The ISIS, Michaelmas 2018

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Editorial Editing The ISIS has changed our focus on the Oxford landscape. Some things have become sharper: the constant stabs of stress, the shape of rustication on the horizon, and the intense feeling of jealousy towards people who still have a social life. Other things have become more obscure, namely what The ISIS actually does.

This was, to our slight discomfort, a question asked by quite a few of our MT18 interview candidates – it seems the easiest time to want something is before you know what it is. If you asked a current team member the same question, you might get an outline of our editorial meetings. If you asked pretty much anyone else, you’d get a comment about our contribution to the waste-paper bin in most JCRs. Yet the magazine is the culmination, rather than the bulk, of The ISIS’s activity. While creating and fundraising for this magazine, we’ve had a much broader engagement with the student body than can fit onto these fifty-four pages – hosting next level Emporium club nights, showcasing gay horror at LGBTQ+ film screenings, and setting up glamorous fashion shoots in unglamorous bedrooms. The ISIS’s openness and diversity shapes the content you see now. We have survived for over a hundred years by being eclectic; we have always been a home for the experimental. This became evident when reading the variety of ‘500 words’ competition entries – based on the theme ‘Rooms’ and judged

by Simon Armitage, Polly Toynbee, Bernardine Evaristo, and Hilary Menos – which pulled writing from every style and genre.

This term’s theme is ‘hybridity’ – a celebration of The ISIS’s everything-ness.

We’ve encouraged crossover between, within, and around all parts of the magazine. You’ll find photo essays, archive collages (we even swallowed our pride and included some Cherwell excerpts), film scripts, and pieces straddling the border between fiction and non-fiction. But, most of all, we hope it’s fun.

Give it a read, and then give it to your friends. And let us know what you think.

Love, Katie and Lev x

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Contents

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5 Clean

30 Big Time Sensuality

Catherine Cibulskis

Antonio Perricone

6 Soulless Places

34 Unlearning mediocrity

Maya Little

Claire Soh

8 Teenage Centaur

36 Carcassonne

Delphine Chalmers

Adam Husain

9 Human Statue

39 Drawing Beauty

T C Mangan

Esther Jeon

12 Née Margaret

42 Not of Sound Mind

Olivia Hicks

Kei Patrick

16 Croydon Cat Killer

44 Beach Script

Amitai Landau-Pope

Meredith Kenton

18 Sex vs. Books

46 Inconceivable

Louis Davidson

Maebh Mulligan Smith

20 The Student

48 It’s Not Like It’s Your Fault

Alex Matraxia

Leela Jadhav

21 A Clean Stink

50 500 words

Alex Matraxia

51 Zoetrope

22 Sex Strike

Alex Matrixia

Temitope Ajileye

52 The Stuff of Life

28 If I go, will I lose myself?

Arthur Charlesworth

Emily Louise

54 Team List

Clean Catherine Cibulskis My mum cries over spilt milk and any other stain; her carpet is her shelter, water rings her shame.

Bleach is her blanket, counting is her thumb; she sucks on cracks and black cats and umbrellas in the sun.

She scrubs as Macbeth’s bride at what cannot be seen, blind to how she marks herself by counting 1, 2, 3.

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Soulless Places Maya Little Motorway service stations are my favourite kind of soulless place. They are completely lacking in individual character, consisting of nothing more than a hermetically sealed unit of chain shops, a carpark (in itself a nearly soulless thing, made almost entirely from rules, regulations, and paint), and homogenous toilets that always seem to have forgettable charity adverts or warnings about IBS on the doors. These nondescript locales are perfect tessellations of each other, right down to the last chewable toothbrush machine.

Although I would not want to spend all my time in a soulless place, there is something comforting about them. I could not understand this feeling until I saw an archaeological display wedged between the massage chairs and WHSmith. I was thrown by this unpredictable addition; by the disruption of my glazed walk towards the exit. You know what to expect: your location reduces the burden on your thoughts. Think of a motorway, a chain coffee shop, a supermarket, one of those late night chicken/pizza/burger/kebab/other meat-of-uncertain-origin takeaways. We cease to see them, can almost navigate by touch. Our choices, like on a well-designed website, become automatic. We are pulled by an invisible string past the cake counter and tugged towards the till. They are convenient and undemanding.

The architecture of soulless places is carefully designed to facilitate the spending of money. That invisible string drawing you around a café or a shop? It’s real. Environmental psychologist Paco Underhill’s Invariant Right rule describes how customers look left, then right when they enter a retail space and thus have a preference for walking anti-clockwise around the shop. Business people, as they are wont to do, manipulate this fact. Most shops are designed to make the anti-clockwise path appear easy and appealing – an eye-catching display or a wider walkway are commonly used tactics. The lengths of aisles are dictated by a customer’s ability to notice products. They stop just before you are overwhelmed.

Strategically-placed displays provide visual breaks at set intervals. In essence, the retail experience is designed to prevent conscious engagement.

This, intuitively, does not seem good. But it is comfortable.

According to the Vacuum and Sewing Dealers Trade Association (don’t ask), “walls, flooring, primary and accent colours, fixturing, signing, and

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wall striping must work together to tell a single story”.

Perhaps my problem with the archaeological display in the service station was that, all of a sudden, the space I found myself in no longer told “a single story”. I was in a transitory place – an anywhere or a nowhere – and, at the same time, in a place that could not exist anywhere except where it was.

