and instrument of his potency. The notion of rape is the direct expression of male phallocentricity, which women should know better than to accept.
If you talk to raped women, they usually resent all the other insults that accompanied the rape more than the unwanted presence of a penis in the vagina. The forcing of a penis into a mouth, for example, is not rape but sexual assault, yet a victim may resent it more; likewise forcible buggery, ejaculating on to the face or breasts, and so forth. In some cases, what remains in the memory and continues to perturb years after the event are the words a rapist forced his victim to say”.
Her article continues: “There is a solution, but it is not recognised as such by feminists or legislators. That is to abolish the crime of rape altogether, and instead to expand the law of assault to include sexual assault in varying degrees of gravity; so that, for example, mutilating assaults on children would be recognised as many times graver than penetration of a grown woman”]. She thinks that rape legislation as it stands at the moment should be abolished altogether. I guess that when she wrote the piece she wasn’t aware that this had already been done in Canada.

LK: Yes, Germaine is a feminist institution here and she’s sometimes brilliant and so insightful, and sometimes she doesn’t do her homework. She’s not kept pace with what’s happened. What has happened here in terms of sexual offences legislation is actually quite interesting. We’ll come back to that later. She’s making this argument that it should be assault. This was the argument that was made in the 1970s, that somehow the fact that it was a sexual offence made it different and it shouldn’t be different, we should just say it’s a crime of violence because if we say it’s a crime of violence there wouldn’t be a focus on the woman and her behaviour. Feminists in Canada, the United States and in Australia took this very seriously and campaigned to change their law and to have it made into assault, but it was a sexual assault. It’s not the same. They carried out law reforms in which they had gradations of sexual assault in the same way that we have gradations of physical assault. What’s happened is that the stranger attacks are the ones that are prosecuted at level one and the assaults by partners and ex-partners are at level two or three.

Chameleon: It should be the other way around.

LK: This distinction between real rape and not real rape is absolutely encoded in how law operates. That would be my major argument for not doing it because if you actually look at the sociological data – a lot of which they didn’t have then – what we need to remember is that we didn’t understand the dimensions of any of this – fully – in the 1970s. We didn’t know how common all of these forms of violence are, nor did we know then that the vast majority of perpetrators are men whom we know. We didn’t know that. If you look at Susan Brownmiller’s book a lot of it, not all of it, but a lot of it has a presumption that it is a stranger. We have learned and are trying to get the rest of society to catch up with us in a way. I think Germaine’s still in the debate as it was then. If you go in that direction it just solidifies these distinctions that are actually not accurate in terms of experience. If you’re raped by somebody you know it’s more likely to be repeated. Rape isn’t a one-off event in lots of women’s lives, it’s a repeated event. Rapes by ex-partners are second only to strangers in the amount of injuries there are and in the amount of times that a weapon is used. At the level of meaning, there’s an abuse of trust, a betrayal of trust, how could somebody that you did at some point love do that to you? As you say, arguably, if we are going to start talking about seriousness and relative harm, actually it’s reversed. I don’t particularly want to do that, I want to follow what a friend of mine in Bosnia said, which is: “Rape is rape is rape”. She carried on by saying that the only difference in war is that your government wants you to talk about it. When the war’s over they want you to shut up like at every other time. I think we have to say that and I don’t want to lose the word. We decided here we didn’t want to lose sight of the fact that it was a gender-specific crime. Some people would say that we fudged it, I would say we were smart. We’d already recognised male rape in law, so in our new Sex Offences Act, which came in in 2004, rape is defined as something that is done with a penis, so it’s committed by men. They can rape women, they can rape men, they can rape girls, they can rape boys; it’s a gender-specific crime in that it is done with the penis. Some would argue that this reifies the phallus, whereas I would say that we live in a gender order where it is already reified and that’s part of the reason why it means what it means. I don’t think you change that by removing protections and meanings from law and saying, “Oh, it’s not that serious, it’s not that important”. We also created another crime called sexual assault by penetration, which has the same maximum penalty and is about using instruments or fingers, not a penis, basically. Female perpetrators could be found guilty of that offence, but more importantly I think, or as importantly, where you have a regime of sexual assaults by a particular person you can charge them with two offences. They can be charged with rape and they can be charged with sexual assault by penetration. Where a child, for example, doesn’t know whether it was a penis or not, the offender can be charged with sexual assault by penetration. I think we’ve created something quite useful in the complex issue of how charges are made and how you mount a prosecution, but we also wanted to hold onto the word rape and that it’s a gender-specific offence. I will be very happy when it’s no longer necessary to do that, but so long as sex is used as a form of masculine entitlement and power over that’s the reality that we’re in.

Chameleon: It used to be the common sense view that the rapist was somebody who hadn’t had sex for a while so he was boiling over with pent-up biological drives, whereas rape has nothing whatsoever to do with that, it’s got to do with power, domination and humiliation, is that not true?

LK: I think sometimes it’s got to do with precisely that, whilst sometimes it’s just to do with a sense of entitlement. It’s certainly got nothing to do with a biological necessity in the embodied sense. It is to do with men understanding that discourse and using it to justify their behaviour, which is a very powerful element in the construction of a certain kind of masculinity. I would suspect that if we carried out a project to look at why some men think of sex as an entitlement – or not – it’s linked to the extent to which they buy into that construction of male sexuality. Men who don’t, men who are very clear that it’s in their control are looking for mutuality, they are looking for an erotics of mutuality. It doesn’t have to be bland, but it is about mutuality and negotiation. I think we would find that the extent to which men buy into that explanation and that way of thinking about sexuality is then how they come to act through this sense of necessity and entitlement. If we think of rape again as a continuum, there are obviously the ones where it’s planned, the rapists behave like a sexual terrorist in precisely the way that they scout everything out, and have decided exactly what they’re going to do, how they’re going to do it and who they’re going to target. Then you also have the partners who are avenging themselves where rape is a kind of punishment and then you’ve got men who are out on the town, they’ve decided before they went out that they were going to get their end away and they either engage in kinds of flirting with particular women, expecting that to be the outcome, or they target someone – and they do this more and more I would say – who is getting drunk. They may encourage and enable her to get drunk by buying her drinks, or they may just let her pay herself to be relatively out of it. Sometimes they wait until women leave, they follow them home, they might even offer to help them home. Sometimes they just engage with the women before they leave. That isn’t planned so systematically and if for some reason whoever they first decide might be a target appears not to be after all, there’s no obsessiveness about it, they’ll just move on and think, “OK, that didn’t work, who else?” It’s a matter of what’s available and easy where I can find someone who’s just going to let me have sex with them. They don’t think that actually what they’re doing is taking advantage and coercive. They don’t. Again, I think this is one of the paradoxes that we are having to encounter, that women are claiming the right to drink, be drunk – and I’m not saying they shouldn’t – but the paradox of it is that it then can leave you vulnerable in that you are not as in control of yourself. You may not be reading cues that you would do if you weren’t affected by alcohol and men can decide that they’re going to take advantage of that situation. There is a paradox for women in that the world has changed and we’ve changed it to mean that we have more access to public space, that we don’t think that femininity precludes us behaving in these ways, but those powerful constructs of acceptable femininity are still there. They haven’t gone away, so if something happens then they come into play and we then become responsible for what’s happened. There’s a fantastic piece of work by a Swedish researcher called Stina Jeffner – it was her PhD – unfortunately it never got published, but she did this work with young Swedish men and women where she demonstrated that actually alcohol increased men’s space for action, that being drunk meant that they had more possibilities to act, they would be excused, whereas it had precisely the opposite effect for women. It narrowed their space for action, so that if they were drunk they were considered more responsible, not less. In other words it’s not just alcohol, it’s that alcohol has gendered meanings and, unfortunately, possibly gender consequences as well. So it’s not just alcohol, it’s what alcohol means if you’re a man or if you’re a woman.

Chameleon: A double standard. So if something goes wrong and a man rapes a woman and by some miracle it actually gets as far as court, this whole ideology of males being active and females being passive comes into play, certainly for the judge and the jury I would imagine. It seems to me that the world has moved on and we have staked our claim to access to public spaces, yet the old definition of what constitutes a “respectable woman” persists and there is a class element to it as well.

LK: I think there is, I think there definitely is. There are also really complex legal issues at stake. In many European countries, for example, the definition of rape is to do with force. Actually if you’re drunk you are less likely to resist, which is what’s read as the evidence of force. How the crime is constructed in law provides this space for action for men. In England, Scotland, Ireland and Cyprus, it’s defined more in terms of consent. The problem there is that if you’re very drunk and the lawyer asks, “Well, did you or did you not give consent?” and you reply, “I can’t remember”, one of the legal strands has gone. Part of what we were trying to do when the law was reformed was to say that being intoxicated to a certain level meant that you no longer had the capacity to consent. They weren’t prepared to go with that except in instances where someone else administered the alcohol or the drugs to mean that you were incapacitated. We tried to say that that was illogical. It can’t be a matter of who gives you the intoxicant that determines whether you have the capacity to consent or not. If you don’t have the capacity here, and you consume exactly the same here, but you chose to do it, the resulting incapacity is the same. I think many lawyers operate on a formal logic basis and they don’t want to engage with what we want to talk about, the communicative model of sexuality. For us, it isn’t just about rape law, it’s about what kind of sexuality we are interested in creating, and we’re interested in creating one where you do actually communicate with the other person, and one in which you cannot presume the outcome of that communication. Part of what I find revealing and deeply, deeply disturbing is that in all these cases that have come up through the courts here there has been a huge discussion about the woman, binge-drinking and so on, but never, not once that I have seen in either the courts or in the newspapers has the question been asked as to why is it possible for a man, who has never met someone, they don’t have a relationship, this is not a date, on what basis can he presume that it’s OK to have sex with someone when she’s totally drunk and he doesn’t know her? On what basis of human communication is that acceptable? Is it not exploitation? What really disturbs me is that nobody asks that question. It’s taken as given that if a man sees a woman who’s drunk, he’s immediately going to get an erection and going to have sex with her. I think men ought to be writing in and saying “This is offensive”.

Chameleon: Yes, it’s an insult to men – it’s every bit as much an insult to them as it is a gross travesty for women.

LK: We need men who actually pick up on those silences and engage in public discourse about it and say, “Excuse me, that’s not the kind of man I want to be and I don’t think it’s OK to behave like that”.

Chameleon: So presumably you were every bit as dismayed as I was when this Sir Igor Judge said he didn’t want a grid system [the reference is to Steve Doughty’s report in the Daily Mail, 27^th March 2007, Labour's rape law plans are thrown into turmoil as top judge declares…It's not always rape if a woman is drunk: “[Sir Igor] said: ‘If, through drink, or for any other reason, the complainant has temporarily lost her capacity to choose whether to have intercourse, she is not consenting. Subject to questions about the defendant’s state of mind, if the intercourse takes place, this would be rape.
‘However, where the complainant has voluntarily consumed even substantial quantities of alcohol, but nevertheless remains capable of choosing whether or not to have intercourse, and in drink agrees to do so, this would not be rape’.
The judge said it would not be right to lay down rules – ’some kind of grid system’ – that say a woman who has reached a set level of drunkenness is incapable of consent.
He added: ‘Experience shows that different individuals have a greater or lesser capacity to cope with alcohol.
‘Provisions intended to protect women from sexual assaults might very well be conflated into a system which would provide patronising interference with the right of autonomous adults to make personal decisions for themselves’”] introduced to the law about capacity to consent, deliberating on one particular case.

LK: It was the case in Wales, wasn’t it? [which gained notoriety when the prosecution dropped it, arguing that his client had been so drunk that she could not remember whether she had given consent] I think you’re always going to get reactionary judges and I also increasingly think – and I don’t want to get into accounts of despair here – but I increasingly ask the question whether adversarial legal systems are equipped to deal with sexual violence. That’s part of the reason for wanting to do this European study, to take a serious look at whether inquisitorial systems fare any better and whether they are less prone to playing on gender stereotypes and constructions of acceptable femininity. This is a very serious question that we need to explore, about whether the adversarial process rewards the playing on stereotypes and blaming women. Actually, we know it does. Jennifer Temkin has interviewed barristers twice now and basically they – the honest ones – admit they’re looking for something, anything, that will question her credibility because then they can say it’s one word against another and we can’t trust her word – they know that’s exactly what they’re doing.

Chameleon: How can they sleep at night? I certainly couldn’t!

LK: I hope they don’t! They justify it through this formal logic, that their job is to give the best defence possible to their client and that it’s the job of the prosecution to prove the case. They justify it through a formal logic rather than an ethics. Jennifer Temkin has said that maybe what we need to start doing is talking about an ethics of defence and of prosecution, an ethics of legal practice because she thinks that’s the only way to move it into a different realm. I think there is a problem about the formalism of the law and I definitely think there is a problem about adversarial systems because I do believe they reward the invocation of prejudice and stereotype. That in a way is where the role of the Daily Mail – to come back to where we began – is actually the most insidious because what it is doing is reinforcing these models of masculinity and femininity in a manner that individuals might not accept in that particular case, but it reawakens them, it makes sure they’re not abandoned, so that when they’re invoked in the court case they retain force. Somebody has done a really interesting study of how speech and rhetoric is used in courtrooms in the US. I don’t think that prosecutors pick up on these things sufficiently because what they say happens is that the defence uses a language of voluntarism all the time in relation to women…

Chameleon: Or passivity – the defendant will say “Oh, her knickers fell to the floor” rather than “I ripped her knickers off” [Here I was adapting from Susan Ehrlich’s superb Representing Rape, Language and Sexual Consent, London, Routledge, 2001, ‘My shirt came off…I gather that I took it off’ The accused’s grammar of non-agency, pp36-61, the source I was fumbling for]

LK: It’s not the defendants that do it, it’s the lawyers; the lawyers give them that construction and the defendants then say, “Yes, that’s what happened”. The agency – and again this is a horrible paradox of feminism, where we’ve wanted to invoke women’s agency, and all the agency in legal cases is focused on the woman and there’s hardly any agency in relation to the man. I think we need to start thinking that way about prostitution too. If we only think about women and we think about female agency – selling sex – you look through it through a particular lens, but if you start looking at the agency of the male buyers and at what does it mean that they feel entitled to do this, what does it mean in terms of gender relations that it’s increasingly legitimised? It’s considered cool because celebrities do it, etc. What does that mean in terms of male agency and masculinity? This is not just about women as actors, it’s actually about gender relations and it’s about what it also means in terms of the larger gender order. We get caught up in looking from only one direction.

Chameleon: If we talk about the moral panic surrounding women and binge-drinking, would you agree that what lies behind this bout of anxiety about women’s drinking habits is a struggle over traditional definitions of “appropriate” feminine behaviour? Is it an attempt to control women’s behaviour?

LK: I think that’s one dimension of it. Another dimension of it is women’s ambivalence about heterosexual relationships and about trying to do femininity differently; drinking is not called Dutch courage for no reason. We all know this, it does act as a kind of relaxant, it enables you to have slightly more confidence. All the research data tells us that a proportion of young women are having sex when they’re drunk that they do regret afterwards. The public lie is that they all then go and report it as rape to the police – no, they don’t. If they did, we’d have a hundred thousand, a million complaints. We don’t: we have thirteen thousand complaints. The amount of unpleasant sex that women experience massively exceeds that, so no they don’t do that. Despite all the suggestions to the contrary, they do have ambivalent sexual encounters that are made both more possible and more forgettable by drinking. There are complicated things going on and young women are trying to re-negotiate, position themselves differently in public and in heterosexual relationships. It’s not simple and it’s not without contradiction. Sometimes alcohol can be a way to paper over the cracks. One of the things I’ve learned as I’ve got older is that when the Right picks something up, there’s normally some grain of truth, or resonance that it’s important for us to understand and engage with. It wouldn’t work as political rhetoric if it didn’t connect to something. It’s actually trying to work out what it connects to and how we might understand that differently, how we might have a different take on what we think is going on, but it’s not that nothing’s going on.

Chameleon: In The Guardian [3^rd April 2007] I recently read an article about the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs report saying that women shouldn’t go to pubs and parties on their own. Would it be way too much of an exaggeration to get the feeling at least that this is tantamount to imposing a curfew on women?

