ABSTRACT
Historically, the landscape of South Wales is renowned for its abundance of coal and iron ore in its valleys. While Welsh coal is known to have been excavated since Roman times, Britain’s industrial revolution (1730s-1850s) saw a rapid rise in global coal export, resulting in an exponential increase in population and a violent disfigurement of the natural and agricultural landscape. Despite the grim life at the coalface, thousands were drawn away from working on the land into the precarious work of mining. While representations of mining as male labour dominate, there is a hidden history of women’s involvement in mining. Children and women worked alongside men, 12-14 hours a day, underground in cramped and dangerous conditions, doing hard, back-breaking work. Getting the work done and increasing production, rather than the gender of the workers, took priority. Indeed, women’s own testimonies point to the regularity of woman doing
THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF QUEER THEORY IN EDUCATION RESEARCH
the lifting and heavy work. As Denise Bates’ (2012, p. 1099) research into pit-lasses explains, ‘women would work for less pay than men required and would accept conditions that no man would tolerate’. Girls as young as six years regularly descended ladders into the pits to draw up tubs of
coal (aka ‘basket girls’), and many were routinely harnessed to waggons to haul heavy loads some distance, sometimes several hundred yards as Agnes testifies above. The quote introducing this section powerfully describes the way harnessed pit-girls were a significant part of the ‘heritage of British mines’ – a heritage that portrays subjugation and strength, and as the following excerpts suggest, an image of female masculinity (Halberstam, 1998) that was decried as unnatural and immoral by the male middle-class commissioners of the time:
These examples gesture towards a queering of the gender order of the day, provoking an abject disgust at girls-becoming-boys, women-becoming-men, if not in-hu-man (‘unsexed’). The ‘disciplinary’ forces of pit-life, ‘crushing’ ‘female purity’ and unleashing ‘masculine vices’ and ‘wayward recklessness’ mesh with the sexualisation of girls’ sartorial and working bodies. Indeed, projections of promiscuous ‘half-dressed’ and ‘naked girls’ were decontextualised, sensationalised and eroticised via sketches and photographs in the Victorian printing press (Bates, 2012). Moreover, claims regarding the moral degeneration and sexual impropriety of girls and women as they laboured in mining environments were used as the rationale for preventing women and children under 10 years from working underground. After a number of attempts, the 1842 miners Act effectively shunted women (and their families), who often only knew colliery life, into further poverty. Many women tried to oppose the Act, while others creatively dressed in ‘men’s clothes’ in order to pass as male and ‘gain a few days wages for the sake of bare subsistence’ (Brown, 1851). Even so, after the 1842 Act the hetero-patriarchal bonds gradually tightened and coal mining became exclusively ‘men’s work’. In sum, pit-lasses were replaced by pit-ponies (the colliery horse, see Thompson, 2008), and women were called upon to relearn a domesticated, respectable and less ‘wild’ femininity. Indeed, schools were discussed as sites for the sole purpose of educating girls so that they:
362 E. Renold and G. Ivinson
THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF QUEER THEORY IN EDUCATION RESEARCH
Fast forward 100 years and the gendered division of labour became imbued with new tensions as traditional mining jobs disappeared, and men were increasingly unemployed in mining areas. From the 1930s to the 1980s, mechanisation allowed coal to be extracted in huge quantities yet for increasingly higher prices, and the UK was unable to compete with cheaper coal extraction in China. Since the deliberate mass closure of the mines initiated by Thatcher’s Government in the 1980s, men’s bodies were no longer needed to stoically endure hard manual labour and many became long-term unemployed. Today, the only available jobs are predominantly in the service sectors which are widely recognised in these ex-mining locales as ‘feminine work’ (Walkerdine & Jimenez, 2012). Girls anticipate, and mothers and grandmothers dominate, the caring and service sectors. As for the colliery horses, they are used for agricultural work or have gradually returned to the wilderness. The last working pit-pony died in 1999. In our longitudinal ethnographic project, ‘Young People and Place’, we worked with
young people in a locale known for its mining heritage at a time when all the mines had finally closed down. For the young teens in our research, a complex set of values and associations surfaced. High levels of multiple deprivations continue to be a signature of the valleys which attract European ‘Communities First’ funding, along with multiple, often unsuccessful, attempts at regeneration. In contemporary times, anxieties surrounding enforced conditions of human worklessness are infused with strong traditions around heteronormative gender roles rooted in the industrial past. Girls’ narratives were infused with tensions that seemed to bear the signs of industrial legacies of what girls and women were expected to do and be. This was most noticeable in their talk of sexual safety and danger, and how they negotiated the affordances of the valleys landscape. Many girls in the study said they felt unsafe, yet to varying degrees. They spoke of the
difficulties often associated with poverty, such as physical and heterosexual violence, illness, accidents and loss (Ivinson & Renold, 2013b; Renold, 2013). Moreover, in these newly gendered places, girls were growing up with complex contradictory messages. Post-feminist school-based slogans plastering classroom walls called on girls to aim high, work hard, never give up and be empowered (Ringrose, 2007). In contrast, community messages steeped in a history where generations of strong women have kept families afloat, demand girls stay close and couple up with boyfriends as ways to keep boys safe. In effect these practices help to keep traditional masculinity intact (Walkerdine & Jimenez, 2012). The specific legacies of pre-industrialisation, industrialisation and postindustrialisation mesh together with the gendered history of the place that shape girls’ everyday practices and imagined ways forward. This paper develops our previous work which draws on some of the conceptual moves
in queer and feminist post-human materialist scholarship to understand the way young teen valleys’ girls alluded to the aliveness of their bodies in ways that ruptured (hetero) normative femininity. We theorise these practices as ‘becomings’ emerging in socialmaterial-historical ‘assemblages’ by drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri’s ouvre. Previously, we have written about how girls’ becomings emerged in entanglements with bikes, skate-boards, and other objects in various terrains and landscapes beyond the school walls (Ivinson & Renold, 2013a, 2013b). The focus of this paper is on girls-withhorses and works with Deleuzeo-Guatarrian notions of desire in dynamic affective posthuman assemblages. The local-historical affects that we detected in our fieldwork required us to widen our focus beyond educational institutions and to recognise how
Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 363
THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF QUEER THEORY IN EDUCATION RESEARCH
becomings emerge through ongoing practices that are entangled with place, history and landscape.