Each chain supermarket, coffee shop or service station usually tells the same story. For the retailer, this is a matter of efficiency. One chain of ‘Big Box’ shops, Costco, only makes significant changes to the size or exterior appearance of its outlets if a local community demands it. This approach also works for the modern consumer.

The writer Virginia Postrel notes that “familiar establishments make it easier for people to make a home in a new place”. The generic nature of our go-to establishments may be bland, but it is this blandness that we have adapted to over time. This attachment to a brand or, perhaps more accurately, to a specific pattern of spaces is encouraged by the anonymity of the modern retail worker: self-service tills and contactless payment mean that we never need to look employees in the eye. The most soulful and dynamic element of a place, its people, becomes its least recognisable feature.

not depends on whether you prefer to have your expectations met or challenged. Increasingly, people want to have their expectations met. Or, judging by the proliferation of the chain store, they are already used to this.

Maybe this is a reductionist picture. While I was writing this article, I spoke to many people about my ideas.

Most of them said that they enjoyed the experience of seeing the strange amongst the familiar, and so do I. A 5am sunrise on a motorway is surely more beautiful than a generic sunrise on a beach.. Coming across the strange in a familiar place is disconcerting, but is it truly uncomfortable, or simply unpredictable?

Perhaps these soulless, nondescript, blank canvas places teach us something about how we ought to look for the new in everything and not grow complacent in response to the familiar. Or maybe they are a gloriously sterile respite from the rush of the unexpected that surges through the everyday. Or are they just what they seem to be – an epitome of predictability? Ultimately, it’s our patterns of interaction that turn them into either a dull phenomenon where variation is preferable, or a welcome oasis through which we can glide without disruption.

Members of my generation, the millennial generation, are usually referred to by arts organisations as ‘experience seekers’. We’re supposedly willing to take a chance on things, to try something new, weird or hard to find.

Yet the media also dub millennials the ‘anxious generation’. We like predictability, reassurance. We like to know exactly what we’re doing and where we’re going. In short, chain stores suit us. Whether you like soulless places or

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Teenage Centaur Delphine Chalmers

Sunsets were like tart whisky mouthfuls that summer I learnt to fear the water’s gaze.

Shyness could no longer redeem me from my pockmarked shimmer: downy thighs sheepish curls witch-hazel arms every inch of me toppled to the clip-clop swagger of my high-heeled stagger.

I faithfully brushed my back for wing-buds tore at dust-kissed pages of secondhand Keats only to come up short:

empty air on my vellum-blush cheeks stale grief at my unbelonging

hatred of my stumbling feet.

I had not realised how the water lied – his reflections had no real faith, no claim to truth in me.

So, I’ll ask him to take a good look now, to see how my rivulet bears my mother’s cloud, or how my leaking heart sparks bright: the imprint of thunder the full-loving friend hero of every unsung ‘perhaps’.

And if he cannot see all this in me, I’ll no longer call the fault mine.

My eyes are set too high for that.

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The Human T C Mangan

The mirror was placed on the wall beside the high square window, positioned exactly so that you could look yourself square in the eye, or apply mascara, and, with only a discrete refocusing of your gaze, suddenly watch the street. She’d left the bathroom light off, using only the reflection of the street lamps and the rooms of her neighbours’ houses to see by as she reached under the sink and brought out the removal wipes. She opened the packet, put one to her cheek and scrubbed concertedly for twenty or thirty seconds. The hard, stony grey shifted slightly, revealing something more like marble underneath. She moved the cloth to her other cheek and scrubbed again. It had the same effect. Now she seemed a comical statue, two white-rosy cheeks on her granite face.

Once, she had tried being marble instead, feeling that the white paint might be easier to remove. It had got her nowhere. No one had left coins. It was because of her cheekbones – in calcified marble, they looked too real, and provoked only jealousy; in a stonier shade, people were not so threatened. They tipped more.

All the paint now gone from her cheeks, she stole a glance just above her reflection, over her head, across the distance between the houses and through another side window. There was an old man there, sleeping in his armchair. He was in view for perhaps a full second, before she fished for another cloth and started work on the thick paint caked onto her forehead.

The brow half done, a thought seized her: was he breathing? Of course he was. She pressed the cloth back to her forehead. But really, had she seen him breathe? She couldn’t say that she had. She had to look. She looked. She watched the man for several minutes, her nose floating closer to the mirror in an effort to see his distended chest more clearly.

There – a wrinkle in the green of his jumper. He was breathing, after all.

Laughing at herself a little, she straightened in front of the mirror and quickly finished removing the dark crust from what turned out to be a bright, charming face: from her ele-

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corrugated iron. Stepping out of the tutu, she felt its heft, pleased: it was the first part of the costume she’d made herself. She had known what to do; she was as self-made as anyone else she knew. But really, to think the old man wasn’t breathing – that was the kind of silliness Miss Adelaide had always criticised her for.

Now that she’d had a little chuckle to herself, she would put it out of mind.

After the tutu was the solid leotard, moving away from the window, and after the leotard were the tights. This all done, and the costume folded neatly by the sink, she turned on the shower and pulled off her underclothes.

gant nose and high cheekbones, her short brows, her welcoming chin. For her work, she naturally tried to think as little as possible – to keep her mind free of anything that might cause her to move her face, flutter her fingers, alter her stance. Then when she opened herself up again, all these little things came tumbling in. That he might not be breathing – she laughed, and the sound of it rang throughout the flat, shocking her slightly. She was unused to any noise she made travelling too far beyond herself.