LK: There’s a danger of over-interpreting some of this because we have this 24-hour media now where they just try to say something different and they fall back on clichés. That’s not to say we shouldn’t object to it and we shouldn’t expose the illogic of it and the stupidity of it, but I also think we shouldn’t necessarily read it as some kind of coordinated campaign against women. Mostly it’s bogus as well, because most women don’t go to parties on their own. If it wasn’t the case that sometimes you didn’t leave with the same people you came with then you wouldn’t be having a social life anyway – why bother going in the first place if something interesting isn’t going to happen? Everybody knows that from their own lives and one of the things that really irritates me about all of this is when you have journalists writing these things when you know that they will have gone to a party themselves with someone and not left with them. Also I know that many lawyers who defend rapists – and these days, the clients seem to prefer to have female barristers defending them – you know that these lawyers will have got really drunk, staggeringly drunk themselves. You can be in parts of London on a Friday evening and the pubs and wine bars are full of lawyers from particular firms and they get off their face. Something could happen. Their privilege is that they earn enough money to be able to afford a taxi home. None of us know whether in this particular encounter we’re going to be safe or not. They use these tactics against women when actually on some level – I don’t know how they square this – they know that they could have been in that situation themselves.

Chameleon: Going back to the continuum of violence, the argument that women shouldn’t go to parties on their own conveniently overlooks the fact that women constantly modify their behaviour because of the endemic threat of violence. We’re acculturated to believe that there is endemic violence, that we constantly run the risk of it, that we shouldn’t walk home after dark or go home via a safe route and not along the abandoned canal tow path. Women are continually modifying their behaviour aren’t they?

LK: Yes and no! Some young women – and I’ve done it myself at certain periods in my life- have just reacted by saying “No, I refuse to do this, I refuse to be controlled, I want to do this!” I think there are also women who do incredibly risky things because it’s a way of dealing with and challenging their own fear, or maybe their own history of violence. We do different things at different times. For me it has to do with how I’m feeling at the time, if I’m feeling really tired, if I’m preoccupied. I used to live somewhere in London that felt a bit risky and I had about a fifteen minute walk from the Tube station to the flat I stayed in. If I was coming home late and I was feeling preoccupied and I was feeling a bit jumpy, I would get in a cab. Lots of evenings I wouldn’t because I felt OK. My partner teaches self-defence and she says that men can and do read our body language – we read each other’s body language, we know this. That’s not to blame women, but it is to say we monitor our own context, our own sense of well-being, our own sense of safety and I think we adapt – I certainly do and I’m sure lots of other women do too. We adapt to how we are at any particular point in time as well as to the context that we’re in. If it’s a context that you know really well you can read it relatively easily. A lot of sexual assaults seem to happen when women are away or on holiday and it’s actually to do with not being able to read that situation and not having your safety mechanisms able to operate on an almost unconscious level. I suspect predatory men read that too.

Chameleon: I just resent the fact that we feel we have to modify our behaviour just to be able to live a semi-normal life.

LK: Indeed.

Chameleon: Free from the threat of violence, free from the feeling that violence is imminently about to be visited upon you.

LK: Some women would say that we can choose not to. Not everybody has that freedom in the same way. I can’t do that, I’ve lived my life working on these issues, I have stories. Certainly when I did my PhD and I interviewed women who lived in the same small town and rural areas that I lived in street names, place names actually had stories attached to them of violence that women had experienced in those places. These were just the few that I knew about, so I can’t ignore it, but I’m not totally controlled by it either. I refuse to be totally controlled by it, but I also can’t pretend that I am not aware of the realities. I think the more you realise that it’s in the everydayness of life that these things happen the less I feel troubled by being in the public sphere, although if I hear steps behind me I am alert to paying attention to who it is. It then becomes about where do you live? Who do you live with? Who do you share your life with? These other kinds of questions. Whom do you choose to trust with certain kinds of intimacies? There are not that many men in my life to whom I feel able to offer that kind of trust. That’s one of the costs and it’s a cost to men. That’s one of the challenges for men of good faith, if they really want to have strong relationships with women and with feminists they are going to have to take responsibility for changing this context.

Chameleon: Why should it always have to be women who have to modify their behaviour, why shouldn’t men have to, frankly, since they are the ones who commit these crimes in most cases?

LK: I think some of them do modify their behaviour, but they are a very small minority, so you’re not that likely to encounter them on your way home [laughs]

Chameleon: Let’s talk a little bit about “date rape” [The following passage from Sue Lees is illuminating: “Another misconception is that so-called ‘date rapes’ are often conceptualised as occurring as a result of men misreading the woman’s signals or not realising that she was not consenting, or that women have sex consensually and then regret it the night after and cry rape. We know that some men claim to misread signals even when the woman has said ‘no’, or in clearly premeditated cases where the rapist has locked the door. Some rapists have a distorted belief system – and even following conviction are in denial, continuing to maintain that the woman wanted it, just in the way that some paedophiles believe children wanted it”, pxii]

LK: Another concept that we should not use, we should get rid of. It comes out of a particular survey carried out in the US by Mary Koss in the late 80s, which was with US women college students, who reported quite a lot of coercive sexuality, including with men with whom they were somehow involved on some level. It doesn’t translate, though, across to other contexts. We tracked 3,500 cases for a piece of work called A Gap or a Chasm? which examines attrition in reported rape cases in England and Wales and I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of cases which were in the context of a date. That wasn’t what acquaintance rapes were; they were much more about men targeting women in bars or at parties. They hadn’t met before that evening, so it was not a date. We started to talk about them and code them as what’s called “Stranger Two”. Stranger One is a total stranger, whilst Stranger Two is someone whom you met within 24 hours of the rape happening. It’s one of those funny little things that you think of as an achievement as a feminist that the Metropolitan Police now use that coding in their data as well. It’s much more accurate. These are not people you know and there wasn’t any presumption of intimacy either – I don’t think there should be even on a date, but that is how that phrase is read, you have a date with someone because of some kind of erotic interest and you want to see whether it’s shared or not. That’s not true of these situations and calling them date rapes means that people misunderstand – it’s not the misreading by men of signals, but our misreading of what was going on through the term “date rape”. I would encourage us to not use it. Get rid of it! There’s a woman called Aileen McColgan who wrote a little book called Taking the Date out of Rape and we should indeed do this.

Chameleon: What about Katie Roiphe’s position in The Morning After? [London, Hamish Hamilton, 1994]

LK: Again, you see, I think this is an interesting issue about research and feminist analysis, because part of what she’s taking issue with, but doing in a very populist way, is drawn from Nigel Gilbert – her book is based on his work even though she doesn’t say so – which comes back to this survey Mary Koss carried out. Part of what they’re taking issue with is that Mary Koss defined as rape incidents that women didn’t define as such. What they neglect to tell us is that the analytical definition that Mary Koss used was the one in the law, so this isn’t even feminists talking about the continuum and saying, “Well, there’s rape and there’s coercive sex and there’s pressurised sex”, which is what I did in my PhD, because I was working with how women defined what happened to them. I was working with the experiential definitions that women use, which is not the same as a legal definition, which is also not the same as an analytical definition that you might use in study. You can use all of those legitimately, they all have a relevance, but to pretend, as Katie Roiphe and Nigel Gilbert do, that the only really valid definition is the experiential one, and because women minimise and don’t label sex that they didn’t want as rape then it’s not, when actually, in terms of the letter of the law, it is. What bothers me about it is I think they are disingenuous in the arguing with these cases. It’s not to deny that there is an issue here about definitions, which definition and why do so many women not call what happens to them rape? It’s a valid issue. We need to talk about it and we need to debate it. It is also valid to talk about under what conditions in research should you define something that someone hasn’t labelled as rape themselves as rape in the research? What does it mean to do that? Absolutely fine question, that’s different from saying these are advocacy numbers, feminists are making it up, they’re drawing the lines to include behaviour that isn’t problematic. That’s not what is happening, but that is the impression that is given. One of the things that I really try to do – we’ve just started an MA in women and child abuse; I don’t think there is one anywhere else in Europe – one of the things we are trying to do is to enable students, many of whom work in women’s services, are activists, to understand the complexity of numbers, what it means to say it this way and what it means to say it that way. Sometimes we can use statistics as advocacy numbers. For example, in our very first piece of research in the unit looking at child sexual abuse we found that one in two young women reported some form of intimate intrusion before reaching the age of eighteen. That did not mean they were all sexually abused by their fathers. It was flashing, it was being pressured to have sex by a boyfriend, a whole range of things and a much, much smaller number of them, I would say probably one in sixty, one in seventy, reported ongoing abuse by an adult male family member. We quote these figures, one in two, one in four, one in whatever as if it means serious ongoing abuse always and it doesn’t. It’s exactly the same with domestic violence figures. Yes, one in two, one in three, one in four in whatever survey in different countries have had an incident at some point in their lives. That’s not the same as the pattern of coercive control, which is what I mean by domestic violence. There are complicated issues about what these measurements mean and we need to be more accurate and more careful when we invoke them, being clear that we do so in an accurate and not an inaccurate way. The figures do say something accurate, but we sometimes stretch that to mean something that it doesn’t.

Chameleon: Or our opponents, let’s say, or the media will pick up on a statistic, if you say, sixty per cent of young women under the age of eighteen have suffered a form of abuse it might be reported on in a way that distorts it. What I’m driving at is that it is not necessarily the fault of the researcher that the media latches on to a figure and takes it out of context to try to discredit the argument behind the figure.

LK: I think that can happen. It’s less likely to happen if we are more careful about how we use the figures, so I wouldn’t say “abuse”, for example because I think people understand abuse in a particular way. If you say “intimate intrusion”, it’s not a term that is commonly used and that has a common understanding. When people hear the word abuse they do think it’s somebody they know and that it takes place more than once. It’s not flashing, for example. Unless we’ve got the space to explain what it is we mean…

Chameleon: The media don’t always give us the space, though, does it?

LK: No, that’s true, but I think we also don’t always want to make the explanation because it’s not such a strong case. Again it’s complicated [laughs]. If they’re picking up on something, it’s powerful and it’s having a resonance it is because something is going on. People do say, “Well, if it’s one in two, why haven’t half my friends told me stories about being raped by their fathers?” Of course, half your friends aren’t going to because it isn’t one in two that are raped by their fathers. There’s a way in which we need to think about how we sometimes invoke statistics, which ends up having the opposite effect. It’s not raising awareness; it’s actually undermining our message because what people think is, “Well, that doesn’t make sense to me, so it can’t be true”. The rejection isn’t just a gesture of bad faith; it’s sometimes that how they understand it isn’t true. For me, it’s a responsibility on us to endeavour – you can’t always do it, but to endeavour not to overclaim and to be clear about what it is that these figures do and don’t mean so that we’re not unintentionally creating a resistance to the message.

Chameleon: What are the worst defects of today’s rape legislation and how can they be remedied?

LK: I don’t think it’s the legislation that’s the problem. Had you asked me that question five years ago, I would have had problems with the legislation. I actually think we reworked our legislation in quite an interesting way and created a whole raft of offences. We removed all the offences that were only homosexual offences, for example. We’ve got a series of offences that are offences against children. We’ve got sexual exploitation offences. We’ve got certain kinds of protection for people with disabilities where they haven’t got capacity to consent. We’ve got offences that are about breach of trust where you are exploiting your position as a worker or a carer. I haven’t seen an evaluation of the legislation yet, but I don’t think the problem lies with the legislation. The problem is with implementation and these narrow understandings of what rape is and isn’t. The problem is that police – not all, but in the majority of cases – start from what we call a culture of scepticism. They’re looking for anything that gives them a reason to not believe, which is not how they approach investigating other crimes. You approach investigating a crime in such a way that, until you have reason to believe otherwise, you think that it has happened and you look for the evidence that supports the account of the complainant. That’s not what happens in rape cases. If we’re talking about myths, one of the massive myths is that a much higher proportion of rape complaints are false compared to other crimes. Why would any woman or man report that they had been sexually assaulted, undergo a forensic medical examination and be treated in the way that too many are treated? I know that it happens, but it mainly happens because of mental health problems. In reality, the majority of complaints are about something that has happened. Whether it qualifies as rape under the law is for the police and the prosecutors and, ultimately, the court to determine. The vast majority of these reports are about something that has happened. We have interviewed police officers who say – and these are specialists who are supposed to be trained – where they say a third, fifty per cent and one even said seventy-five per cent of complaints are false. How can they possibly be carrying out a proper investigation if that’s the place that they begin from? That’s the first thing and the second thing is that because this concept of real rape is so powerful, the whole way in which investigations and evidence is thought about is through a stranger rape model. That’s not how this case is going to play out today, certainly under our new legislation and with DNA. Alice Vachss was a prosecutor in the US and says there are three defences for rape: it didn’t happen, it wasn’t me, she wanted it. DNA and all sorts of other technical advancements mean it’s much less likely that you can say it didn’t happen or it wasn’t me, so basically your defence is she wanted it, she consented. I don’t think that the whole investigative process and how you think about collecting evidence and presenting the case in court is understood through the lens of it’s going to be a consent defence. I would say – and we’ve been saying for a while – that actually they need to rethink the whole way they do this, start again from the very beginning. They know how to do it when you’re talking about a stranger, they know how to do that, but the majority of cases don’t involve a stranger. So start again and think about the whole process that she knows the person and/or they’re going to plead consent. What evidence, then, are you looking for? How are you going to present the case as the prosecution in the court that gives credibility to her account? If all they’re thinking about all the way through is what discredits her they’re never ever going to arrive at a position where they know how to present the story in court that is to her credit. I think it’s about starting at the beginning and rethinking investigation and prosecution. It’s not so much about the legislation; it’s about those processes that enable the legislation to function.

Chameleon: Presumably what you’ve been talking about, the fact that the police almost instinctively disbelieve what the woman says is one of the reasons why the conviction rate is so low.

LK: It’s not instinctive – there’s a book by a woman called Patricia Yancey Martin from the US called Rape Work in which she talks about how institutions almost require that their staff adopt this sceptical attitude and that you need to change it at the institutional level if there’s going to be a different approach. What’s different about women’s services is that, institutionally, they absolutely don’t require scepticism; they almost require the opposite, which is why women experience them so differently – because they enter into a culture of belief. It ought to be possible to create a culture of belief in the police and medicine, which is only suspended when they have strong reasons to do so. We’re talking about ways in which institutions reproduce this scepticism. It’s not about the individuals and their attitudes only, or even especially. It’s actually about how institutions require or reproduce those orientations. That’s what we need to change. We need to change the institutional cultures that support or require this way of doing things.

Chameleon: That brings us back to the feedback loop, as it were, of assumptions within the culture in the broader sense, for example the 2005 Amnesty International survey [One third of the people polled believed that the woman was partly or wholly responsible for being raped is she had behaved flirtatiously. Yvonne Roberts responded in an article in The Independent on Sunday (27th November 2005), Asking for it. Why do so many women think rape is a woman's fault?: “The truth about rape, of course, is that whether women ‘ask’ for it or not, it happens. The ‘justice gap’ is widening. In the 1970s, a third of reported rapes resulted in a conviction. Now, more women are reporting sexual assault, including rape, but the conviction rate has dropped dramatically. In 2003, 11,867 rapes were reported; 1,649 went to trial and only 629 resulted in a conviction. However, there is cause for optimism. The little reported aspect of the Amnesty International survey is that the majority of the public believe only one person is to blame for rape – the rapist”] on rape where so many, dismayingly many, of the respondents still believe that it was the woman’s fault, that she was to blame. I read an eye-catching phrase in a newspaper article somewhere: “Alcohol is the new short skirt”.

LK: It was Julie Bindel who wrote that. She’s good at those.

Chameleon: How can we tackle this persistent attitude that women are somehow “asking for it” no matter what they do?

LK: In no one way. There’s no one way to do this as it is about culture change. It is about changing the discursive construction of everything – not just rape, but femininity and heterosexuality. They’re all connected. I wish I could say – and this is one of the irritating things about being an academic – there never is a simple answer any more because you see how everything is connected to everything else and if you make an inroad here, the something else over here will prevent it from being as effective as it might have been. I just think that we’re here for the long haul and it is about feminists engaging on every level. It matters that popular culture is re-sexualised. It matters that what Angela McRobbie calls the “new sexual contract” – her argument is that, in return for a recognition of equality in the worlds of work and education, there’s been a re-sexualisation and re-subordination of women in the more private, intimate sphere. Then you’ve got Ariel Levy’s raunch culture idea, so we have to engage in critique on that level whilst, simultaneously, trying to change the institutions and the laws, taking educational programmes into schools and youth clubs and at the same time inviting men of good faith to lend their voices too, recognising that at particular points, in certain historical contexts you make progress and then it feels like it’s either halted or you’ve moved back a little bit, or sideways. This isn’t a linear process – it would be a lot easier if it was! [Laughs] It is a bit like shifting sands that we’re having to negotiate. I suppose the most important thing is that there continue to be groups of women who call themselves feminists and who commit themselves to trying to make the world better for women. When I say that I mean I don’t think it’s OK to call yourself a feminist and that just be about your own personal achievement. However much it’s important for women to achieve things, that to me isn’t sufficient to be a feminist, for which you need to be interested in the lot of all women and be doing something to bring about change on that more social level. And to be reflective about women who have less privilege and fewer options than you. And how their situation can sometimes even be made worse by some of the ways that privileged women operate and argue their case. I think there are ways we can be, for example, judgemental of young women that have all sorts of class and maybe also race prejudice in them. That’s not to say there isn’t a conversation to be had about what does it mean that young women dress in particular ways, behave in particular ways in public, accommodate this re-sexualisation. Many conversations and engagements are needed, but in a way that respects that they’re trying to manage contradictions in the same way that others of us do in different contexts.

