I recently read George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier. I confess that I am terribly late to this book and I have no good reason why: it is a masterpiece. Then again, I am also convinced that all books have a ‘time’ to be read by the reader, and it would appear that this was the right time for me to read this one. This isn’t a book review, save to say – go read it if you haven’t – it is depressing how many of the conditions affecting working-class lives remain 90 years later: the casualisation of labour, housing struggles, crap food, disbursement of communities, etc. I also recognise many of the difficulties around communication styles I have encountered (especially) in the academy, when he talks about the rough rudeness of the working-class from the perspective of the middle- and upper-classes. On the plus side, I’m proud to be
I was five when I grasped the difference between biological sex and gender. My best friend dumped me when we started primary school because he realised I was a girl. I was so hurt and confused: I was the same person, but because our relationship was now embedded in a larger, gender stratified community, I was now seen as something less. Someone less. Someone different. Someone he could no longer be best friends with. What the experience told me was that my body had socially ascribed meanings that didn’t have anything to do with me, the person inhabiting the body. That I still liked climbing the same trees, riding the same bikes, playing in the same dirt, and with the same trains, was irrelevant. What mattered was that my body was different to his which now meant that there were different expectations on and of me, expectations I did not agree