The face done, she allowed herself a few minutes’ rest and a mug of tea, feeling the weight of the full kettle and then watching as the water began to heat itself, bubbling, moving itself around. In a way, it reminded her of herself – not now but several years ago, when she would get into the studio in the morning and begin to bubble just from being there; from finally being there and earning the chance to study under the venerable Miss Adelaide. The pianist would settle his wrinkled music on the stand, and one, two, three, and they would all be dancing, bubbling, boiling. She had so enjoyed that. The kettle clicked off.

She poured the water into the mug and carried it steeping back to the bathroom. Now she set about peeling away her clothes. The fabric was still and starched like

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As the shower warmed, she took the time to admire the solid lines left on her body: where her skin showed through the pain on her arms like a brand and where the paint on her chest stopped, waiting for the leotard to rise up and join it. Miss Adelaide would never appreciate these things, she reflected. She could only appreciate what she knew: the cold beauty of a turn, the passionate intensity of a jump, a lift – these were Miss Adelaide’s things. Under Miss Adelaide, she had been a figure within a routine, not much more. But that was past now. She had never believed she could obtain love from Miss Adelaide. She had hoped for affection, but she knew now that the woman could only have offered approval – stark, conditional approval. Dancing, in Miss Adelaide’s eyes – perhaps in all people’s eyes, and she had been too slow to see it – was u nequ ivocal. It

cared not for the dancer: the dancer was not the artist, but the medium. She had not known this, but she had found it out in the end.

Perhaps, she thought, no one else saw it that way. Perhaps it was just small, hard Miss Adelaide: Miss Adelaide like a sharp flint carving her bitter mark on the craft. It made no difference. She was out now, out of it all. When a child or a sweet old man put a shiny penny in her box, she danced a little, spun on her plinth: otherwise, she remained still beneath the canopy of the sky. It might rain and wash all the paint off her, but she’d stand all the same.

Another thought, like cold water.

The television. Had it been on?

She couldn’t remember. Then it had been off. It didn’t matter. She went back to lathering her arms.

But it did matter: even elderly men don’t usually nap in their chairs when a bed will suffice, not unless there’s something on in the background.

Was this true? She thought so.

But really, it didn’t matter.

She discovered that her hand was on the tap as if to turn it off. But she had seen herself that the man was breathing. All was well.

In the half-light, under the showerhead, she found herself thinking of her own grandfather, a tall clumsy man with big Irish hands and two cats. He had loved her; loved her for her spirit, for her energy. He had told her so, scooping her up to him all big and peaty, before setting her back down to run and dance and scream out her sixness, chasing after the cats, telling them hello, I’m six, let’s be friends, as they ran for the safety of her grandmother’s bedroom where she did not go. She missed him still, and sometimes it was as painful as a new grief. But this evening, with the sun setting late, making it harder and harder to see the flecks of paint still left on her body, she was remembering a frosty Saturday morning when she had snuck off from their early breakfast to try again and play with the cats, finding one in its bed that did not run off, and when she touched it was cold. And she was remembering running back to tell him, and him coming, and saying it was dead, and her saying, no, Grandad, but I saw it breathe, I saw it breathe. And him shaking his head and saying you didn’t, girl, you didn’t, but it’s okay now.

The shower was off and she was stepping naked onto the tiles. She was reaching for a towel to wrap herself in, craning out of the tiny window. She had to know.

But he was there now, standing, looking out of his window into the evening. She saw herself reflected in his eyes: the old man looking at this strange statue girl in her towel, and seeing the paint streaks on her face – thinking she had been crying, and turning away to give her some privacy – barely seeing her, and knowing nothing.

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Née Margaret Olivia Hicks By 1865, Dr. James Barry was an established figure, entering the final weeks of life. A former surgeon in the British Army, Barry had retired from a pioneering career that had spanned the globe, and had risen to the position of Inspector General. When Barry’s vivid life reached its end on 25 July 1865, it was a death that was guaranteed to be noticed, and it did – but not solely for the doctor’s accomplishments.

Though Barry had requested no examination on death, the message was lost somewhere along the way. A charwoman came to lay out the body. She discovered a corpse that was biologically female. Though known as Dr. James Barry for an entire (and remarkable) medical and military career, a whole fifty-six years of life, Barry was born Margaret Bulkley. The British medical and military community, and the public at large, were left with one question: how had this happened?

Many have been enthralled by the enigma of Barry’s gender, but it is far from the only aspect of Barry’s life that contributes to the extravaganza and infamy which surround the legacy of the Inspector General.

Various dates are given for Barry’s birth, as Barry would frequently lie to appear younger, explaining an effeminate appearance.

Sometime in the 1790s, in Cork, Ireland, Mary Ann Bulkley and Jeremiah Bulkley had a child, christened Margaret Ann. Jeremiah conducted modest business on the docks and supported his family. Some thirteen or so years after Margaret was born, a new child, named

Juliana, entered the family. Though officially this was another child of Mary and Jeremiah, there is a strong case for the girl being Margaret’s – the result of a rape by Mary’s brother, Redmond. Eventually, business failures led Jeremiah to debt. The family split, and Mary and Margaret travelled to London.