Chameleon: Let’s move back to the media. Do you think that a programme like The Verdict was a valuable exercise leading to serious debate or did it simply indulge in empty sensationalism, reinforcing already entrenched negative attitudes towards rape victims?

LK: We actually had two TV programmes: one called Consent [Channel Four] that was more like a real jury and The Verdict, which was obviously celebrities. I actually think the programme Consent was very interesting in the sense that we’re not allowed to do research on juries in this country. We’ve got one piece of research by a woman called Vanessa Munro, which has been simulating jury deliberations, but we imagine that we know that these prejudices are circulating. What the programme did was evidentially show us that was absolutely what was happening. It showed us that they brought all their prejudices into the room, they brought all their ideas about acceptable femininity and ways that men are excused bad behaviour and a lot of it wasn’t to do with the facts of the case. It exposed the kind of delusions that the higher echelons of the British judiciary operate under in terms of how they eulogise the jury and the common sense of the jury. I don’t think that was a bad thing and I suspect that we’ll read various student dissertations where they use it as source material. OK, fine. The Verdict, however, was, I think, much more cynical. It wasn’t, I don’t think, a serious attempt at exploration. It was one of these things that happens in TV: somebody leaked the fact that the other channel was going to do this, so they thought, “We’ll trump them, we’ll do it better, we’ll have celebrities”. These are people who perform for the camera. These are people who have agents. These agents know if they adopt X position, it’s going to get reported in newspapers, so I have no sense of how authentic their responses were at all. How much of it was a particular deliberate and constructed performance? We don’t know. I don’t think then that’s as useful, because you don’t know whether what you’ve got is celebrity acting or engagement with this particular account. What I think is interesting in both cases was the extent to which female jurors felt that they couldn’t find the man guilty, but knew that harm had been done and felt totally conflicted by the decision that they reached. I’ll tell you the reason why I thought the Consent programme was particularly good was that at the end, when they reached the verdict of not guilty, as the credits rolled, you were shown the scenario acted out as the woman had recounted it, not how he had recounted it. What it showed you was: this happened, it happened in the way she said it happened, but he was found not guilty. I thought it was a powerful message, a very powerful message. I’m not of the opinion that there should be no fictional representation of these things, but as with what we talked about earlier concerning how lawyers operate, there needs to be a certain ethics about it and I do think one of them made a serious attempt to be ethical and the other did not have that at the foundation of what they were doing. They were making reality TV, celebrity TV. They were not using the medium of television to explore a complicated, serious issue. However, that’s not to say I expect all TV programmes to do things right, but I expect them to make a serious attempt and an ethical attempt. One programme did that and one didn’t.

Chameleon: Now that we have the Internet and you can download every variety of humanly, or inhumanly imaginable, pornography in endless quantities, do you think that the ready availability of pornography has an impact on the number of rapes by fostering a rape mentality?

LK: I don’t know whether it does that or not. I am fairly certain that it has a very bad effect on already damaged men. They can use it to fuel obsessions and hatreds. They are a small number. I think, much more insidiously, it has an impact on what men think heterosexual sex is and how they understand women and women’s engagement with sex. To me, that’s not just about the number of sexual offences we’ve got, it’s about the quality of sexual engagement and encounters between women and men. I think it gives men a weird sense of women’s sexuality; I think it gives them a weird sense of men’s sexuality. I’m not any longer convinced that this is just a reinforcement of one kind of masculinity. I think it can actually make a lot of men feel uneasy and insecure, but they’re not allowed to talk about it. There’s no space to talk about that. So, for example, slightly to one side of this, you have all those Internet sites where they can rate women they’ve paid for sex. The men who try to post on those sites who are ambivalent and who are saying “I’m not sure I really liked it; I thought it would make me feel like this – it didn’t” are discouraged from posting again. These communities of men who are interested in the sex industry, in paying for sex and pornography don’t want other men saying “We’re not sure about this; this feels unsatisfactory”. We are just doing a project at the moment where we’re talking to men who pay for sex. We didn’t expect to have so many of them phoning up to confess, to say how bad they feel about it and how uneasy they feel about it. It doesn’t fit in with a particular feminist construction of predatory men, but actually these men are interesting because there’s a possibility for change there, if we engage in a particular way. I feel the same about porn on the Internet. What bothers me is that, certainly in this country, we have very poor sex education in schools; young people don’t get it as a right, so some might get nothing. Most of what they get is what we call “plumbing and prevention”, it’s not about relationships, it’s not about complexities, it’s not about contradictions and that’s what most of them want to talk about. And so where are they going for sex education? Porn on the net. I think the implications of that are huge for both young men and young women. I don’t know whether what we’re doing is producing a generation of young people for whom sex is solely performance and technicality, something you should do and want and perform at all times and then what kind of sexualities we’re going to be confronting. So for me, I’m much more interested and concerned about its broader cultural meanings and consequences than whether in a particular instance it’s implicated in a sexual assault or not.

Chameleon: Do you think that pornography creates a kind of “background tolerance” of rape through portraying women as “ever ready”, like the battery.

LK: I think certain kinds of pornography legitimise rape and certain kinds of it eroticise rape and if men get caught up in orchestrating their own sexual desires and sexual practices through that, then that’s very problematic, clearly. A significant proportion of it purports to be consensual – fair enough, but what about the representation? Whether it was consensual in the making of it is a different point from the representation depicting consensuality and it’s a particular kind of consensuality, which is about these women who can’t get enough. It’s also about these men who are constantly ready and able and well-endowed. I increasingly am not convinced – I never really was, but I’m not convinced by this argument that, well, it’s just fantasy and everybody knows it’s fantasy because you can see that in the guys who pay for sex. On one level they know that they’re paying for a performance, but on another level they believe it – they’re paying to believe that they’re good at doing sex. They’re paying to believe that they give pleasure, but if you push them a little bit about it, they go, “Well, maybe, but I really think she had a good time”. This idea that we make clear distinctions between fantasy and reality doesn’t work because you’re paying for a fantasy that then allows you to construct your sense of self in a more positive way than before you made that payment. It’s has material consequences in the way you think about yourself, how you perceive yourself to be. How do these men then engage where payment is not an issue, where you have to be a human being, where you have to negotiate, you have to confront the fact that maybe the person isn’t going to find it pleasurable that just because you’re doing something doesn’t mean that somebody else likes it. That’s the complicated part and I think a lot of men find it quite difficult. There’s that horrible thing, chilling, in Pornified by Pamela Paul [New York, Henry Holt, 2005] where some of the young men whom she interviewed are very clear that they’ve become quite obsessive about accessing porn and not certain about it, but some of them are actually saying they prefer sex – and they call it sex, they don’t call it masturbation – through porn than with a real person because they can just get their relief and they don’t have to engage on a communicative or an emotional level. Women have always said that men are less emotionally literate – and that’s putting it nicely – but there is a real possibility that what porn does is reinforce this emotional illiteracy.

Chameleon: They just feel that they couldn’t be bothered with the complications of involvement with a flesh and blood human being rather than this classic, surgically enhanced fantasy creature that bears no relation to the saggy boobs and stretch marks most women are.

LK: And most women are complicated and they’re sometimes bad-tempered, irritable and have expectations of certain kinds of baseline behaviour. There is the question of how it is implicated in particular kinds of sexual assault and there’s no doubt that it is in certain instances, but this deeper implication in the cultural construction of masculinity and femininity is in many ways more significant and possibly even, at a cultural level, more dangerous.

Chameleon: When men purchase the pornography or the sex, as you very rightly said, they’re trying to purchase the ability to overcome their own anxieties or sense of inadequacy, whereas for the women who see these images of media perfection with celebrities, it doesn’t even have to be porn stars, they might feel inadequate, driving them to the surgeons in droves, or to Weight Watchers. Men can overcome their inadequacies whereas women are made to feel more inadequate.

LK: You would say that they can overcome their inadequacies – I would say that’s debateable. It might be that they have a way of appeasing the sense of being inadequate, and who’s to that shopping doesn’t do the same thing for women. That this particular consumer, celebrity culture of the moment is producing extremely insecure femininities and masculinities, neither of which are particularly healthy, neither of which are about any kind of human dignity and, when combined, are not a recipe for engaged heterosexual relations. I think there’s a group of men who use the sex industry in a totally consumerist way and they just bolster their sense of entitlement, privilege and power, but it doesn’t have that effect on all of them. It isn’t uni-dimensional, it’s multi-dimensional and we need to show more interest than we have done in those dimensions.

Chameleon: I’ve noticed an alarming trend whereby women who fail to get their attackers prosecuted in court are subsequently taken to court themselves by the men who raped them and are sometimes being sent to prison for false accusation. How do you react to this?

LK: There are layers to this. There aren’t very many where the case goes to court and that happens. If the case goes to court and there’s an acquittal and the accused wants to do something, they will normally go through civil courts, through damages, suing for libel or whatever. We’ve had a couple of cases like that and there have been a couple of sexual harassment cases that have gone through the civil courts initially. What’s happened in terms of rape cases has been when a case has been dropped because it’s a false accusation that the police have prosecuted for wasting police time. There’s another charge – I can’t remember precisely what it is – that’s slightly more serious as well. There have been a few cases like that. The danger is to think it’s happening all the time. I actually think that probably any such case is reported in the media and the misreading is that there are lots of other ones behind. What’s more significant is that if you have made a previous allegation that didn’t result in a conviction, if you report a subsequent sexual assault that previous allegation will be seen as going to your discredit, so the fact that we have this massive attrition rate, that only one in forty cases now results in a conviction – we’ve got a 5.3% conviction rate – means that we’re creating a generation of women whose subsequent complaints will be discounted. That’s much more significant, but it’s not so obvious. We’ve seen it because we’ve gone and looked in the files and we’ve asked police to tell us why they’ve dropped cases at particular points in time. This information has come out and you can see that it has a significant impact, but that’s more invisible than these high profile cases, although there are many more where that happens than are prosecuted for wasting police time.

Chameleon: You talked earlier about the glamorisation of violence in our culture. I agree that such a glamorisation is taking place – it’s amazing to see some of the films that are released now. They are so stylised that when a woman is punched she doesn’t develop a bruise, her lip doesn’t split and gush with blood. On the one hand, there are lots of women who think that something like Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Kill Bill, both of which could be said to glamorise violence, tries to do away with the myth that women are wimps, or that women are not resilient – some women look on these fictions as a kind of empowerment. So how should we be looking at the phenomenon of the glamorisation of violence? It is quite nuanced, isn’t it?

LK: There isn’t one answer you see because I do think – I know from myself that I can see representations of women being strong, fighting back, being able to win a fight with a man can involve a sense of enjoying that representation. To me that’s not the same as empowerment. I can enjoy that representation, I can enjoy it as a challenge to the traditional ways women are represented – I can even enjoy the aesthetic of the choreography of the violence. I enjoy it because I know it’s not real, I know it’s a fiction, which gives me permission to engage with it in a particular way. We’re all doing that to some extent. Underneath this is a different issue, one that has frustrated me for a very long time, which is a conflation of victimisation, victim and passivity. Women are victimised, so are people with disabilities, lesbians and gay men, people from ethnic minorities – and those aren’t mutually exclusive categories – victimisation happens. What it means, how you respond to it, whether you take it on as an identity are entirely different questions and are different again from whether you are accorded the status of victim by the justice system. If you are not accorded the status of victim by the justice system you have no right to redress or justice. You see this most clearly in relation to women who are trafficked. If they are not given the status of victim they then become a criminal, who can be deported with no rights, nothing. It can be hugely important and significant, even to the point of being a matter of life and death, whether you are accorded the status of victim. That has nothing to do with how you process what’s happened to you in terms of your own identity. We don’t even use any more “victim” or “survivor”, we talk about “women who have been raped”, “men who have been raped” because that leaves open what kind of identity they may or may not choose. I think some of this happened through a therapeutic turn in the Nineties that was then attributed by people like Katie Roiphe and Camille Paglia to feminism. It wasn’t feminism, or it wasn’t in any activist feminist way – there was a kind of populist feminism that they are also a part of in a different dimension – with all of these self-help books about the journey from victim to survivor. If you look at the research that’s been done on sexual violence, violence against women, but particularly if you look at the service providers, the ones who provide support, a lot of them didn’t – some of them do now – use those words in that way. We saw them as being two sides of the same coin. That being victimised didn’t mean you had no agency. Women resist, physically or in their minds, holding a part of them somewhere, where they think “You’re not having this bit of me”. They resist and fight back by deciding to report, or deciding to tell their friendship group what this person’s done, to expose them. There are all sorts of ways. It does, though, narrow, constrain your space for action at that particular point in time, which is one of the harms of it, that actually you don’t have the possibility to prevent it. It happened. For me, the interventions that we make should be about expanding that space for action again. It’s not that there’s no agency, but it’s that agency is constrained by violence. I find this invocation of victim and victimhood really unhelpful and also entirely inaccurate in terms of what actually happens when women confront violence. You talked about how we manage our fear by doing or not doing certain things. Those are forms of agency. We might resent the fact we have to do them and we might engage in discussion about whether that’s the most appropriate or useful thing to be doing, but it is action. Women who live with domestic violence are managing that situation all the time and a proportion of them are so damaged and so diminished by this intimate domination that their space for action is hardly anything. Those are the women who it’s really difficult to work with because they are terrified of doing anything as everything they’ve ever tried to do didn’t work. It doesn’t mean they were passive and didn’t do anything. It means they live with a nasty bastard controlling man who used every strategy they ever tried to develop as a reason to further abuse. Not all of them are like that, but with some of them, the sophistication of how they undermine every strategy women ever try is actually quite frightening.

Chameleon: It’s cold-blooded, isn’t it?

LK: Yes and I find them more frightening, more disturbing than the ones who use physical assault.

Chameleon: It’s the ruthlessness, the calculatedness of their behaviour, isn’t it?

LK: Absolutely. Absolutely. So I think there’s a whole way in which we as feminists need to revisit these concepts. If I were to point to something I’d do differently I think I wouldn’t abandon the concept of victim like we did. I think I would want to fill it with other meanings, so that it wasn’t seen as a contradiction to agency, but that it limits your agency in particular ways, but it doesn’t mean that you have none. It doesn’t mean that you’re passive and helpless. It means that your space for action has been constrained by the behaviour of another person. I think we have to acknowledge that for women who want to seek justice and want to use the criminal justice system as a means to obtain justice, being accorded the status of victim is very significant and important. It’s a recognition that they’ve been harmed and it’s a route to certain rights.

Chameleon: Some progress has been made, however.

LK: Yes. There is a coalition that we have recently developed here in the UK, the End Violence Against Women Coalition. It’s the first time that all the organisations that work around violence, across the different forms of violence, have come together, groups working on domestic violence, on sexual violence, on FGM, forced marriage, trafficking and prostitution. We are actually part of a network, but more than that, we’re also in a formal alliance with Amnesty International, the Trade Union Congress and the very big women’s organisation called the Women’s Institute. We are committed to trying to get our government to have a coordinated strategic response to violence against women. We have a number of action plans on different forms, but none of them are gendered, they don’t talk about violence against women, they talk about rape, or domestic violence and they’re not linked up, they’re strands of work that are separated. We don’t have a plan of action on violence against women in this country. We don’t have really a commitment to want to do that despite having signed the Beijing Platform for Action. Within that we also want there to be a much greater emphasis on prevention and we want there to be a commitment to increasing service provision, especially protecting the women-only services. I think this is a really interesting development – it’s not without its tensions and difficulties, but it has given us a voice and a strategic position. One of the things that we’ve decided to do is to audit the government every year on whether it’s moving in the directions we’re saying we think we should be moving in. We’ve produced this report called Making the Grade and we’ve done two so far. As a result of the second one our prosecutors have said that they want to develop a violence against women strategy. The police in London have said that they want to, so we’re seeing some departments get the message and say, “Yes, we understand what you’re saying, we want to do better”. The other thing that I think is worth mentioning is that we’ve just had this law come into force called the Gender Equality Duty. We’re about to move to a single equality body and that will mean that we no longer have a specific equality body for women, or for race, or for disability. One of the things that was very clear was that there is a statutory responsibility around race and around disability, but not around gender. What the law states is that every body, at national and at local level – everything from a government ministry to a school – has to have a gender equality scheme, which has to be about how they are going to eliminate gender discrimination and harassment in their institution and they also have to carry out a gender equality audit of any big change in policy, all new law. This is the first time you’ve ever had a legal requirement, so part of what EVAW has been trying to do is to say you must put violence against women in there because one of the things that the duty says is that you should address the most serious inequalities and forms of discrimination in the first instance, so we’re saying, actually violence is one of the most serious. Everybody has to publish their gender equality scheme by Monday [30^th April 2007] and then these have to be monitored and rewritten again in three years’ time. I think this is a really interesting approach to trying to put gender and women back on policy agendas, because we have been relatively invisible for a while. It was a very smart move by the women in the Equal Opportunities Commission to agree to enter into a single equality body, but only if we have a gender duty in the same way that we have these other duties.

