Forthcoming talk

Compared to this time last year, when I seemed to be on an endless treadmill of giving talks on a wide variety of topics in different venues, I don't have much on my dance-card at the moment. However, I shall be giving the following talk to the Queer Studies Forum at the University of Westminster on 9th Feb at 6.30 pm: 

‘‘‘Bearded Fruit-Juice Drinkers” : the Queerness of Interwar Progressives’

There was a significant mass of individuals and organisations in Britain between the wars, concentrated in the metropolis, who were widely perceived as ‘queer’ both in the contemporary popular sense of generally eccentric and cranky and also on account of their contravention of gender and sexual norms. This paper will look at the ways this somewhat amorphous group destabilised prevalent assumptions of the day, with particular attention to the ways in which they were felt to be violating hegemonic masculinity, whether through belief in pacifism, a dedication to vegetarianism, unconventional personal fashion style, or enjoyment of such unmanly forms of exercise as yoga and folk-dancing, alongside their liberal attitudes towards homosexuality and on other matters of sexual conduct.