Mary was the sister of James Barry RA, a highly successful, hugely eccentric painter. Mary was hopeful of securing a brighter future, and sent Margaret to her estranged brother’s home. James Barry lived in squalor, in a grand Marylebone townhouse. This lifestyle was likely by choice or artistic temperament, given his eminence. He did not give Margaret and Mary any funds, though he took the adolescent under his wing. James Barry RA died not long afterwards, and it was through their brief relationship and the arrangements of his estate that Margaret was introduced to his friends – many of whom were influential, liberal-minded members of London society, including the lawyer Daniel Reardon, the physician Dr. Edward Fryer, and Venezuelan revolutionary general Don Francisco de Miranda.

Dr. Edward Fryer, like his recently departed friend, was fond of Margaret, and assumed responsibility for the youth’s education. During this period, Margaret penned a letter to her brother, a soldier in a poor man’s regiment in Portsmouth. In it was written the now iconic line “were I not a girl, I would be a soldier!”, and it seems that this wish was nurtured by the men now around Margaret. General Miranda had hopes of building a new nation in Venezuela – likely one in which women could enter the professions given Miranda’s support of women’s emancipation. The group had mixed with the liberal intellectuals of the blue-stocking generation, and Barry himself had been friends with Mary Wollenstonecraft. There could not have been a more fortunate circle to have stumbled into. Nor, perhaps, a more auspicious period: Brian Hurwitz and Ruth Richardson, writing for the British Medical Journal, suggest that Margaret may have been inspired by the Chevalier d’Eon, a French spy presented as female to gather intelligence in the Russian court. Together, these men and Margaret planned to send the youth to medical school in the guise of a young boy. Margaret took the name of the artist James Barry – a recognisable name which ensured the best start possible, upon entering the University of Edinburgh.

Barry was an unstoppable force at Edinburgh. In one letter to Daniel Reardon, the student reports working from seven o’clock in the morning until two o’clock the next. Barry studied Ancient Greek, Anatomy, Botany, Chemistry, Philosophy,

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Jurisprudence, and, Medicine. It was not always easy. Many doubted the age of James Barry who, with a smooth face and a stature of just five foot, appeared pre-adolescent. As graduation approached, the professors were reluctant to award an MD to a child – though, in fact, Barry was likely older than most students at the school. An Edinburgh friend of James Barry RA, David Erskine, Earl of Buchan, who had grown close to the student, was more than eager to sponsor his late friend’s young relative – but even Buchan agreed that Barry was probably a young boy. The Senate of the University agreed that they would not allow Barry to enter for the final examinations. Buchan would not stand for this, and the Senate was no match for his influence in the region: they retracted their decision. During clinical studies, Barry became interested in midwifery and obstetrics, and wrote a Latin dissertation on femoral hernias. The epitaph Barry chose for the dissertation was a Menander quote: “Do not consider my youth, but whether I show a man’s wisdom.”

With ‘De Merocele vel Hernia Crurali’ accepted in 1812, Dr. James Barry MD graduated from the University of Edinburgh.

After two years of training in London, Barry entered the army, and was first posted to the Cape of Good Hope. It was in South Africa that Barry developed a lifelong friendship with Lord Charles, the colony’s Governor – aided by a letter of introduction from the Earl of Buchan. The opportunities afforded to the young physician through this relationship were excellent; Barry attended to the Lord’s family as their personal physician, and to all important visitors – even Napoleon’s confidant, the Comte de Las Cases. With Charles, Barry travelled into mainland Africa and tended to wounded elephants. Charles promoted Barry to the new position of Colonial Medical Inspector, a role in which Barry took on an almost obsessive attitude to Public Health: cracking down on charlatanism, commissioning officers and services, regulating hygiene, administering a smallpox vaccination programme, and attending to the inland Leper Colony. In South Africa, Barry began to demonstrate fits of temper, but this was tolerated, given the doctor’s talent. Many have emphasised Barry’s kind and empathetic treatment of both slaves and the colony’s indigenous population, though it must be remarked that Barry’s name was never associated with abolitionism.

never identified, this, like so much in Barry’s biography, will never be definitively answered.

Wherever Barry went, arguments followed. Eventually, Barry’s many feuds outgrew the doctor’s talents, and the role of Colonial Medical Inspector was abandoned. Nevertheless, Barry stayed in South Africa, even after Lord Charles left for England, and in 1826 performed a Caesarean section on a woman named Wilhelmina Munnik. Prior to 1826 there were only a handful of cases in which both mother and child lived, and none in any part of the British Empire. Yet, Wilhelmina Munnik and her child did survive. The child was named James Barry Munnick. The name became something of a tradition in the Munnick family, and would eventually find its way to James Barry Munnick Hertzog, Prime Minister of South Africa in the 1920s and 1930s.

In 1828 Barry left for Mauritius, but in 1829 Charles fell ill and Barry left for London – without permission or notice – to attend to him. Barry did not return to service throughout Lord Charles’ illness, and it was only upon his death in 1831 that Barry agreed to go abroad once more, to the Caribbean.

St. Helena followed Jamaica, and Malta followed St. Helena.