Chameleon: Thank you so much!

Essential Links:

The End Violence Against Women Coalition

The Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit

In the comfortable armchairs of the first floor café in Paperchase (Tottenham Court Road), fuelled by a tall latte I had the honour of meeting and interviewing one of Britain’s foremost experts on social class, Professor Beverley Skeggs, whose extensive publications form an invaluable resource for any feminist curious about the interplay of gender, culture and symbols in creating, consolidating and contesting identity. No transcript can do justice to Professor Skeggs’ enthusiasm, immediacy, humour and warmth, which made the experience highly pleasurable as well as informative.

Chameleon: Could you tell me about your intellectual background, the projects you have been involved in so far and those you are working on at present?

BS: I began my research by issuing a feminist challenge to all the powerful theories of ideology in the early 1980s, mainly coming from people like Louis Althusser who proposed that people always accept the ideological positions that they’ve been placed in through interpellation, and I wanted to resist that, I knew instinctively it was wrong, having grown up with working class women. I wanted to say not necessarily, maybe people do something else with them. So it was a sort of resistance, both methodologically, I guess, as well, interested in actually seeing what happens and an interest theoretically because it was probably the beginning of my whole seduction by but resistance to these very powerful male, often French, theorists.

I went through a whole journey of finding Marx, whose writing started explaining my life and I loved it. I was sixteen at the time and it was like, wow, doing O-level sociology and it was brilliant, absolutely brilliant. And then coming much later on to much more at university, getting on to Bourdieu, Foucault and I think I had a fantastic university education at York, which opened your eyes to so much more, but never thinking that it explained everything. Always thinking these are fantastic ideas, but we need more and we need to know if they work, because I think the interesting thing about them is that they are incredibly speculative theories and so I always wanted to see, I’m not an empiricist, I just wanted to see how they did work. Could they work? Could they be put into practice?

I know lots of people would argue that you can’t do that, they’re not intended for that purpose, but for me, if you want to see if ideology’s working, you have to look, and you do actually see it in what people say and how they behave. It is interesting that those early theories still are very, very powerful.

The new research that I am doing is with Helen Wood and Nancy Toomin and focuses on reality TV and how reality TV is making class, new class relationships through the telling of the self. How people are being forced to perform, dramatise themselves in very particular ways. It’s a dynamic process. What we argue is that it is not a level playing field; it depends on the resources you have at your disposal to do that self-exposure and self-telling. The participants are being exposed, humiliated, shamed as well, although sometimes also having a great laugh and getting through it, so I’m not saying it’s all really, really bad. As a friend pointed out to me I’m probably the only person in the world who watches all of these, every series, every programme, every one, for the research project. I’ve learned to hate them, but I’ve come back to the concept of ideology as a result.

There’s something going on that is so pernicious about how class is being remade through symbolic value and through morality. People who can’t display themselves as having the right culture, the right way of saying things and the right emotions as well. People are now being opened out more and more and more and they’re expected to emote properly. I am looking at emotion as a value and the making of proper emotions in the making of class.

I love Bourdieu for his analysis of class, for his analysis of cultural capital, but I really don’t think he could handle gender and, even more so, sexuality because his is another kind of typical French explanation of what the powerful do, how the powerful make the world in their own interests and I think it’s much less about how people take that up and what they do with it. The only time – and it really is tragic, I think – he ever really tried to deal with it was in The Weight of the World, which is methodologically disastrous because it is totally unedited, or appears to be unedited. None of the prerequisites for any kind of decent feminist or sociological methodology are in there: How did you elicit these accounts? Why did they say this to you? What’s the discourse behind it? There’s no kind of discursive analysis across the whole, so even when he tries to see what’s happening, he doesn’t, and then, sadly, he died.

I owe him a huge, huge debt, but I think that on gender and sexuality he simply fails to understand ambivalence. There’s the great argument by Emily Martin where she talks about how gender works through ambivalence, not through that ideological positioning, because it’s through so many sites. We may change the way we do gender in one site, but we’re still going to have to do it in another site and, of course, motherhood and the family is usually the one that gets everybody in the end.

My first project was on a further education college and women on caring courses because they couldn’t do anything else. Formations of Class and Gender was a result of that, using Bourdieu, using media theories on the symbolic, but applying them to ethnography. A lot of that book is really informed by early media analysis from Birmingham CCCS, people like David Morley. Throughout my research there has always been an interest in the symbolic and there has always been an interest in the way people use the resources that they have.

Hence, even at an early stage, I was drawn to Pierre Bourdieu because his work is all about symbolic distinction. I still feel that’s the one thing that is missing in lots of feminist theory, actually, the gap between how we live our lives, how things are imposed on us ideologically, if you want to call it that, or by the state, which is then mediated through the symbolic and it is that mediation process that gives people value, or not, that becomes really important to my research.

My critique of Bourdieu is that he doesn’t really explain the processes of revaluation, so that if you’re working class and if you’re female for Bourdieu, you are caught up in a zero sum game. You can’t get access to the proper rules of the game to become truly powerful and any form of misrecognition boils down to your power being misrecognised. For me, he doesn’t give enough credibility to how we make things ourselves with what we have.

I then moved on from that to a project on sexuality, violence and space with Les Moran, a legal theorist, Kare Corteen, a criminologist and Paul Tyler, a literary theorist. We had a great inter-disciplinary team. It was a nice combination and we did argue a lot because people had varying interests. There was me, straight woman, Les, gay man, Paul, who would more identify as queer and Karen lesbian, really different interests being articulated and emerging around sexual politics in terms of queer and gay. Did creating a gay space, Manchester’s gay village, actually promote security for gays and lesbians? Then I included straight women, since lots of straight women had been using that space literally to be safe. To go out and have a good time without all that heterosexual harassment they experienced elsewhere in Manchester and in their own town.

Straight women definitely were there with a presence, they were 13 per cent of the total group, but they were usually in very particular bars. We looked at the alignments that were made between straight women and gay men, lesbians and straight women.

A real issue emerged around femininity, not surprisingly, and so I looked at that in one of the favourite papers that I have written, called The Toilet Paper, in which I analysed what happens in toilets between women. It was about difference of cultural formations in a sense, about who could make alignments and about lifestyle.

The straight women wanted that space in the village. It was a really revealing project in terms of seeing where violence occurred, who was subjected to violence. One of the main findings was that people are subjected to violence when they don’t look right. Straight women would get beaten up on buses going home from the gay village if they looked like a lesbian.

We put a lot of emphasis on visuality, looking at the paradox and ambivalence of the politics around gay visibility. If you think about it, every gay and lesbian political campaign has involved making themselves visible in order to make claims on the state, for example, the current civil partnerships. We looked at the real problems inbuilt into that: once you claim visibility you are more likely to suffer violence because it’s about power, it’s about hegemony and people are going to try to keep you where they want you rather than allowing you to have access to those state resources.

Bourdieu was also extremely useful for that project in terms of taste as the distinctions in the gay village would be around taste. We’d ask “Why do you go there or there?” They’d reply: “Oh, I wouldn’t be seen dead in that bar!”

Bourdieu was not so helpful in understanding sexuality. Because again, sexuality, especially as we’ve learned from queer theorists, is something that is very, very ambivalent – it’s literally playing with the attempt to position and hold people down as sexual in a very particular way, so if you think about the history of sexology, typification, classification, knowing every single practice, queer theorists play with that, they challenge it and really pull it apart.

Instead of being positioned, as Bourdieu would say, symbolically, they actually contest the whole basis of positioning in the first place – there’s a good argument between Judy Butler and Bourdieu about the symbolic, where you can see they are actually quite similar in some respects, but what she deals with is re-signification to some extent, the possibility of re-signification.

In the sexuality project we studied the significance of visibility in politics and the relationship of any queer politics to the state. We looked at how claiming to be abused by violence, which is what happens to a lot of gays and lesbians is something they can use as a resource in terms of saying we need protection, we need looking after and then looking at how campaigns of visibility make people much more vulnerable, which meant that it gave them a stake, but then subjected them to more violence.

There’s a very good study of Dupont Circle in Washington where gay-bashing reached a height because gay men became so publicly visible. Those debates became really significant in terms of who we see, but who we see with what value.

So now my big concern is really value: how are people being valued and who is doing it? In terms of reality TV, the people who are doing it are doing it because they would like a job, and they can’t get the proper documentary jobs in TV. All the people we talked to who are making these programmes always say “I’d much rather be doing a documentary; I’d much rather be doing investigative journalism”. They’re doing them, in other words, because of the changing labour conditions of TV and they’re doing them because they’re cheap and they’re bringing in people because they need to get high audience ratings in order to get the next job.

I’d argue that all the kind of new ways of showing people with value are actually underpinned by an incredible system of labour, which is actually reliant on a whole formation of creative middle-class people confronted with really difficult labour conditions.

That’s what I’m working on at the moment.

Chameleon: So your emphasis is very much on people as creative agents.

BS: Absolutely. I am always being informed by Marx, in that people make history, but not in the conditions of their own choosing. Always. That is the imperative, I think. That’s how we live. It’s a dynamic force. We’re involved in it.

The majority of French theories of the self address how we are done to and how forces work through us. To some extent I believe in that, I believe desire propels us in different ways, you can see the force of certain things that we do in body, but at the same time we are doing things. I think of my Mum in particular. She’s a very stubborn, resistant person who goes “No! I’m not like that, I’m not doing that!” There’s a real refusal, a politics of refusal as a recurrent theme in my research. Probably informed by my experiences of very stroppy aunties and mother.

In reality TV, people are making their own history, but not in the conditions of their own choosing. This sector of television is now massive, absolutely massive. It pervades everything, even Newsnight, the most serious documentary news programme in Britain, has now acquired a reality TV aspect, where they get one of their reporters to go out and see if he can be “green” for a week, environmentally green, and you just think “Oh, God, hold on to your integrity!” but it’s not happening.

Thinking back on my earlier research, I guess class has always been an important concern. I thought when I finished the Formations book [Formations of Class and Gender, London, Sage, 1997] that I probably wouldn’t work on class again and then I started writing Class, Self, Culture [London, Routledge, 2004] which was initially called Visible Classifications.

Then somehow it turned into a book more about the middle classes. I was quite surprised, really. I think it was because I wanted to understand how all the different classification systems are working, through to who can be a good economic subject, who is a good political subject and I slightly shifted my emphasis from respectability to the proper, as a whole legal aspect.

Les Moran, who I worked with, had brought me on to these fantastic feminist legal theorists such as Margaret Davies. They are really interesting on how the proper literally gets produced in law through legal statements and who has to show themselves in front of law. If you’re deemed improper, say you’re a prostitute, which is the key example, you have no legal protection. The law doesn’t work for you.

He put me onto these really fascinating legal ways of thinking through the proper, which extended the material on respectability. That is why I am now interested in how a lot of reality TV is all about having the proper emotions. What we get is this incredible forensic emphasis on people’s faces, so that they are watched to see how they emote and do they emote properly? This is what I am attempting to capture at the moment.

I also think it is a really powerful political opening out, which makes so visible the improper. It makes those who don’t know how to do it in the kind of respectable, bourgeois way look really, really bad. Jerry Springer is the best example of people emoting very, very badly. They punch other people. Violence is the wrong emotion. Part of the fascination is that we don’t usually in real life spend that much time looking at people’s emotions and if they emote too much we look away, we would be embarrassed or whatever else, but we can voyeuristically watch it on TV. We are getting it not only shown, but we’re getting to know exactly what it should be.

I hate reality TV itself, or, to be more precise, I hate some of it, which is so badly formulaic, cheap and nasty and I ask myself “Can’t you find another victim to pick on?” It is pretty banal, but Deleuze argues that what we will never know, in any encounter, is the affect that is produced through the encounter. We won’t understand what is cause, what is effect and it’s always circulating, creating, troubling relationships. What reality TV does is to try to capture all that and say, “If you behave like that, you will produce that bad emotion”. It’s so seductive in that sense. It gives people bad psychology and makes them think that if they use these techniques they can manipulate people. The key programmes here are the motherhood ones, such as Supernanny. Have you seen Supernanny?

Chameleon: No.

BS: It is really bad behaviour modification. Everybody has a “naughty corner”, so that if you are confronted with bad behaviour you have to impose a technique and if you impose a technique the child will behave well. It has been so effective that some of the new nursery nurses whom I have been interviewing for our reality TV project say that lots of Mums come into the nursery and ask, “Well, where’s your naughty corner?” You can’t be a good nursery unless you have a naughty corner. Of course the nurses themselves have learned much more complex psychology on their courses. These programmes seem to be particularly effective on motherhood and children. Much less so on other subjects, where there is much more resistance. People see Jerry Springer as a kind of joke really. I don’t think people take it seriously.

Chameleon: Viewers probably believe that the “audience members” are paid actors.

BS: Yes, exactly.

Chameleon: Yet they still seem drawn to it somehow anyway.

BS: It’s the spectacle. It’s just an amazing spectacle in a way of things you don’t normally see. If there’s a fight on the street everybody will look. You’re not used to it. It is similar in that it shows behaviour at the limits.

Chameleon: Would you describe class as a pernicious classificatory system?

BS: Without a doubt. What is really interesting about class, and I am in the process of compiling a big reader on class with the best texts I can find, is that so much effort is put into denying its existence internationally, which signals to me that it must be extremely important. I went to a seminar yesterday at the Institute of Public Policy Research where a new project by Anthony Heath in Oxford was being discussed.

He shows that from 1964 to 2006 almost the same percentage of people identified with either the working class or the middle class. There had been a small shift in the number of people identifying with middle class, but not that massive, if memory serves me well, it was from 38 to 52.

Even though we have experienced 27 years of denial of class in this country, since Thatcher said that there is no such thing as society, that she would destroy any sort of powerful class organisation, which she subsequently did, it’s still there, it is still present. So I think it is both pernicious as an incredible system of classification in every area of life and in Britain in particular through taste. It’s culture in Britain that is the big give away. Language, clothing, the whole visible dimension is the biggest thing. You see that much less in the States. You see it as much in France, actually. Probably even more so, which is why Bourdieu is particularly useful in England. France and England have a sort of culture quotient measure of class, whereas the US and Australia are much more about money, display of money rather than the display of culture.

It is pernicious because it is read on the body. Constantly. Even things like how people sit, their entitlement to space, aurality, noise are really significant. Lots of loud people. There has been all this emphasis on loud, working class women being a source of disruption to the nation, whereas in fact they are only occasionally like that.

Chameleon: On a girls’ night out.

BS: Exactly. All the ways that it works through something else. Through the economy, very clearly, in terms, for example, of who gets jobs and who doesn’t, but also very much through culture, I would argue.

There has been a great deal of research on the shift to culture as a criterion for who is given employment, so that if you used your year after university to pay off your debts through working in McDonald’s that doesn’t go down very well on your CV, whereas if you used it to travel round Libya and set up some sort of voluntary campaign the opposite is the case.

People have been looking at how culture is now making the big difference in employment relationships. Class works at that level in an incredibly pernicious manner, since it is about life chances and resources. You have it working every day.

Valerie Walkerdine has done some very interesting research in which women say, “Class? You can spot it a mile away”. She has been working around that idea. People see it, they read it, they know it and then they behave towards other people accordingly. The most intimate social encounters are being worked through class in the same way as the most global, economic encounters. Its pervasiveness, its ubiquity operates in so many different ways, mediating our social relationships, our cultural relationships, our emotional statements.

