ABSTRACT
A central project of feminist cultural theory has been to locate and name a female ‘gaze’, a female ‘voice’, be it that of the writer or reader, producer or consumer, of cultural texts. This chapter explores the cultural landscape of early 1960s Britain, examining, in particular, social realist representations of working-class women. It provides a reading of Nell Dunn’s Up the Junction with a view to affirming its radical attempt to applaud the lives of working-class women. The chapter draws attention to the contradictions which are manifest in the body of this text. When a female writer, in 1963, attempts to speak the unspeakable, to name and celebrate an active female heterosexual desire existing outside the confines of marriage and monogamy, and accorded lesser importance than camaraderie between women, such contradictions are inevitable. The publication of Up the Junction was itself a junction in terms of cultural constructions of female sexuality.