In 1851 Barry was posted again, to Corfu, two years before the outbreak of the Crimean War. Barry was intensely curious about the war and left Corfu to visit the front line at Sevastopol, stopping en route at Scutari, where Barry met Florence Nightingale. When Barry saw the nurse, she was only wearing a small cap, and Barry burst into a rage, furious that she would put herself into such danger in the heat of the sun. Unsurprisingly, after this introduction, Nightingale took a lifelong dislike to the doctor, later calling Barry “a

In 1824, a placard was placed on a bridge in Cape Town, announcing to the town that an anonymous inhabitant had witnessed “Lord Charles buggering Dr. Barry.” For both Charles and Barry, it was a humiliating accusation. In fact, the author of the placard was risking more than reputations – in the British Army, homosexuality carried a death sentence. Lord Charles and Dr. Barry were put on trial and ultimately acquitted, though not without scars to their reputations. Many eyebrows were raised by this episode. Were Barry and Charles in love? If so, surely Lord Charles knew Barry’s secret. As the placard’s author was

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first discovered Barry’s sex – but it was she who first sought to profit from it. She had come to Barry’s personal physician, Dr. McKinnon, clearly presuming there had been a conspiracy of some kind. She criticised his medical expertise and expected hush-money, but McKinnon was not fazed: “I informed her that it was none of my business whether Dr. Barry was a male or a female”.

brute” and “the most hardened creature I ever met”. Barry spent a few months at Sevastopol tending to the injured.

In 1857 Barry was posted abroad for the last time, to Canada, as Inspector General of Hospitals – the zenith of Barry’s career – as the second most senior doctor in the British Army. Eventually, Barry was (reluctantly) discharged back to England, no longer fit for duty. The ship carrying Barry’s personal effects ran aground at Quebec, with most of Barry’s possessions lost to the sea. Barry never worked again.

The doctor died not long after, from dysentery, at 14 Margaret Street, Marylebone.

Throughout a wild international career, there is a consistent eccentricity in Barry’s behaviours; vegetarianism, teetotalism, and a variety of animals – parrots, goats, monkeys, and many beloved dogs, including several terriers named ‘Psyche’. This is fortunate for researchers: Barry was somebody that people remembered.

A few times in Barry’s career, the truth of the doctor’s sex was almost revealed. A servant who had worked for Barry in South Africa claimed to have "burst in" on the doctor dressing, and the doctor’s stuffing of clothing was so well known in South Africa that Barry earned the nickname ‘Kapok doctor’, after the fibre used. In Trinidad, Barry contracted Malaria, and two well-meaning officers who had come to attend to their colleague discovered the truth – or so one of the officers claimed, two decades after the doctor died.

This is not to give the impression that Barry’s sex was an open secret. Indeed, after the doctor’s death – when the story was circulating wildly – the Medical Times and Gazette published a piece declaring that “the stories which have been circulated… are too absurd to be gravely refuted”.

So, in fact, it was likely not the unnamed charwoman who

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Many have taken Barry’s life story as paradigmatic of the experiences of contemporary marginalised communities – Barry has been associated with both feminism and with transgender advocacy. In 1951, Colonel NJC Rutherford wrote an article for the Journal of the Royal Army Medical Corps, in which he called Barry “the first woman doctor of the British Isles”. The most comprehensive account of Barry’s life is a well-researched 2016 biography written by Michael du Preez and Jeremy Dronfield – a book to which this article owes much. It is titled Dr. James Barry: A Woman Ahead of her Time, though throughout the book, du Preez and Dronfield use both male and female pronouns; when it is Barry’s own narrative, female pronouns are used. The Science Museum uses both male and female pronouns to describe James Barry. Prudence Wade, writing in The Independent, has described Barry as a transgender man, and Historic England included Barry’s grave on a list of historic sites of LGBTQ+ heritage.

There have been other theories, such as those of inter-sex identities, which are perfectly possible – but there is little evidence here. Describing Barry as a feminist champion, or as a successful and thriving transgender man, or as an intersex person, often arouses the sensibilities of those who identify with the demographics involved; many angry letters to editors and impassioned tweets are testament to this – and, with talk of a James Barry biopic, the controversy and emotive discourse seems unlikely to abate.

In mainstream gender discourse, being a transgender man and being a cisgender woman are mutually exclusive identities. There have been few discussions of Barry’s story that consider the possibility that Barry’s relationship to gender may not have been static throughout the doctor’s life. If we insist on a concrete identity for Barry, and if we take historical figures as figureheads for demographics, then surely somebody is wrong, and somebody’s historical hero does not belong to them.

Let us assume that Barry’s identity was that of a cisgender woman. Margaret is frustrated with the limits placed on women. She cuts her hair short, wears heeled boots, and changes her name. She enrols in the University of Edinburgh, as the UK’s first ever female medical student. Entering the army as an officer ensures that she does not have to undergo a physical examination, and also means that she can keep up her medical career. There are occasional rumours of homosexuality, because Barry struggles to repress her womanhood. But no one seriously entertains the idea that a woman could possibly do what Barry has done. Barry, a true Victorian and proud woman, is concerned with her

legacy and would hate for her accomplishments to be overshadowed by scandal, so makes the order that there will be no examination of her body after death.

Now let us assume that Barry’s identity was that of a transgender man. Margaret grows up, knowing that the way he is addressed is not reflective of his own sense of self. Margaret knows the man he wishes to be: a soldier, a physician, a gentleman. He goes to Edinburgh, and finally, introduces himself as a man. The internal becomes external, and James can begin his life in earnest and in honesty. Nobody, in a society without the terminology or concept of being transgender, would accept him if they knew his sex. So, he tells no one.

Of course, there are no hormone blockers; there is no gender reassignment surgery. He cannot deepen his voice, nor can he acquire a stronger jawline, broader shoulders, facial hair.

At first, he’s a young boy, a precocious youth. But as Barry ages, suspicion grows, and feminine characteristics lead to accusations of homosexuality. Barry can’t bear the thought that, in death, he would once again be subject to the intolerable words that had plagued his youth: “she”, “girl”, “her”, “woman.” So, he makes it clear that his body must be left alone. His biology is nobody’s business but his own, and he alone fully comprehends his masculinity.