In the course of putting together the reader I have seen how you can chart all these movements towards denial and then you can chart all the movement back that proves that it is there in another way and you can see it happening at significant moments.

Certain sociological theories, such as those put forward by Ulrich Beck, and Giddens on the architecture of New Labour, speculate about social changes with absolutely no evidence. They completely mirror the policies that are put into effect to bring neo-liberalism into government. It is totally separated from class.

There is an alliance between social theorists and governments, which is slightly worrying if you think of Clinton and Blair and of the impact of neo-liberalism in this country now. Choice in education? Well, who can choose? Who has the knowledge? Who can move house? All this choice rhetoric is so powerful. I see the power of class working through these different ways in which people put a lot of effort into denying class, the ultimate symbol of the fact that it really does exist. That denial can always be rebutted from so many different directions.

Chameleon: There was an article on the front page of The Independent the other day about the “old school tie” phenomenon. A higher proportion of people who work in the media now than was the case in the past come from fee-paying schools, that mobility is on the wane and the situation is worse now than it was 40 years ago. How do you respond to this?

[The Independent, 15^th June 2006, Richard Garner and Ben Russell, Stranglehold, in which the salient passage was as follows: “(…) of the leading 100 media opinion-formers, 54 per cent came from private schools, compared with 49 per cent 20 years ago. Thirty-three per cent of the remainder came from selective grammar schools – while only 14 per cent were from comprehensive schools, which cater for 90 per cent of all pupils.

The report on the legal profession shows that almost 70 per cent of barristers from leading chambers were educated at private schools. And in the House of Commons, 42 per cent of those holding government office or shadowing ministers are former pupils of private schools. Just 7 per cent of all pupils are educated in the private sector”]

BS: It’s incredible, isn’t it? Most social mobility is downwards, from the middle class into the working class through marriage. It’s absolutely astonishing. We have all these rhetorical statements about choice, freedom, individualism and then we have this fixing of people into positions, huge spatial apartheid as well in this country and in France again. Huge investment into some areas and total neglect of others.

Chameleon: Another contributory factor to that social apartheid that you mention is people moving out of neighbourhoods and how they deteriorate subsequently.

BS: Or displacement, like where I live – posh people moving in. What happens to the people who live there and who now can’t afford to buy houses in the area if they could ever have afforded to buy houses? There are twin movements: movement out and displacement from within. There is an excellent article by Neil Smith, a geographer [New Globalism, New Urbanism: Gentrification as Global Urban Strategy, Antipode, 2000], where he looks at gentrification as a very powerful strategy of displacement, a Western if not global strategy.

Chameleon: Would it be fair to say that feminism has overlooked class as a conceptual tool?

BS: There have been some fantastic women out there doing the work and I’d like to say “Respect” to them. Terry Lovell from Warwick, Carolyn Steedman’s Landscape for a Good Woman, if you can read that book without crying…it’s phenomenal. Valerie Walkerdine who is writing about run-down steel plants in Wales at the moment; Steph Lawler up in Durham; Diane Reay who is doing some brilliant work on education…There have been people fighting their own corner. The problem was with publishers.

Some key people in sociology, in history and psychology were trying to be fashionable and thought “Are we meant to be doing postmodernism now?” You couldn’t get things published.

To get Formations published, for example, was an absolute nightmare. They didn’t want “class” in the title. Initially they wanted it to be called Feminist Cultural Theory. It began as an ethnography of working class women and they didn’t want ethnography because, apparently, nobody likes small-scale local study, which it isn’t. I fought for a year to get that title and I lost two publishers. It was a real struggle. I only got it published in the end because my friend’s partner is on the editorial board at Sage.

Carolyn Steedman’s Landscape for a Good Woman was in history and was written under a different, autobiographical, creative writing heading.

It was really difficult to make a space. You have to think about who is teaching in academia and who wants to know about this subject. As I argue in Formations and still maintain, a lot of the men who invested in class just wanted someone else to do the revolution for them. When nobody did, they got a bit pissed off and said “I’ll find something new now”. I think that’s still going on.

Again, some have really stuck to it, like Alex Callinicos, great. The rest of them just think “Well, class isn’t that important now, I’m doing something else”. And it’s because they could. They could do something else.

It has been tough for a lot of feminists working on class, but it has also been really tough for feminists working on race. There used to be a moment when Sara Ahmed and I were at Lancaster and every time we had a guest speaker she’d ask them a race question and I’d ask them a class question and at one point I said, “Why don’t we just swap, we’ll alternate!”

Different feminists who are not following the mainstream have found it really difficult to get places in academia, to be accepted as credible. Feminists who are working on class never ever ever claimed it as an identity politics. It was more a form of analysis, which also made it even harder in a way.

I think that for a lot of black feminists they could have an identity politics, they needed one; I’m not saying it’s a bad thing. They had to use it as their battering ram, whereas I think the problem for class was that it had a place, through the almost hegemonic power of Marxism in sociology, history, English, across the board.

It then seemed to be superseded by a fashionable new postmodernism and so all the feminists are trying to hang on to it, but what it made them do was really, really rework it, so if you look at all the feminists who are working on class, I’d argue, they’re all pretty interesting, because they had to move away from that very traditional productivist, economy-based approach. They’ve had to understand how gender works and you can’t do class without gender.

Chameleon: So it isn’t true that feminism has neglected a conceptual engagement with class. Or is it more that feminism has been trying to emphasise what women have in common to facilitate the formation of a coalition in order to promote political action and that feminists have thus de-emphasised class deliberately?

BS: It’s a hard one. If you look at who were the people who could publicly present feminism, some of them did come from that kind of background in the nasty debates – those socialist, Marxist, feminist debates were quite hard and heavy, so there was an attempt for a moment to make a Utopia. You need the politics of hope in order to have a future.

Exactly what you’re describing was occurring, but you’re never going to be able to get away from that because at the time it was happening there were events like the miner’s strike going on. You can’t deny issues that are literally forming women’s lives.

We do see a movement of women into academia, middle class and working class women who have got into academia and who are making a space. At the same time, however, it is who they take with them, whose interests they want to promote.

The problem with identity politics – I remember being in a seminar when somebody objected “You can’t say that because you’re not queer, you can’t say that because you’re not black!” Let’s have an analysis, not just a position.

It’s a tricky one. Feminism is about competing groups to an extent trying to put their theories and their issues on the agenda. There was a moment when you would say that socialist feminists and radical feminists and others were all trying to make a mark, so I don’t think it was a conspiracy. There weren’t enough people around who were doing or were interested in class. As a result it took much, much longer.

Also there has always been an interest in pretending it doesn’t exist. There’s that great book by Andrew Sayer where he looks at why his middle class students don’t want to talk about class. It is a really important and problematic issue that f you’re born middle class, you’re born with privilege and you don’t want to walk around going “Oh, I’m really privileged!” You want to say, “Oh, I want to be equal and I want to be nice and I want to care about everybody”. So class makes people think about the privileges that they have and that they can’t do much about.

People would like to deny the existence of class. The way it has been formulated as a white project almost. It’s possible because of visibility, but that’s changing now.

Whereas I think for black feminists there’s always been a kind of middle class liberal discourse of multiculturalism and “Let’s patronise the natives” kind of thing. That enables different issues to be taken up. I think Sara Ahmed would say quite clearly that there were issues of tokenistic acceptance, whereas white working class culture has never offered the middle classes much, they’ve never wanted it, they’ve literally measured themselves against it.

Chameleon: The defining moment of middle class identity is to point disapprovingly to the working class and say “We are not that!”

BS: Absolutely. We can see that happening so much at the moment. For example, the chav phenomenon. Chavs, the most hated objects in Britain.

Now why is all this hate coming out at the moment? That’s what I’m fascinated by.

I started writing a paper on hate. A criminologist, David Garland, charts the differences in the legal systems, showing the shift from re-education to retribution in the law at present so that the people who are being criminalised cannot be saved. They are just bad people.

I think the whole chav phenomenon where you get this obsession –it was the Oxford English Dictionary new word for 2004 – if you do a web search you will find so much – chav books, chav town, how to spot a chav, chav babies, honestly, there’s masses.

Why is there this middle class obsession with visualising, knowing and degrading the working class? Part of the argument is because we all live in proximity and a lot of the stuff has come from London where you do get groups in proximity.

So if you have the gentrifying middle classes moving into working class areas, who’s going to be the problem? The ones who are visible.

There’s a lovely argument somewhere that because of the massive incidence of break-up in marriages and increase in the number of divorces, children are being moved all the time between different spaces, a major concern for middle class parents is the protection of the child and what the working classes do in the areas that the middle classes have moved into is make that space more dangerous.

That danger then gets reproduced in the professions where these people are represented.

Even Ferdinand Mount who was Margaret Thatcher’s ex-right hand man agrees. He has never witnessed such a nasty cultural attitude towards the working class. He differs from me because he thinks they should be written off, but the real question is why so much hatred? Why this middle class obsession?

Again we come back to the argument which states that what is denied alongside that which is obsessed about so much reveals a real fear and concern. That to me is how class relations are being structured at the moment. Through hate.

I get told off by a lot of colleagues for saying that: “You’re just saying that it is class war again and we’ve tried to get over that!”

There’s a whole politics of niceness, so that if you say something like the middle class hate the working class you’re really being nasty yourself.

Chameleon: How can incorporating class conceptually be of benefit to feminism?

BS: It’s a form of analysis.

If you think about what feminism is trying to explain, if you want to explain, say, the body or embodiment, corporeality and the like, you have to think how that is worked through race, class and sexuality, not just gender. For me, you can’t do class without gender and sexuality and, hopefully, race, which I keep trying to put in.

Anything that makes you more rigorous in terms of trying to understand is beneficial.

When I did the project on sexuality having done gender and class I wondered how it fitted in. What it does is throw your analysis. Incorporating sexuality made me think about how to approach ambivalence, whereas before I could see everything slotting in, I could see class and gender as systems of power, being put into effect. But when you see sexuality, you see competing interests, you see differences, you see different spatialisations, you see the gender differences within it and I just think it makes you a better theorist.

It makes you think about things more. You may not get it right, but at least you are thinking. It’s like, how the hell do I understand this now? That’s the key to it, really. That’s what you should be asking. The only reason we have theories is to try to explain things. You have to improve your theories, not that I’m there yet, but pushing in that direction.

Chameleon: What do you think that the feminist research agenda on class should comprise?

BS: Marx! [Laughs]

If you go back to reading Marx, he’s such a funny writer, he can make you laugh. He is the Gothic imaginary, really.

I think it should really include how resources are unequally distributed in so many different ways: economically, politically, culturally.

For me, a policy agenda would be how do we actually change those?

A feminist analysis would need to re-value the incredibly negative valuations that we have currently. I still remember moments – a friend of mine who was a student at the time says when I went to teach in York University in the Women’s Studies Department and I walked in that I was just the wrong sort of feminist. I had long permed hair, I had a shortish skirt on and I was wearing bright red lipstick. This was in the early 1980s and she said, “Oh my God, we looked at you and we thought, she can’t be in this classroom!” I think I had learned that that was the wrong thing to be, but I was still in the “Don’t tell me what to do!” frame of mind, “This is my cultural capital, this is what I’ve got! I’m going to feel ridiculous in anything else”.

It’s to do with accepting that women who have different forms of cultural competence are not necessarily bad or stupid. My friend Helen, who I work on the research project with, has got a really strong Wolverhampton accent. She tells me she walks into a room and she can feel everybody just going, “Ah [sighs], who’s that silly woman? She doesn’t belong in here”.

I think that’s both feminist and non-feminist. There’s a whole bourgeois [ideology of the] proper that both makes you feel excluded, outside and it’s not just about personal feelings, but is doing this continually, is repeating it.

A feminist project should really think about which persons are valued and why and what is good or bad about that. The writing off of loads of working class feminists because they wore lipstick is just not on because that is what you grew up with. That is not the issue. People can’t get jobs; that’s the issue.

Chameleon: A rhetorical question: Women suffer disproportionately from the burden of class discrimination, don’t they?

BS: They certainly do! Take a look at all the debates about domestic labour now. Women are going out to work, they’re doing full-time jobs and then they’re still doing the bulk of domestic labour. There’s a massive disparity there.

There has been a huge increase in immigrant servicing of the middle classes.

It could be argued that a whole range of domestic servants are being recreated. Within this, it is illegal work, they’re not getting pensions, they’re not getting National Insurance; they are literally employed because they are not legal.

To my mind that’s an enormous issue.

There has been an increase in some kinds of unionisation, but part-time work tends not to be unionised.

Nurseries, all those really basic feminist concerns about work, childcare, healthcare, welfare, they’re all still huge to my mind.

Even though it looks like I am working on TV, for me those are really, really significant and should always be on the feminist agenda. There are some great people working on these out there, but again they don’t belong to a known group. Niki Charles at Warwick, for example, has been working on domestic servants.

Chameleon: We talked about chavs a few moments ago and the other category that seems to be cropping up in moral panics about binge-drinking is the ladettes…

BS: Actually ladettes were a precursor to chavs to some extent. They came from the New Lad movement in the 1980s and one of the reality TV programmes is called From Ladette to Lady.

In it they take a group of eight self-identified ladettes, hard drinking, hard-partying women, who often take their clothes off and are having lots of sex – they’re just having a good time, really – and they try to turn them into ladies through etiquette training at a private girls’ school.

It’s really hilarious, because partly they get absorbed in the whole process, but again the whole ladette phenomenon was an attempt not to be proper – it’s about the burning out of a very particular sort of Laura Ashley femininity that was no longer appropriate for women who were all going to have to go out and work and who were being taught through Thatcherism, neo-liberalism and individualism that they could be strong.

What it does is almost deal with the changes that are going on around femininity, so these women are very badly behaved.

Chris Griffin at Bath is doing a really interesting study on binge-drinking where she looks at the incredible codes of loyalty amongst these ladettes when they go out, so if one of them gets unconscious they will always look after her, make sure she’s got a coat, if she takes a coat out!

The moral panic around it centres on thinking what the trouble for the nation is – whereas the trouble for the nation is child poverty, but let’s not focus on that! Or the trouble for the nation is that there’s a war that nobody wants to be part of, so let’s latch onto a figure that can be a common object of contempt. So I’d say straightforwardly political, but you can see a group of women trying to carve out a very different way of being.

Chameleon: Is the moral panic motivated by some wish to constrain women, to restrain them? Because one of the distinguishing characteristics of ladettes, according to the press, is precisely their lack of restraint.

BS: Absolutely, but that’s why I think they’re having such a good time.

OK, in feminist terms there are some problems with the fact that they often end up without their clothes on sprawled in the street, it’s not called dignity, really, is it?

If you look at them they are without restraint. There’s always been a big problem in understanding women who cannot be governed. The police are scared – these are ungovernable women to an extent.

The thing is, they’re going to grow up and grow out of it. It’s not really that much of an issue because your body can’t take that much alcohol for that long. So they’ll do it, they’ll grow out of it, it’s not going to be the same sort of health problem as gout or the men’s club drinkers.

For me it is an obvious and really cheap form of journalism – that’s what really gets up my nose at the moment – it’s easy and it’s cheap and nobody’s making any effort to know why this is happening or what’s going on. Instead it’s let’s find a figure of fun and humiliation and let’s dwell on that and say it’s a national problem.

There’s a whole complicity around reconstructing the proper again, reconstructing the restrained.

I’d argue that, historically, it’s that battle between restraint and non-restraint that creates an incredible class struggle and attempts to control the working class are usually met with quite phenomenal resistance culturally and morally. The attempt to control women morally has always been challenged. The way I see it, these women are issuing the challenge and then they get turned into a social problem. As we know, however, they will live through this.

Chameleon: Tell me about respectability…

BS: It’s so powerful! Writing Formations, which seems like a long while ago now, I see it everywhere, all these reality TV programmes are about trying to produce some sort of respectability, fitting into the family, The Apprentice, fitting into work, becoming the best capitalist in the world; they’re all about becoming respectable in various ways.

It’s about cleaning, mothering, caring and respectability.

What I try to get to in Formations was about how these women try to do respectability differently. For them, respectability was a strategy of having value and I don’t think that what they were doing was identical to middle class respectability because they challenged a lot of that respectability, for example in mothering. They didn’t like that way middle class mothers sent their children away to school.

These women were trying to carve out their own respectability. Partly that is fitting in, partly that is conceding that respectability is something that should be achieved, but partly it’s an attempt to revalue what respectability is.

Chameleon: What is it?

BS [laughs]: Being proper.

