Philip, Fiona Louise (2010) Veiled disclosures and queer articliations readings of literacy and cinematic works by Bryher and Pool. PhD thesis, University of Leeds.
Abstract
This thesis uses three case studies to consider the creative negotiations that Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman (1894-1983)) and POOL (1927-1933), the experimental film group of which she was a member, deployed in order to represent, and to speak as, dissident sexual subjectivities in the interwar period. 1 explore their various 'queer articulations’ - the attempts to both ‘speak out’ and ‘speak back’ - in four literary and cinematic works. 1 introduce the term ‘veiled disclosure' to consider how Bryher and POOL circumvented both social censure and artistic censorship by seeking to address a particular readership - those viewers or readers attuned to difference - while simultaneously concealing their subversive contents from the audience at large. Queer articulation, however, also refers to Bryher and POOL’S repeated attempts to forge links, both creative and political, across difference, especially in response to fascist nationalisms. The first chapter frames my interdisciplinary project in relation to queer feminist theory, and argues for the necessity of using a queer theoretical lens for interpreting Bryher and POOL’S work. In my second chapter, 1 read Bryher’s two early ‘autobiographical fictions,’ Development (1920) and Two Selves (1923) as an attempt to ‘speak out,’ rather than come out. In so doing, 1 argue that Bryher’s texts were also an effort to forge a queer reading community not just to remedy her own isolation but that of other ‘queer’ subjects too. My third chapter explores the impact which cultural censorship had on POOL’S 1930 silent film Borderline, and, more specifically, how the almost contemporaneous banning of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well o f Loneliness (1928) informed its production. I read the film as an attempt to ‘speak back’ to English censors, with Bryher’s performance as the nameless manageress being the fulcrum of POOL’S retort. In Chapter 4, I focus on Bryher’s little-known novella Manchester (1935-6), reading it alongside two pieces of film criticism, the writer’s ‘Dope or Stimulus’ (1928) plus ‘The Hollywood Code’ (1931), which reveal her as a prescient critic of mass culture, especially in relation to the category of kitsch. Alongside functioning as a critique of the homogeneity of Hollywood productions, I argue that Manchester was also a call to arms, which encouraged the English population to heed the devastation unfolding in mainland Europe.
Metadata
Supervisors: | Flannery, Denis and Pollock, Griselda |
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Awarding institution: | University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > University of Leeds Research Centres and Institutes > Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies (Leeds) |
Identification Number/EthosID: | uk.bl.ethos.531605 |
Depositing User: | Ethos Import |
Date Deposited: | 12 Jan 2023 11:15 |
Last Modified: | 12 Jan 2023 11:15 |
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