Both are possible. Both are stories. Evidence can lead us to either interpretation, and in both cases leaves us lacking. All the evidence surrounding James Barry is external – and it is clear from both situations that the difference between the woman-in-disguise and the transgender man lies in the personal thought processes. Oppression is external, but identity is internal. Add to this the wide schism between modern gender terminology and thought, and that of Barry’s era. Without pre-existing language and precedent, it would be very unusual for a Victorian identity to match perfectly with any paradigm used today. In some instances, modern transgender terminology is useful: to say the doctor presented as male, for example, or that there were times when Barry was not male-passing. This terminology can help untangle the complications of gender and society, but can only go so far – there is a danger in describing a person’s life too heavily with a vocabulary they themselves would not have recognised. If the limits of our language really are the limits of our reality, Barry’s own identity description would likely not calibrate perfectly with any modern experience. Objective experiences become difficult to match up when the language surrounding them is necessarily subjective.

and feminist lenses, the doctor’s narrative is entirely irrelevant to the wider history of the oppression experienced by these two identities. Few had reason to suspect anything unusual in the doctor’s background. Those who approached Barry did so as if they were speaking to a cisgender man.

Nor did the discovery of Barry’s sex usher in a new era for any oppressed group. In 1869, only four years after Barry died, female medical students were forced to leave Edinburgh after harassment by students and faculty. No openly transgender person would become a doctor in the UK until Michael Dillon in 1951. Whether Barry truly identified as a man or a woman, the doctor was a first. At least in this country, no transgender person had done what Barry did, nor had any woman. Nobody had managed to ignore gender and succeed in doing what they wanted to do anyway.

Much of the doctor’s allure rests on their status as an impressive anomaly, a fascinating but isolated example of an individual who transcended the established boundaries of gender. A person to discover – not an era, not a group, not anything but Barry. The doctor’s career saw caesarean sections, cholera epidemics, poverty and destitution, war, the birth of general anaesthesia, pioneering advances in Public Health. Barry witnessed feuds and duels, explored foreign lands, and kept what essentially amounted to a personal menagerie all while forging an unprecedented career. The puzzle of Barry’s gender is fascinating. I will not deny that – but Barry’s gender is a biographical quirk, yet another riddle and unique brushstroke in Barry’s colourful seven decades on earth. To try and mould Barry into a form that fits out gender categories falls flat. It is perhaps better to leave the doctor as the doctor was: the remarkable, mercurial, and enigmatic Dr. James Miranda Steuart Barry, MD.

Although Barry’s story has been viewed through both transgender

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Killer has chosen to remain anonymous to the general public. His actions have been consistently reported in the press, yet he has never been spotted, physically described, or interviewed. I had never met a person who dismembered and decapitated cats. I grew curious. I had to reach out. * We meet at his house in Twickenham. (As it turns out, the Croydon Cat Killer doesn’t even live in Croydon.) It seems like a sensible worklife balance. Don’t kill cats where you eat, eh?

He’s wearing a green t-shirt with some camouflage cargo trousers. There’s a faint toothpaste stain on his chest. He has a set of keys. I count eight pockets, though there could have been more.

As we walk through his front room, he offers me a cup of tea. I notice a cabinet filled with claws. A small glass case – about the size of a matchbox – holds a collection of whiskers. I decide to speak up: “Milk with no sugar, cheers.”

“So you’re the Croydon Cat Killer,” I ask, “but is there another name I can call you today?”

Croydon Cat Killer

He seems taken aback. It is clear that few people had bothered to learn his real name or story. He hesitates and responds with a smile.

Amitai Landau-Pope

I ponder on that for a second. “Do you think all this name-calling in the media is helpful?”

“Some people call me the M25 Cat Killer. Some prefer the London Cat Killer. Each tabloid has their preferred nickname. Tomato, tomato.”

“Not sure.”

Many people don’t step outside their comfort zones. But I’m not many people. I’m one person.

And I’m a journalist.

The Croydon Cat Killer is reported to have dismembered and decapitated more than 400 cats across England since 2014. Reports of his activities have spread as far north as Manchester. Like Banksy and the Stig, the Croydon Cat

16

“Do you prefer any nickname?”

“I really don’t mind.”

“Well, what do you like?”

“Killing cats.”

He’s surprisingly open and it’s refreshing. I delve a bit deeper.

“When did you decide to start killing cats?”, I ask. (I knew the answer: the Croydon Cat Killer had been active since 2014. I did my homework.)

“2014.”

“What happened in 2014 that made you into the Croydon Cat Killer?”

“I killed my first cat.” * I wanted to talk with this man. For too long, he had been alienated by the press, pigeon-holed by his community, and forced to hide his opinions on cat-killing. I like engaging with views that I find uncomfortable. It often makes me change my opinions. It broadens the mind. I wanted to broaden his.

I decided to surprise him. I had an amazing idea up my sleeve. This idea was named Dawn.

She was light brown and rosy-whiskered.

isn’t helpful).

Her newly-opened eyes absorbed our surroundings. For about a minute, she developed a routine. She would sharply glance at the room for a second, then she would look at me. Her tail would move, and she would emit a purr.

Dawn’s curiosity made her dance.

Watching Dawn was ecstasy. Her eyes dragged a smile out of my face. She commanded irresistible joy. She was perfect for my investigation, and already I could see a smile widening on the face of my Croydonite friend.