Chameleon: What’s that?

BS: Not being excessive, being clean, again, depending on which position you are reading it from in terms of childcare, giving an incredible amount of attention to your child – or not! – depending on which class position, at the extremes.

One of the keys is not being sexually excessive, absolutely restrained and constrained in terms of sexuality.

So, sexuality, hygiene; manners and deportment are key to it as well, not being too obvious, too loud and too vulgar, which are characteristics that have always been attributed to working class women. It is a range of different practices that are all based around femininity, a particular working of femininity, it is a very class and gender-specific amalgamation.

Chameleon: That latter point reminds me of Bartky’s disciplinary practices. Would you say that femininity as a discourse or as an ideology is calibrated in such a way as to ensure it is unattainable for working class women?

BS: Absolutely. It was never for them. It was about the bourgeois wife who stayed at home, could pay attention to herself, didn’t have to clean the floors herself, never for them. Working class women were associated more with masculinity.

If you look at all the writings by Arthur Mumby, who was obsessed with his cleaner, about her big hands and her dirty legs.

What you find is black women and white working class women much more associated with masculinity: they were hard, they laboured, they even had dignity at work, women miners and the like, so it was never about them.

What I think is interesting is that when they do what is seen as femininity it’s often highly sexualised because they were positioned as sexual in a way that middle class women couldn’t be.

That’s why I think Sex in the City is so important. It’s when middle-class women start claiming a sexuality, but it’s not valued as bad, or pathological or excessive because there is so much other cultural capital to offset that sexuality, where working class women don’t, they have sexuality and they do it. It’s like they will make use of it.

Again, that’s why thinking through sexuality, class and gender is quite important. They can do it in really non-restrained, non-respectable ways. They are subject to the same disciplinary practices that Bartky describes, but I think they do them in very different ways. And they often refuse. They refuse the restraint.

Chameleon: You touched upon femininity and the body. Obviously what you said about being demure is part of it, but would you agree that, for example, being “too big” also forms part of a class distinction as a different aspect of physicality, restraint of fleshly excess?

BS: Again you see it, it was in Formations and it is repeated in all the research we are doing at the moment, where people talk about women “letting themselves go”. If that isn’t beyond disciplinarity, what is?

I did write an article in Sociology [The Making of Class and Gender through Visualising Moral Subject Formation, Sociology, 2005, vol. 39 (5), pp965-982] which says that if you drink, if you have sex, if you eat and if you’re loud you are the evil object of the nation because everything is meant to be restrained. The body that displays, with pleasure almost, its lack of constraint is the most dangerous body as in it’s not doing exactly what’s expected of it. It’s absolutely key.

I think it’s really funny, I’m going to see my Mum and Dad tomorrow. You can guarantee the first thing when I get off the train, my Mum will say to me is “Oh my God, look at the state of your hair!” and “Aren’t you getting fat?” But it’s as if me being in London is a sign of me getting out of control. That’s the focus of being out of control. Very powerful.

What I love the most with a group of women we are working with at the moment, big women who are proudly displaying their bodies is that they’re not covering themselves up, they are proud of their bodies. I think that’s a really important thing. It’s saying, “I’m not going to be restrained or controlled and I’m not going to accept your values”.

Whereas I looked at respectability in the past, I’m looking at refusal now. At those who refuse to be constrained, they’re not going to do it. They use a variety of strategies. Drinking is one of them. They do take over town centres, they can be very loud and noisy and scary. I think, good on them really, a public space for them when they’re not usually allowed a public space.

Chameleon: Historically, women have always been secluded, indoors.

BS: And constrained by violence, the violence of being in particular areas. For me, part of them taking over space is basically a refusal to be subjected to violence of various kinds and I think that’s great.

Chameleon: A trendy buzzword these days is “post-feminism”…

BS: I hate it. It makes me want to vomit. I see it as part of neo liberal politics focused on individualism. Some young women have learned to become a ladette or something and that’s it, that’s the limit to feminism.

Call me a dinosaur, but for me it’s actually imperative that we keep a feminist politics on the agenda. Nurseries, work, unions, new slave labour, sex trafficking, all those major issues demand a feminist politics.

It’s not post-feminist. Women are being abused down the road for a pound an hour. That calls for a feminist response.

Chameleon: You quote Sennett’s “hidden pain of class”. Could you say a few words about that hidden pain?

BS: I think it’s hidden, but absolutely ubiquitous. A bit like the example that I gave of my friend, and I have certainly experienced it. You walk into a place and you know you have no value and I think that is where class is lived, painfully, nearly every day.

You can just see it. You can see judgement, you can see the exclusions and you can see you have no value.

There’s a woman, Lady Sovereign, who is defined as the chav pop singer. She’s only 16, really good, really clever. She’s like young, white Miss Dynamite with really urban, political songs. She talks about being really hurt by being labelled chav because it was consolidating negative value so that wherever she went, her style of clothing, everybody could read her as having no value.

That is the pain: you enter a space and you know you have to prove that you have value without just taking it for granted that people will listen to you, take you seriously and accept you. Not everybody gets accepted everywhere and I’m not arguing that it’s straightforward, but it’s that kind of pain all the time, really.

Like when you walk into a shop. There’s an example in Formations of the women who felt they couldn’t walk into posh shops like a department store because they knew they were being read as potential thieves. You can see that all the time where I live. If a person comes in with their tracksuit on, looking like the stereotypical chav you see the store detectives almost following them around. You learn.

And if you think that process can happen a hundred times a day, wherever you go, it works very painfully.

Chameleon: So does that mean that the fashion you wear acts as a distinguishing badge of lower-classness?

BS: Yes. And if you want to be what you grew up with – if you grew up with a lot of investment in fashion, maybe sexually explicit clothes, or maybe tracksuits – everything that is part of your cultural heritage and that has value for you in your local setting devalues you outside of it.

That’s why there is so much effort to fix people back in place: you have a place, it’s spatial, stay there! You don’t belong.

Again, when we were doing the sexuality research the working class white boys who’d been accused of homophobic violence all expressed real resentment that the city had been taken over and they couldn’t go into it any more. OK, they are really nasty little evil gits who’ve been beating people up, but there’s an expression of their exclusion in that statement.

Again the issue is complex. It involves thinking about the impetus. Why would you want to beat somebody up for being gay? Thinking about all the different reasons for that, masculinity, whatever else, but exclusion as well. It is going to create a self-perpetuating cycle: people get excluded, they want to enter the areas they have been excluded from, some people are going to be subjected to the process, they are going to be forced back into restricted space, they are going to get criminalised.

There’s a huge moral agenda in Britain around ASBOs, keeping people in their place, literally, keeping them at home sometimes.

Chameleon: That reminds me of something the right-wing press is fond of harping on about, the “loss of deference”! Then there’s someone like Lynn Truss complaining about the coarsening of public interactions. Is this all a symptom of middle class malaise?

BS: I don’t know. It does fascinate me. Whoever assumed anybody would be deferential to them? From which position is that being spoken?

I can understand it with teachers and doctors and so on, they should enjoy some authority because they actually possess knowledge that is useful to people.

Where it is coming from is really weird.

The swearing issue is quite funny. I was having a big argument about this the other night because I first heard really, really violent swearing when I went to university. I’d never heard it much before because of investment in respectability.

Again it gets located with one class when, in fact, as far as I’m concerned it was the upper middle classes that were the most prolific.

Why does it get stuck to one class? In whose interests, the classic Marxist question, is this happening? It’s the middle class trying to reclaim its authority.

Again, one of the big class struggles is about authority. Not accepting middle class judgement.

So when social workers come into people’s houses, the hatred of social workers is phenomenal. Because you’re not going to accept the middle class judgement that you should behave in a particular way. It is absolutely antithetical to the way you were brought up.

Chameleon: Yet the Government seems to be devising more and more ways to interfere in people’s lives.

BS: And generating more and more resentment. I’m going to start a project on the Government’s new “Respect Agenda”. It’s unbelievable! They ask questions like: If somebody swore, would you tell them to shut up? No, of course you wouldn’t, you’d get beaten up. It’s so out of touch with what’s going on. They’ve created this incredible hatred and violence and they then berate people for not responding to respect. Dear me, how could they do this?

Chameleon: What can we do about it?

BS: We need some sort of political organisation to represent the working class. It’s gone. That’s what’s the really worrying thing. And it’s not about interests, it’s literally about inequality. The lack of concern about inequality is what really, really worries me.

I was just listening to The Money Programme on Radio Four and the presenter made one comment, along the lines of “For those of you who have money that you don’t really need”. I was outraged! This is so wrong! You shouldn’t have money if you don’t need it. According to that statement it is just fine to accrue money that is completely pointless, you don’t need it. While other people are living on eighty quid a week. It’s wrong.

We’ve lost our sense of fairness to some extent. That’s what’s gone, not deference. Fairness. Caring. I probably sound like a really old person, going, “Oh, you know, we used to care about people in our day!” You have to have a kind of ethical caring.

Chameleon: Talk to me about Vicky Pollard.

BS: Little Britain. The absolute epitome of “Let’s make somebody a complete and total joke!” I always think it’s fascinating how all these alternative, “clever”, white, middle class comedy programmes, and there’s a whole tradition of them, usually have an excessive character and excessive in so many ways. Harry Enfield had Wayne and Waynetta.

This tradition consists of a laugh at excess.

Now the thing about Little Britain is that it’s all about excess in various ways, “I’m the only gay in the village; I’m a lady”, so she is not out of place, but what’s key is that Vicky Pollard fits in with Government rhetoric, when Peter Mandelson made his speech, which was really embarrassing, where he tries to pretend, he tries to speak from the problem of the working class in Britain and he ends up looking ridiculously stupid, when he says, “We are the scroungers, we are the breeding, overeating whatever people”. I reproduce the full speech in Class, Self, Culture.

What Little Britain does is feed into all those chav representations, ladette representations, government representations, media representations.

When they’re doing their “I’m a lady”, it’s quite funny; when they’re doing their “I’m the only gay in the village”, it’s quite funny, but when they’re doing the chav piece it just feeds into every other representation of the large, noisy, badly behaved, non-restrained.

[The reference is to p88, the excerpt from the speech reads as follows: “‘We are people who are used to being represented as problematic. We are the long-term, benefit-claiming, working-class poor, living through another period of cultural contempt. We are losers, no hopers, low life, scroungers. Our culture is yob culture’”]

Chameleon: And it is dished up with this veneer of “post-modern” irony and “sophistication”.

BS: Absolutely, where nobody is responsible for anything.

We’ve seen that in all the lad magazines like Loaded, you know, “Get your tits out, it’s irony”. No, it’s not, it’s actually offensive. I think most people have cottoned on to that now.

Lots of people I know are very cynical about irony. Irony is political power and always has been. It has been used in really good ways, but now seems to be used to reproduce entire discourses. So you can have reproductive and non-reproductive irony.

Chameleon: How can we counteract such denigrating stereotypes? Or is it impossible given the power of the media?

BS: This is the really big problem, but my answer is partly that it is so powerful and because it is now in alliance with Government rhetoric as well as in alliance with what employers want it is an almost concerted attempt to carry out this symbolic devaluing.

My only tiny bit of hope is that in these reality TV programmes, for instance, when people are set up as idiots, trivial, feminine, whatever, sometimes the dignity of their performances wins through and they’re shown to be really nice people who are thoughtful and caring.

There was one programme, it was called Poor Little Rich Girl, in which they set up a Liverpudlian, therefore loud and with all the Liverpool signifiers of being working class, a Page Three model, signifying excessive sexuality, another working class women, a cleaner, but who had no kind of money or presence and didn’t value herself in any way, but what was interesting is that they both came across as really lovely women. They care about the family, they think about other people, they are considerate; they’ll do horrific things if they have to. Sometimes that breaks through. They actually break the value system.

Chameleon: Is that a bit like Jade Goody from Big Brother?

BS: Jade’s a bit like a comedy item. She’s been reincorporated. Jordan and Jade kind of go hand in hand as the stupidly excessive – there’s something to do with motherhood going on in there because they have both been good mothers.

A lot of the reincorporation is about motherhood. It stops them going out behaving like absolute mad people.

It’s as if you get figures of comedic or clowning status that appear in British history. I worry about Jade and Jordan because they didn’t do that revaluing themselves.

Partly the Jade thing was in response to a really nasty campaign in The Sun when a lot of women really responded to the misogyny of it. She was picked on. She was the evil fat pig, that’s what she was called and, as I say, a lot of women responded to the misogyny of it. I think she’s complex in that respect. Motherhood has been really good for her, even though she’s been a single Mum.

Chameleon: If we’ve got these stories in the media, they reinforce people’s sense of helplessness or being trapped. Representations are obviously powerful, but what are the limits of representations?

BS: It’s a bit like race. If people know somebody who’s working class and who’s loyal, or whatever else, they can get beyond it. It’s the people who don’t have such friends who are less likely to.

If you think that most of our policies revolve around spatial apartheid, people are going to be kept away from each other except for figures of fear and figures in the media, so I think there’s a real problem in terms of who doesn’t get to know other people.

If you think that most of our policies revolve around spatial apartheid, people are going to be kept away from each other except for figures of fear and figures in the media, so I think there’s a real problem in terms of who doesn’t get to know other people.
But as for the representations that are aimed at devaluing those who are the object of them I think the latter challenge them. So you get Lady Sovereign singing, I don’t think it’s called “I’m a chav and I don’t care”, but it’s in that kind of vein. “Don’t label me, look at you, you uptight so-and-so!” There’s a real response and it’s been like the old music hall stuff, a real response to middle class authority, an attack on constraint, restraint, morality and the like, saying “You’re the really, really boring ones, get a life!”. There’s a real refusal and the “Get a life!” statement going on. I’d say from my recent research with new groups of young working class women.

Text and photograph © Chameleon 2006. No part of this interview may be reproduced without written authorisation, which may be obtained via e-mail (see profile page).

Light is the mould upon my breast
No sound disturbs my peaceful rest
No friends I mourn no cares I have
No pains no sorrow in the grave
[Headstone inscription, 1825]

One of the treats prepared by my Mother in the faltering between childhood and adolescence was something I had only read about in books, afternoon tea. She would entrust us with her best china, removed from the display cabinet, the teapot, the delicate cups (even then my little finger was too clumsily large to fit through the handle’s ostentatious curlicue) and saucers, the cake plates their fragility a compliment in itself. Slices of plain bread (Mother’s Pride), coarse crusts carefully removed, Shipham’s salmon spread or, the ultimate in sophistication, slivers of cucumber so thin as to be almost transparent. My companion in this imitation of carefree gentility my neighbour, AM, slightly older, whom I looked up to as a sister.

The sense of community seeped out of the row of houses when her family left, almost imperceptibly, the newcomers keeping themselves to themselves whilst I returned only as other commitments permitted, saddened by the neglect implied by the overgrown gardens, the indifference (if not outright hostility) evinced by the high wooden boards separating the properties. Our respective careers swept us off to distant cities, the gaudy, superficial glamour of my line of work amidst the constant chatter in contrast to her more dignified service away from the throngs of journalists and television crews. Her unswerving determination and talents enabled her to achieve the breakthrough into a branch, which, once professionalized, was masculinised. My admiration remains.

Chameleon: Could you say a little bit about yourself and what got you into the business of being a funeral director? What made it an interesting or attractive career choice?

Grim Reaper (GR): That’s quite an easy answer because when I was eighteen – not a lot of people are aware of it, but my Dad occasionally helped out at a funeral director’s in P, driving limousines. He only did it a couple of times because he was standing in for another colleague of his and that was when I first thought this is really quite an interesting job, working with the dead. I didn’t get any further with that – I didn’t think really much about it until quite a bit later in life, in fact, eighteen years later and I then started taking actions to try and get a position in a funeral firm, but nobody would take me on because I was a woman. I just left it at that, I had a couple of interviews, but they wouldn’t you on, you didn’t have the experience, you weren’t strong enough, you know, what could a woman bring to this line of work? But three years later, one of the funeral directors I had had an interview with head-hunted me because I had impressed him, seemingly, so much, he found me again and asked if I was still interested to which I said yes. That was the start of it.

Chameleon: Why do you think that they were hostile to the idea of employing a woman? Is it because it is a male-dominated profession?

GR: Absolutely. It was always a male-orientated line of work, you know, it was always men that were funeral directors. There were women in the profession, but they only worked in the office: they dealt with the paperwork, but they all suddenly saw that women were the way forward because you have families who are losing babies and children and they don’t want the hardness of a man. Not that the men are bad at the job, but they felt there was a softer approach with having a lady funeral director and that’s what started everybody thinking about it.

