Page 18 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

6 DAVID MORLEY AND KUAN-HSING CHEN

‘A thief in the night’ is designed, as she puts it, to offer ‘other elements of
an account to lie alongside Stuart’s, to contribute to a thicker description
of a time and topic of conflict.’ Brunsdon is concerned, on the one hand, to
emphasize just how painful these conflicts were, for all concerned—to
recognize the real difficulties of living through political and theoretical
disagreements, in a context in which ‘sometimes only door slamming create
(d) the silence in which to be heard’, as she and other women at CCCS
attempted to destabilize (and were experienced as transgressing) the basic
groundrules of the ‘boyzone’. Her point is also to resist any current
temptations to think of cultural studies as somehow ‘always already
politically chic’ and to remind us just how explosive the ‘gender agenda’
was, in ‘interrupting’ the concerns of the marxism whose centrality, at that
time, was as taken-for-granted as that of gender issues is today. Of course,
as Brunsdon notes, ‘interruptions’ themselves are interruptible. In this case,
the eruption of issues of gender onto the agenda of cultural studies was
itself then ‘interrupted’ by the emergence of the issue of race (and later
again, of ethnicity). There are also a number of close parallels here:
Brunsdon’s comments on the way in which the Women’s Studies Group at
CCCS was initially ‘pigeonholed’ as simply ‘filling in the gaps in an already
existing analysis’ can usefully be read in conjunction with Julien and
Mercer’s comments (chapter 22) on the ways in which the ‘politics of
marginalization’ have often operated so as to leave questions of race (as
much as questions of gender) as the preserve of the ‘Special Issue’. Equally,
Brunsdon’s comments on the significance of the shift from the emphasis on
the category of ‘women’ to that of ‘feminism’ (see her comments on
McRobbie and McCabe, 1981, as a marker of this shift) offer clear
parallels with the later shifts away from essentialism in concepts of race
and ethnicity (see Part V, below). Her comments on the extent to which
‘identity’-based politics can, in the end, only offer starting-points (if crucial
ones), rather than conclusions to political debates, resonates clearly with
Gilroy’s (1990) formulation that ‘it ain’t where you’re from, it’s where
you’re at.’
Brunsdon’s essay is followed by Hall’s (1993) ‘For Allon White:
metaphors of transformation’ which, in its focus on questions of
transgression (not least, in relation to the body and sexuality) perhaps most
clearly demonstrates the significance, for Hall’s own later work, of the
encounter with the ‘gender agenda’ at CCCS. ‘For Allon White: metaphors
of transformation’ is the text of a Memorial Lecture which Hall gave at the
University of Sussex, after the premature death of one of his ex-students,
Allon White (published initially in White, 1993). The text takes the form of
an extended commentary on the significance of White’s work, and that of
his collaborator Peter Stallybrass, and especially their (1986) joint book,
The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. The full significance of
that work, Hall argues, is only now beginning to be recognized as the