Had cats ever made an effort to engage in meaningful dialogue with the Croydon Cat Killer? Maybe Dawn could civilly change his view on cat-killing. Maybe she could build a bridge with him. Six legs, two brains, and one tail walking over the same bridge of coexistence. I could picture it all, as Dawn surveyed the room with her curious stride.

Reader, he killed my cat.

Many people would not trust the Croydon Cat Killer around their kitten. But I’m not many people. I’m a journalist.

I wanted to see how he would react to Dawn.

Dawn was four weeks old and had only just developed a sense of the world. I brought her into the room and introduced Dawn to “our friend, the Croydon Cat Person”. (I changed his name for Dawn's benefit. And anyhow, name-calling

17

Sex

Louis Davidson

Books Editor’s Note: this piece has been kicking around in The ISIS archives since 1983. I was going to write something myself, but I couldn’t be bothered. Then I found this in the archives, and given that it already has my name on it, I was going to pass it off as my own work. So I publish it here, edited by me, for interest. Attached, too, are my footnotes where Louis Davidson (1983) is marked as “L.D.”, whereas Louis Davidson (me) is marked as “I”. Or is that too confusing? I’m sure you’ll pick it up. Hope you like it.

I should apologise for my last story in The ISIS. If you didn’t read it, it caused quite a stir because it was about s-e-x. It was called “An Open Day”, and in it an older female tutor of Classics seduced and slept with a male prospective student while his mother waited downstairs. For some reason, the editors of The ISIS (in their infinite wisdom) allowed this to be published and I feel that the blame for any controversy should start and end with them. Oh well. In any case, the story was supposed to be about growing old and feeling passion, not to mention wanting to have s-e-x with underage boys.

But I feel that in discussing this kind of story we need to have a little conversation about s-e-x and about the way that we write about it.

Did you ever have sex-ed classes?

We didn’t have many because I went to an old-fashioned school, the masters being so terrified of the female pudenda that they preferred to swear their lives to the bleakness of the Catholic Church. So we didn’t have many sexual education lessons at all. But once they did give us one – I think the government had stepped in because we were all growing up “warped” – and a very dry older man called Dr. Clements told us, “Well, gentlemen, this will be awkward for all of us, so I had better start with the facts.”

He informed us that masturbation was a kind of self-abuse and that sexual intercourse was the sacred mingling of two fleshes, between a man and a woman. Now I will take a leaf out of Clements’ book and outline the facts:1

18

1) My name is Louis Davidson.

2) I study English Literature at John’s.

3) Up until last week, I had never once had sex.

4) I am a writer. 2

* Other Louis here again.

It is up for debate whether point 3) leads to point 4) or vice-versa. In any case, both of them are true, and there is clearly some kind of re-

Now I know I said I would just publish it with a few comments, but

lationship. Now, I have been thinking a lot about Clements recently.

I feel compelled to share with you what I have to say about L.D. and

Whenever I sit down to write something, I think of him, and up until

his masturbation theories. Did anyone ever ask you that question: “If

now I didn’t think I knew why.

you went back in time and had sex with yourself, would that be sex or masturbation?” That feels somehow relevant. You have seen, I hope,

There are, by and large, two ways to write. The worst writers write

that L.D. and I share some very real similarities, the most disquiet-

like they’re having s-e-x – as if the reader and the writer are melded

ing of them being that we have almost exactly the same voice. I can

into one flesh, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. This is bad writing be-

almost hear him through the pages, and it has the same disquieting

cause s-e-x is so much better in principle than it is in reality. I had

effect as when you hear your own voice on a tape recorder. So reading

s-e-x for the first time last week and I must say I was disappointed.

what he has to say about having sex with oneself is putting me in

The rapturous desire for it was much more interesting than the ac-

rather a difficult position. If writing is a substitute for having sex in a

tual ten minutes of fumbling. Good writing doesn’t fumble. Good

way that masturbation isn’t, am I in some way having sex with “Louis

writing only needs you and your imagination. Good writing is like

Davidson”? Perish the thought! Who on earth would want to do that?

masturbation. You spend the whole time on your own (and most like-

I still consider myself to be a virgin, mainly because I haven’t actu-

ly thinking about people you know) and it helps you get through the

ally had any sex. Also, I don’t think he’s right – I think it’s easy for

day, helps you to think about what qualities one finds attractive and

people who have had sex to say that it’s not that good, just like how

which ones you don’t. You take it all in your mind and it starts and

the people who seem to have the most success writing like it less than

finishes with you. You may be compelled to do it by what you read or

anyone else.4 I just thought it would be an interesting mind game –

see, but it’s all yours.

for what is really more fulfilling, writing or sex? That’s the question at the heart of all this: does it feel better to consummate or to create?

Now, what does all this have to do with my little story? People

I couldn't find “An Open Day” anywhere in The ISIS archives. Maybe

seemed to assume that, by writing this piece of lurid s-e-x literature,

L.D. was joking the whole time. That’s all these damn people ever

I intended to in some way have s-e-x with the reader – or God for-

really do – they play their little joke and then you only realise after

bid the characters in the story. That I was in some way involving the

you’ve read it. I like to imagine him now, sitting in a room somewhere

reader in a sexual game – that I was the boy who had been seduced or,

thinking up the story just because he thought a good first line for a

even worse, that I was the professor herself. None of that is true. The

piece in The ISIS would be “I should apologise for my story in The

tutor in that story was based on Professor Warring, who is not my

ISIS”. Interestingly, it seems that this is the last thing L.D. ever wrote,

type, while the boy is based on every teenage boy. 3

in Oxford or otherwise. I wonder. In any case, he wasn’t having sex until “a week” before this article was published. Is there an answer in

Instead, I would argue that my story was, like all good literature,

that? Well, I’ve been messaging a girl on Tinder and I imagine we’ll

masturbatory. Writing stories is just a kind of self-abuse and in order

end up having sex quite soon so perhaps this will be the last piece of

to do this we must picture and place within a new context (usual-

mine you read in a magazine like this. We’ll see what happens. Maybe

ly a rather uncomfortable one) the people we know in our lives. So

if you satisfy that urge you never write again. Maybe one day.