Chameleon: So when would you say that this shift in attitude took place, more or less?

GR: 1998 it really started and I got my job in 1999.

Chameleon: So were you amongst the women pioneers?

GR: In Scotland, in A certainly. I was one of the first three in A. So, I’m really chuffed with that.

Chameleon: So how many years have you been in the business?

GR: This is my seventh year.

Chameleon: And you’ve never looked back.

GR: Never. Not at all.

Chameleon: You mentioned a moment ago that strength, physical strength was seen as a must. Why was that? Was it for removing bodies from the house?

GR: When we are on call, on duty we have to physically go to houses where people have died and nursing homes and take the body into our care. It’s a team of two people, normally, a funeral director and an ambulance driver. We go to wherever the body is in situ, take them onto a stretcher and take them out, you know and sometimes you are met with somebody that is quite obese, quite large and we have to call for backup from the other team that is on duty. We don’t risk our health. Most often I will manage, I’m not a weakling, in fact, there are some men at my premises that are smaller than me and can’t even lift the weight that I can lift, so what can I say?

Chameleon: So it was a bit of a myth that women were not cut out for the job?

GR: Totally, yes.

Chameleon: Do you think it was so that the men could keep hold of the sector?

GR: I think it probably was. I think the men didn’t really want women in the forefront of funerals. I don’t think they realised just how good it can look, but we’ve proven otherwise over the years, so I’m really happy with that.

Chameleon: Good! What qualities do you need to be a good funeral director?

GR: Well, empathy, rather than sympathy, empathy. Each funeral’s different, every family reacts differently, you can’t sympathise with them unless you’ve been through it yourself, but you still don’t know what they are feeling personally. Everybody’s emotions are different. There’s happiness, there’s anger, there’s sadness, there’s relief, there’s all these emotions and you’ve got to be able to deal with all these emotions, so it’s empathy rather than sympathy, good man management skills and being able to read a situation. We sometimes get into very bad situations. People are really angry and they want to take it out on you because their loved one has died. You are the first person to come and take them away, so you are the bad person. I’ve had people thump me in the chest and verbally abuse me because I was just there to take their loved one away who has died in tragic circumstances and it’s somebody’s fault, not theirs, and I’m the first person on the scene, so it’s my fault. That’s how it works.

Chameleon: That must be quite difficult to deal with.

GR: It really is. Quite a lot, you know, you get young mothers who have lost teenage children in road traffic accidents or drug overdoses and they’re the ones that are really, they’re frustrated because they just want to know why, why did it happen to them? And why are you here taking my son or daughter away? You’re going to put them in the ground or you’re going to have them cremated. You’re evil, you know, it’s your fault.

Chameleon: But presumably once they calm down they realise you’re not to blame, that they were just worked up.

GR: They do, yes. Exactly. I mean, it’s just bereavement, it’s different stages of grief. Everybody goes through these different stages of grief and they do come round quite quickly, they realise that you are there to help them, not hinder them. You’re there to do everything for them, to make it as memorable an occasion as possible and not a horrible occasion.

Chameleon: Of course. It’s horrible enough as it is.

GR: It is really, you know.

Chameleon: Do funeral directors have a morbid sense of humour?

GR: [Mock indignation] What do you mean? [Laughter] Well…I would say, yes. I mean, if you don’t have a sense of humour, not at the cost of the deceased, but something else. It’s situations we’re put into. For instance, I would say, my premises are at the end of a street and when somebody phones me and asks “How do I get to your premises?” one of my comments is, “Well, you can’t go anywhere else, we’re a dead end”…and, you know, it is a dead end job. I’m not going to go anywhere further and I don’t get my clients backchatting me or anything, I don’t get any cheek from them, they’re really quite well behaved. So I think the answer to your question is yes, we do have a morbid sense of humour. Then there was one incident that sticks in my mind. To set the scene, it was a Saturday and I was on duty, as I am today [during the interview, the Grim Reaper was on call for the entire weekend, her mobile switched on 24 hours a day with the ring tone set to loud to wake her up should she be needed in the early hours]. I had done my shift at the office as well as the work that needed done at the mortuary. My work partner and I received a call for a house death in B, so we drove out. We got past [another village on the way] and were now going through A. As we were leaving this little village, we saw a large queue of traffic and I jokingly said to my colleague: “That’s our next fatality”. He just didn’t want to know. I said: “It’ll be an RTA”. He didn’t want it as he had never attended one. I said I’d get out of the ambulance, walk up and take a look. I’m walking past this great long line of cars, dressed in black from head to foot, passengers staring at this vision. As I arrived at the scene, I saw a Range Rover, motorcycle, police, ambulances and a body on the ground. At the time we had the police contract for removals. I walked up to the police officer who about fell over when he saw me. I said “I take it this is my next fatality”. His jaw dropped: “I haven’t called you yet!” “We’re just out touting for business”. Then I added that I was only joking, that we were on the way to B for another deceased. The RTC [Road Traffic Collision] incident unit had to measure the skid marks to determine the speed, it had to record where the bike had landed, where the car had stopped and where the body ended up. I asked if we could drive through and the officer replied that we would have to take a detour round the outskirts of the village. “Fair enough,” I replied. En route back to the ambulance I walked down the driver’s side pretending to be a police officer (I was mistaken for the CID because of my outfit) and through the open windows I would explain they would have to go the other way. One guy leaned out, “Excuse me, officer, ma’am, is it bad?” [In a deep, authoritative voice] “’Fraid so, fatality here”. Just at that point, two motorcyclists came tearing up the road and stopped right at my feet. I told them they couldn’t go any further, there’s been an RTA. “Did it involve a motorcyclist?” I confirmed it was a motorcyclist. They asked, “Did he have a blue helmet on?” I confirmed that he had. Their shoulders slumped, their heads bowed and they turned and drove off. I went back to the ambulance and said to my driver, “It is a fatality. You’ll be alright, though, it’s only his head that was hanging off”. He now looked very sick. I told him we had to turn and take a detour and reassured him that although there had been a fatality, the body was intact. There was a lot of blood. When we arrived at the house we were asked why we were late, so I explained we had been held up by another incident. We knew we would get called back to the RTA so we went back to our branch in [a village] with the body from the house. Unfortunately, due to the movement, he had been faecally incontinent, so he needed a good hose down. Then the call came from the police that we needed to attend a new death. “Ah, yes, the motorbike on the B109”. The woman on the other end of the phone was surprised: “Oh, so you know about that already”. “We had passed that way earlier on”. So we went back to the incident, collected the body, picked up the body from the house death and brought them both back to the main office in A. I thought we would be let off as it had been a hard enough day, but there were two more deaths. I had been on duty for 13 hours and felt sick and hungry and wanted to get home, so I was speeding through B. I got stopped. The police officer had been in attendance at the scene earlier. “Why are you speeding when you of all people know what the outcome can be?” I was upset and told him about how I had not had a minute’s rest and he tapped me on the shoulder with his glove. “Don’t let it happen again”.

Chameleon: Well, I suppose it’s a coping mechanism as much as anything else…

GR: It is.

Chameleon: … because doctors and nurses often have a very morbid sense of humour as well and they are dealing with patients whilst they are still alive. Could you give me a run-through of a fairly typical day? What does it involve?

GR: Well, first thing in the morning we go in and we go through to the rest room and we close all the coffins that have cremations or burials that day. We will make sure that all the coffins are in the respective order for going up to the crematorium and then we get the hearses up to the door and load all the coffins on board and take them up in procession to the crematorium, unless they are going as a cortège, in which case they would wait until the family arrived and we would then leave the premises. Once that’s done we all get changed out of our black suits and get into our striped suits for the actual funeral itself. It’s a different uniform for conducting and we head off to either crematorium, church, burial site, wherever we’re going and conduct a funeral. Now, we’re not taking the service, we’re conducting the service in that we liaise with all third parties who are taking part in one funeral and make sure everything is running smoothly. That’s your minister, the florist, the flowers, you know, the hymn sheets are there on time, releasing doves if you have to release doves, you know, balloons to represent the child’s spirit going off into the sky, anything like that, we’ve got to make sure it actually takes place. We don’t really get a lunch break, you just eat on the job, snaffle a wee apple sometimes during the day, whatever. You don’t get a break because you could have one funeral in a day, you could have six funerals in a day. At our premises, at G and W we average about 30 funerals a week. There are only four funeral directors to conduct this amount, so we do have our work cut out for us. On top of conducting we also arrange funerals, we go to removals, we go to house arrangements, we have to do our community work to keep everybody happy, we’re good neighbours, if you like and we’ve got other duties that we have to conduct within the premises, keeping the vehicles clean, helping out in the mortuary to prepare deceased. We don’t really have a lot of time to ourselves.

Chameleon: It doesn’t sound like it.

GR: Then, on top of that, at the end of the day you go home. If you’re lucky enough you’re not on duty, if you’re unlucky, it’s your rota time, you’re on duty, so you’re actually on call 24 hours a day. We work 365 days a year, OK we close on Christmas Day and close on New Year’s Day, but the rest of the time we are actually physically at the office at the rest rooms, working.

Chameleon: So it’s really quite a demanding job in many ways. What about emotionally, or is it something you get used to?

GR: No, you don’t get used to it because each funeral is different. Emotionally, I mean, how do I treat it? If I go to the scene of a really bad accident where there is serious trauma to a body or badly injured people, I just treat it like the worst possible film I’ve ever seen with special effects. I can watch it on the TV screen, so why can’t I deal with it in reality? You know, that’s how I think of it. It is not the human being that is left, it’s their earthly remains, the shell of their body, their being. To me the spirit is gone by now, so, really, I can deal with it. It’s not that I’m hardened to it, it’s just that I can deal with it and it’s never bothered me. Part of my interview for the job that I did get the first time round was to be walked into a mortuary where somebody was actually being prepared. I’d never seen a dead body before and I just went, “Oh cool! Can I look?” And the manager of that premises knew right away, well she’s into this, she’s got the job. That’s how serious I was about wanting to do it. I’d done my research, I wanted to do this and I was determined I was going to do it.

Chameleon: Are there any times of year when you’re busier than others?

GR: Low season and high season? We have high season in the winter. Yes, when the cold nights and the cold weather, dark nights, I should say, and cold weather come in we have a lot more deaths. The old people, the vulnerable, the young catch bugs and any germs that are going around, they die. Also, at Christmas time people get themselves into serious, serious debt and we get an increased number of suicides just after and that is why we have the high season as the winter, the dark nights. That’s when you get many more funerals to conduct. Summer time it’s quite quiet, that’s the low season, if you want and we don’t have nearly as many funerals, but I mean it’s swings and roundabouts, it just depends what’s going on, healthwise, in the area at the time. You can have a bout of meningitis or something that will just wipe a whole heap of folk out. It’s a shame. It happens, you know, but it’s usually the dark nights. It’s much busier.

Chameleon: You don’t actually conduct the funeral services do you?

GR: I have done. I have. When a family have said to me, “Look, we’re not religious, we don’t want a minister”, we offer them the opportunity to have what is known as a humanist, that is a non-religious, ceremony. However, the Humanist Society do charge quite a considerable sum for their services and some families don’t have the means to pay that, so we, as funeral directors, some of us, can actually hold a service as well. We’re not ordained, we’re not ministers, we’re not men or women of the cloth, but we can speak at funeral services and I have done on a number of occasions.

Chameleon: How do you go about it? Do you find out about the person’s life?

GR: We get background information about the person, you know, from the family, we just sit and meet with them and talk about them and we ask if they want a poem read out. We won’t do anything religious. We’ll lead them in a singing, if they want a hymn because some folk still want a hymn, even though they’re non-religious. We will lead them in that, we will announce that we will now sing this song, or whatever, this hymn, and that’s it. Read a few words out. It is a short service, but it is still quite meaningful to them because that is what they wanted, non-religious and that’s what they get.

Chameleon: Do you prepare bodies for people of different religions, or is it always Christian?

GR: No, we have Chinese, Muslims, Jewish, we have other bodies to prepare, but most often with these other religions, representatives of their religion come in and actually prepare the body themselves, that’s just part of their belief. They have to touch the body and nobody else. So we allow them to come into our mortuary conditions and use the mortuary facilities and they will prepare and lay to rest the deceased. We stand in attendance because obviously we have to make sure they don’t touch anything they shouldn’t, but we will be there and assist them if they require it.

Chameleon: How do you prepare a body?

GR: There are two types of preparation. Normal preparation, which is washing and dressing a body. Washing them properly, washing their hair, cleaning their fingernails. What you have to do really is suture their mouth and make sure their eyes are closed because most people when they pass away they take a last breath and their mouth is open. It’s not nice for a family to come in and see a gaping open mouth, so we close the mouth and we most often have to put a suture in and then there’s embalming, which is not mummification or anything like that, the Egyptian-style, it is disinfecting the body internally and the organs and replacing the body fluids with formaldehyde, basically, and that preserves the body.

Chameleon: Are there any times when you don’t need to do an embalming?

GR: We don’t need to do embalmings if the funeral is going to be like within a week or so, but most people do want embalming because it does make the body look more presentable than just a preparation, just normal preparation. Part of the formalin, the actual chemical, has a pink pigment in it that brings back the natural skin tones, whereas if we didn’t embalm they’re not getting this fluid to give them the pink tones and then, obviously, the skin goes very, very pale, very white, very quickly, so embalming has its benefits, definitely. A person who has been embalmed certainly looks better presented than somebody who hasn’t been embalmed.

Chameleon: Do you have to put make-up on as well?

GR: Yes, make-up would be applied. Not if the person didn’t wear make-up. We would never just put make-up on and it’s always light make-up, you know, just a little bit of powder. If somebody had severe bruising on their face or anything, we would put some light foundation on to cover it up as best we can and we explain that to the families that that might be necessary.

Chameleon: I suppose you need it if somebody died in violent circumstances, such as in an accident.

GR: Yes.

Chameleon: Does that mean you have to do some reconstructive work on occasion?

GR: Reconstructive embalming, techniques and preparation, is only coming now to Britain. It has been in America for quite a number of years. We’re only getting it now really and we’re still learning. I don’t do that personally.

Chameleon: Presumably you’d need to go on a special course?

GR: Our embalmers, qualified embalmers would have to go on special courses to learn reconstructive work. It’s quite involved.

Chameleon: Do you get a lot of murder victims?

GR: We do have murder victims, yes. Not an awful lot, because A’s good, A’s not murder city. Yes, there have been murder victims.

Chameleon: Are they more difficult to cope with?

GR: It’s the circumstances surrounding it. I think it’s more difficult in that the family are so robbed; they feel so robbed of their loved one. It’s just so horrific what happens. Obviously, in most circumstances of murder, we wouldn’t be able to let the family see their loved one because of injuries inflicted. Most of them are violent.

Chameleon: I suppose the pathologist will have had to have carried out a post mortem.

GR: Yes, to establish what was the cause of death. In those cases as well, the body probably wouldn’t be released to the funeral director for approximately two to three weeks whilst all the investigations are going on. During that time decomposition will continue to take place.

Chameleon: How do people react when you meet them for the first time and introduce yourself and they ask you what you do for a living? Is it a conversation stopper?

GR: It can be. There’s only two reactions. One is that it’s a conversation stopper, instantly and they all try to get away from you as quickly as possible – I don’t know what they think I’ve got, some sort of disease or something – and the other is they’re so interested in the subject that they will ask you every question under the sun.

Chameleon: Like me.

GR: Like you [laughter].

Chameleon: Do you try to accommodate special requests from the families about how the funeral is to be run? Can you say a few words about some of the more unusual funerals you have arranged?

GR: Any requests that we get we will endeavour to do them; we always try our very best. I mentioned a couple earlier, the releasing of balloons and the releasing of doves, that is really to represent the spirit going off to the heavens and it gives a lot of people comfort. Little requests. It could be just that this person held a hankie in their hand all the time and we would ensure that this hankie was put in their hand in the coffin for them, you know, little things like that. Then we have had, can my ashes be turned into diamonds? It really can be done, they actually can. Ashes are carbon, our bodies are made up of carbon, so we can send them off to a company called Life Gems and have ashes made into diamonds. From one set of human remains you can probably get about 100 diamonds.

Chameleon: Really? How do they do that?

