Presentation to
Kingston School of Art Writing Cultures Research Group
19 March 2021
This presentation was given at the very beginning of my research on Fiction, Family and Life Writing in Britain 1960-79. One aim of the research is to develop a creative life-writing project which uses a Marxist, historical materialist framework to explore internal-individualised, and external experiences of queer sexuality, both of which constitute the social, in Britain in the 1970s, alongside a literary critical strand which examines the fiction of Elizabeth Taylor and David Storey. I’m beginning by ‘reading’, as a Marxist activist, temporality-collisions between my early-life memorisations – or the way I remember and tell my memories – and early perceptions of queer sexuality – with trajectories and events in adulthood. I’m using the concept of queer time as a lens to recognise, and interpret my life events that are resistant to conventional temporalities. I also apply resistance to ‘chromonormativity’ to the process itself, of reading, aggregating and redistributing experiences , by reading back in my own time and finding opportunities to disentangle individualised personal disturbances and find a historical materialist method of understanding their social and political meanings.