GR: It’s a process. I don’t know the actual ins and outs of it, but the process takes about three to four months, I think. They extract the carbon from the ashes and then they compress it at high temperatures in their machines and it produces a beautiful, beautiful coloured diamond, not white, not the pure white ones, there’s blues and greens and oranges and amber colours and they really are absolutely gorgeous. I think that came about because a gentleman in America lost his young daughter and he said that he wanted the light of her eye to always shine in his life and he co-founded Life Gems because they thought what shines in your life all the time is diamonds, you know, it glints, so they co-founded Life Gems. I think that’s how it came about, but I’ve never had anybody yet ask me to send their ashes away once they know the costs involved they kind of back down on that one. Another obscure thing that we’ve been asked is to have ashes fired into space and that was after Gene Roddenberry died, the writer of Star Trek. He wanted his ashes in space and so Heavenly Hearses or Celestius Incorporated were formed.

Chameleon: That’s priceless.

GR: A lipstick-sized phial of ashes is strapped to a rocket and fired into space.

Chameleon: Do they collect a lot of them because it must cost a fortune to send up a rocket?

GR: I really don’t know. I’ve never had anybody ask me that. I really don’t know, but I mean, gee whizz, I’ve got to be aware of all these strange things that are available just in case somebody comes up and says I want this done.

Chameleon: You haven’t had anything like in the episode of William and Mary when William’s assistant has to drive the corpse in a motorbike side-car at 100 miles an hour in front of his biker friends?

GR: No, I’ve never had a motorcycle funeral. I’ve had people who were motorcyclists at funerals and we’ve just been a normal funeral cortège and we’ve probably had many bikers following us, but we’ve never had a bike hearse [the Grim Reaper later went on to explain that a bike hearse consists of a specially modified side car]. I have had police officer’s funerals where we’ve had the traffic stopped for us with all the officers practically in A being on duty at the funeral, but I’ve never had any really weird requests. Yet. But that’s only seven years. I have years ahead yet.

Chameleon: What about amusing incidents, or near mishaps?

GR: I could write a book about them [grins]. One of them was when a gentleman said to me that he was going to sing at the graveside, which I said, “Well, that’s OK”. It was going to be a graveside service and he said: “Right, well, I’ll just sing, will I?” I replied, “Yes, I’ll tell you when you can sing”, so he stood there and he went, “A one, a two, a one, two, three, four,” and before he started singing, I just thought, “Oh my God, what is coming next?” You know, I was ready to do a shimmy on down, some Elvis number, but he actually just went “Abide with me, Fast falls the eventide”. Well, I about ended myself, I really had to hide from laughing. We’ve had some gentleman who just wouldn’t listen to what I was telling him about holding the cord for lowering the coffin and he wrapped it round his neck and turned and faced the opposite way and I said, “No, you must turn right round”, so he did a full 365 degree turn and ended up still facing the wrong way and I said, “No, sir, you’ve got to face into the grave,” and he did it once more and still faced out the way and the minister by this time was, his shoulders were going, and I just stood there and I went “Hi-ho, Hi-ho, it’s off to work we go” and the man just started laughing and said, “I am round the wrong way, amn’t I?” I said, “Yes, you are, you need to face into the grave because if you’re going that way, you’re pulling the coffin back out, you are not lowering it”. So we’ve had that. We’ve kicked spokes into graves. The coffin rests on spokes when it’s on top of the grave and we got onto the grave boards either side and, unfortunately, you slip because it’s maybe icy, wintery and you kick the spoke by accident and it falls into the grave, so you’ve just got to walk off the other end of the grave again, let the gravedigger go down into the hole, pick out this spoke and get it back up again. So it’s just like, you know, Take One! We’ve had quite a few things, I mean, I could name quite a few. That’s a few to start with.

Chameleon: Have you ever had any experiences – I know corpses can suddenly sit up and so on – has anything like that ever happened to you?

GR: Oh, yes.

Chameleon: How did you react?

GR: The private ambulances we have now have got enclosed backs to them, but the ambulances we had before were open-back, you could see into the back where the stretcher was and one of the deceased I had on board – we went over a bump and gases were released and the top half of the body did sit up slightly and you hear them groaning as they move and you just think, “Oh, get lost! Sit down again! [Laughs] Behave yourself!” So, I’ve had that.

Chameleon: Isn’t that a bit creepy?

GR: Well, it is the first time you experience it, definitely. It’s a bit creepy and I think probably the worst thing I ever saw was a totally maggotised body. A gentleman had died; he’d committed suicide in his own car. He’d been there over a week and it was the height of summer, so decomposition had set in quite severely and the flies had been at him. When we got there, oh, it was terrible, terrible, lots of maggots.

Chameleon: [Winces at the mental image conjured up from the last series of Messiah with the woman’s body crawling with maggots and bees] How do you cope with something like that?

GR: Well, I wasn’t too bad. The five burly police officers were puking at the sides and I could only think of boiled rice at the Chinese. I’m sorry, but it’s true [laughter]. I just got hungry. I just thought I want a Chinese meal later on, with fried rice or boiled rice; this is what the maggots were reminding me of, but the police officers when we moved the body, you know, there were some odours, they started being sick at the side of the scene and I was just quite happy to carry on with what I was doing.

Chameleon: Recently in the papers, an article appeared on the Top Ten funeral hits. Do people ask to have their favourite songs played a lot? Is there one song that’s very common for people to want to listen to?

GR: When I first started, seven years ago, I think one of the absolute favourites was Tina Turner’s Simply the Best and we heard it time and time and time again – it was getting on my nerves, actually, after a while. Then we went through a stage of Sarah Brightman and Andrea Bocelli’s Time to Say Goodbye and we get Queen, the group Queen, just different things. We get Bat out of Hell, Meatloaf, ah, there’s a few requests, but nothing really sticks out other than the Tina Turner one.

Chameleon: If memory serves me well, in the newspaper article, Number One was My Way. Does anybody ever ask for that around here?

GR: Not really so much here; I think that’s based more in England, that poll because I think I’ve only had My Way about three times in all my career. I haven’t had it much. I’m glad because I don’t particularly like the song.

Chameleon: For my tastes it would be a bit too clichéd.

GR: Definitely.

Chameleon: So how would you say that funerals have changed within the course of your career? Maybe you could say a little about what a very staid and traditional funeral would be like and then compare it with one that’s not quite so traditional?

GR: Certainly they have changed, even in my seven years. It used to be very much that the family would just rely on you to tell them what was going to happen. Now, with programmes like Six Feet Under and Don’t Drop the Coffin and suchlike, people are very much more demanding, which is OK, I mean we don’t mind that. Like I said, we will try and get any request, and also when you see George Best’s funeral on television and then they do a funeral on EastEnders or something like that and folk say, “Oh, I want that, the name tribute and I want a horse-drawn hearse. So we get all these requests now, which is fine because we’ll deal with them. A very plain funeral is, basically, up to the crematorium or just straight to the graveside and a simple service at the crematorium with two hymns to sing and no fuss, no nonsense, no frills attached, if you like. Then a very elaborate funeral would be a full horse-drawn hearse, procession, cortège, about four or five cars following, choirs in the church, soloists, harpists, whatever you want, you know, that would be a really fancy one.

Chameleon: So is that more a question of budget?

GR: Yes, I would say so. Individual families they know their own means and they will come in and tell you what they want. Part of our job is that we have to tell them the costs involved and a lot of families will say, “Oh right, OK, well that’s too dear, we’ll maybe change that slightly, but then there’s some families that will say, “No, cost doesn’t matter, you don’t even need to mention it”, but it’s my job, I have to tell them the costs involved; I wouldn’t be doing the proper job if I didn’t. So I tell them all the way along what it’s going to cost them and they just say, “Right, that’s fine, that’s fine, carry on, carry on, add it on”. It is just the background they come from, or how much money they have, they will pay for what they want.

Chameleon: Do you also organise receptions after the funeral?

GR: Yes, like a funeral tea or a wake. We will arrange it for them in that we will book it for them, but they have to pay that one separately, you know, we don’t like to take on funeral accounts for catering because if an account goes to a solicitor, six months down the line, we still haven’t been paid, we’re still waiting for that catering account to be paid, but we have to pay everybody straight away. We try to avoid catering accounts.

Chameleon: Does the series Six Feet Under give an accurate portrayal of the funeral business or are things so different in America that you can’t really compare them with Scotland?

GR: It’s exactly that, I mean America is – I don’t want to insult them, but they are a bit OTT. But no, what we did see in Six Feet Under was very good. It was very lifelike in the way we have humour and we do have lives outside, although we don’t get much time for them, but we do have lives outside. It was a very good programme. I enjoyed watching it. I think every funeral director in Britain watched it to try and compare. The only thing I didn’t like about Six Feet Under was the way the man said embalming, it was very emphasised, [mimics the drawl] em-balm-ing.

Chameleon: Do you think that programmes like Six Feet Under and William and Mary have had an impact on the public perception of your profession?

GR: Probably.

Chameleon: A good one?

GR: I think so. They know that we’re there to help them and that we are human.

Chameleon: What do you think about the way that some commentators, mostly right-wing commentators, complain about the way people don’t show restraint any more, that it’s not stiff upper lip at the funeral. How do you react to that?

GR: Well, a funeral shouldn’t really be all doom and gloom; a funeral should be a celebration of a person’s life, to be honest with you. If you don’t want to wear black, don’t wear black. You don’t have to follow tradition. Victorian tradition dictates that you would go into mourning in the case of a spouse for about three years. If it was a child it would certainly be for a year of mourning and then wear a black armband for about two years after that, which is still three years. Times change. We have to get on with our lives. It’s not that we’re forgetting about the person, but we’ve got to get on with life. Life is for the living. Don’t forget the person: “Do not stand at my grave and weep, I am not there, I am the thousand winds that blow, I am the diamond glints on snow”. Things like that. Life is for the living and as for the dead, let them die. Don’t forget them, let them live in your memory. They’re in your heart and they’re in your head and that’s where they should stay. With pride say, “That was my Mum, that was my Dad”. But no, commentators, they have no right. What do they know exactly? They have no right to comment, really they don’t. It’s for the living and it’s a celebration of a person’s life. And I know it’s a sad occasion when somebody young has their life cut short, either by an accident or by an illness or something, but you have still just got to accept it. It’s happened. It’s happened because the person was ill or because somebody, unfortunately, had an accident, so, you know, you’ve got to get on with it.

Chameleon: I think that what these commentators object to is public displays of grief. They think it’s vulgar. Frankly, I think that’s rubbish, but I was just curious to know what your perspective is.

GR: Well, for instance, with Diana, I certainly thought that was too much. People who never met her crying in the streets, they could grieve in private, but they didn’t meet her, they didn’t know her, why were they grieving so much? I didn’t understand that myself, I just don’t understand why they were grieving. I thought it was sad. The woman was killed in tragic circumstances and she had left two young sons behind, but I certainly wouldn’t have gone out of my way to go and lay a flower down at Buckingham Palace gates or go to the funeral or cry for a week on end or even go out to buy Elton John’s record. No way. Sorry [laughs], that was too much. The same with George best. It was over the top.

Chameleon: Do you think that Diana’s funeral was a watershed in terms of how people show their grief? Do you think it had an impact on more modest funerals shall we say?

GR: Probably. I would think so, yes. I think all that did was really just to allow people to show grief. People before then didn’t want to show that they were grieving, but the Diana incident would have opened up the floodgates for folk to have books of remembrance, to openly say, “I am grieving. I really have lost someone and I’m hurting inside. I’m very upset”. So it did open that up, but, like I say, I just felt it was over the top.

Chameleon: It probably was, but what I always assume is that it’s worse to bottle it up, it is far preferable to acknowledge it and to release it.

GR: To let it out. You should always speak about the person. Don’t hide away from it and don’t ever avoid mentioning their name again. Speak about them, as though they were still there. You should. Do you?

Chameleon: Yes. With my Mum.

GR: And I do with my Dad. I often comment about my Dad, “Oh, my dad would have loved this” or “Dad would have said this, Dad would have said that”. No, we don’t forget him and we speak openly with Mum about him. And it’s helped Mum.

Chameleon: What do you think about our society’s attitude towards death? It seems to be a bit of a taboo, which is why some people might be taken aback to see a young, attractive woman such as yourself in the role of a funeral director.

GR: Modern society, well. People of my age, no, that’s not quite true, actually, let me rephrase that, people who have lost somebody already in their life, somebody close, they will show respect, for instance, if they see a funeral cortège coming, they will show respect. Only because they have experienced this. On our way to A crematorium we have to drive past a school and quite often we are going past it at playtime or during the lunch break. Now the kids in their hundreds are coming out. They will show no respect. They will jump out in front of the cars to try and slow you down. They will shout things at the cars and make fun of the people who are sitting in the vehicles, the staff included because we’ve got to wear hats and our full dress code and everything. They make fun of you and they don’t show any respect at all to the bereaved family. We also get drivers who won’t give way to a cortège and they will break you up. In fact, they will even overtake you because they are being held up in their life. They’ll overtake you and shout obscenities out the window at you and they will make rude gestures, you know, finger gestures, etc. etc. and they just don’t show any respect. I think they are the people who have never lost anybody close – yet. And when it happens to them they will understand how awfully they have acted. As for children, I think that’s down to the parents, the parents need to start teaching them, death is a serious subject, speak about it and stop the kids behaving in such a horrendous way when they see funeral cars coming. I think it’s disgusting, I really do.

Chameleon: I had no idea that this kind of thing happens. I was merely thinking of death as a social taboo, that we need to talk about it instead of ignoring it.

GR: People do need to talk about it because quite often we’ll get families in as well, they’ve lost somebody suddenly for instance and not one member of the family would know whether the person wanted buried or cremated and it’s half the battle if you even know that, because they just won’t talk about it. They wouldn’t know what the favourite song was, or whether the person liked hymns. Did they like flowers? What’s their favourite flower? What would they want dressed in? Simple things like that, and nobody knows about it because they are so frightened to talk about any member of their family dying. It is the only thing in life that is guaranteed: you will die. Eventually. You need to speak about it as people, even if it’s just to say “When I die, I want to be buried,” or “I want to be cremated and I want my ashes thrown into the North Sea,” or something like that. Just let somebody know what you want, even if it’s written down somewhere, easily found. But folk do need to speak about it. I think our family were the same. I don’t think we ever spoke about it until I got into this line of work and now I could tell you about what every member of the family wants. Just because I have asked them.

Chameleon: Do you get the impression that the way our society is built up means that we are in constant denial of the fact that we’re going to die? Do you think that’s a healthy or a bad thing?

GR: I think it’s a bad thing, you know, you shouldn’t deny you’re going to die. It’s going to happen. You don’t know what’s round the corner. It could happen today, it could happen in ten years’ time, twenty years, thirty years. I think we all want to live forever, but it’s not going to happen and I think it would be horrible if you did live forever. You would see so many changes. Definitely it’s a bad thing. Folk need to realise that they are going to die at some point, or somebody’s going to die at some point and they need to get a hold of that. It is real.

Chameleon: If a down and out dies, what happens to the body? Do the authorities try to find out who that person was? What happens?

GR: Yes. It used to be what was known as a welfare funeral, but it’s now been given a different name, indigent death, and, basically, the council would take over and they just arrange a simple burial or a simple cremation. My company actually has the contract for that in A, so we would deal with them anyway and they just get a plain, basic coffin for cremation or burial and we will take care of the arrangements. The council pay for it.

Chameleon: Presumably you don’t necessarily know who they are…

GR: Most folk, there’s something to say who they are and we often do find out who they are because you always have to have a name plate on a coffin, but what happens is the council actually take occupation, if you like of their flat, bed-sit, wherever and they will try to recoup any money by selling off the person’s possessions. That’s how it works.

Chameleon: That sounds awfully cruel, doesn’t it?

GR: I know.

Chameleon: But what if the person has no possessions?

GR: Again it would just be the council that would arrange for them to be buried or cremated, but they do try to find out if there is any family. They always make enquiries about whether there’s brothers, sisters, cousins that want to help with something at least. And they do. I don’t think I’ve ever yet come across somebody who’s never had anybody at all. There’s always been somebody. They crawl out of the woodwork.

Chameleon: What would you say are the positive aspects of your job? What do you like about it?

GR: Gosh [pauses for a second]. The satisfaction of being able to help people in a time of need. I’m helping the family, those that have been left behind, but I’m also helping the deceased on their final journey and that gives me great job satisfaction. I really am privileged to help people and that’s how I feel. As soon as I stop feeling like that I would not do the job any more. I feel privileged to be able to help folk in their final hours, or desperate hours of need, you know, families that are left behind, that’s it.

Though greedy worms devour my skin, and gnaw
my wasting flesh, Yet God shall build my bones
again, And clothe them all afresh
[Headstone inscription, Greyfriars Kirkyard]

This interview features in the Eighth Carnival of Feminists at the unfailingly excellent Gendergeek.