I hope you see that I did not have s-e-x with you by writing about s-e-x. I aimed only to make it clear that all literature might as well

be masturbation. I attempted to convey this through fiction, but see-

Louis Davidson

ing as no-one seemed to understand that, I have done so more mat-

ter-of-factly here. Yes, I merely intended to masturbate on the pages

(Not that one)

of The ISIS, which I think was quite an honourable goal. So they told

me that the story was smut or that it was unnecessarily rude or what-

Edinburgh, July 2018

ever, which I hope you now see isn’t true at all.

I say, wouldn’t it have been funny if there was no story called “An Open Day” and this was all a rather clever meta-fictional trick? If only I should have been so witty. Maybe one day.

Louis Davidson

Oxford, 1983 1 I looked up Dr. Clements after doing some research into L.D. Personally I suppose he was a virgin himself. And – surprisingly enough – wrote a couple of rather timid stories for The ISIS, during his time at Oxford.

2 Now, L.D. and I share some remarkable similarities! All four points of these are true for me as well. Although I would say it’s a bit presumptuous to call oneself a "writer" if you’ve never been paid for it.

3 We share another similarity here – I looked up Warring and she is not my type either.

4 Isn’t it interesting that we have no word for someone who isn’t a virgin? No one of a literary mind can think in those terms…

19

The Student Alex Matraxia When it’s late even the moon seems voyeuristic.

I’m thrilled watching the divine way a cat walks so proud on its toes at night, graceful and cool as if leaving a gay bar.

I see people dancing tonight – I think heaven is full of dancing angels, sweating as their dilated eyes roll to the backs of beautiful heads.

Maybe we form our own kind of violence but then again our bodies are only beautiful once – so dance, lips like sidewalks, an outdoor piss which sounds like bird song.

Taste where the body leaves itself for there could never be more life.

20

A Clean Stink Alex Matraxia The night air always feels cleaner than day air.

It’s probably psychological, dark colours and their cooling effects; but maybe the night is more precise; there’s a sharpness to nothing.

I know I’ve just seen you and lay with you, licked your nose like a spaniel. Dogs seem happy so I may as well love you and drink toilet-water.

I feel embarrassed simply being situated in the universe this evening; a coy, unforgiving, natural embarrassment.

This midnight is unbelievably fresh, like a shadow made of stained glass; beautiful but too ornate for comfort.

The Northern Line smells horrible but I think of our bodies when they bloat and we haven’t showered.

It’s like how the earth smells when dogs and people are honest.

21

Sex Strike Temitope Ajileye In Hilary 1958, women students at St Hilda’s launched a short-lived sex boycott to protest the nuclear arms race. It prompted a debate about gender relations – and exposed the deeply entrenched misogyny of their peers.

“What to do with women”. So began one of the last editorials of the 1958 run of the Cherwell. It was a year loaded with hot debates on campus. Some of the most controversial issues included French atrocities during the Algerian independence war; the activities of the cross-university Joint Action Against Racial Intolerance ( JACARI); the National Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament; and, finally, the position of women in the university.

The last two issues collided spectacularly in 1958.

And what emerges from the articles of the period is Oxford students’ desire to passionately discuss just about everything, coupled with the general expectation that nothing of consequence would result from their debates. Janet Dawson, an undergraduette (as they were called at the time) at St. Hilda’s, wanted to change this. She decided to launch a no-sex campaign intended to nudge men towards taking active action against the H-Bomb. “No sex for sadists!”; “Banishment or ban the bomb!” were the chants.

Dawson took the idea from a Greek comedy, Lysistrata, first performed in 411 BC. The play recounts one woman’s extraordinary mission to end the Peloponnesian war.

The heroine, Lysistrata, manages to gather women from both sides and convince them to deny all men sex until they agree to end the

war. She also arranges for the old women of Athens to occupy the Acropolis and take control of the treasury in order to put a choke on the war financing.

Thanks to Lysistrata’s rallies, women win the ensuing abstinence endurance test: Spartans and Athenians finally agree to arrange peace talks and the play ends with men and women dancing together.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the St. Hilda’s students did not enjoy nearly as much success in Oxford in 1958.

From beginning to end, the sex boycott was met with derision, insult, and that characteristic male flavour of irritation reserved for women who are less than nice to men. But it generated a year-long debate that went beyond the denuclearisation campaign to touch on all aspects of the life of women within the university and its colleges. It raised discussion about the differential treatment male and female students received – from their curfew times to the difficulty of obtaining leave.

And if Lysistrata was played by Dawson, then the Acropolis was undoubtedly the Oxford Union, whose membership was barred to women. The debate about gender relations eventually led to renewed attempts by women to break into Oxford’s power circles. Their struggles would prove unsuccessful for another three years, on the grounds that the Union was and ought to be a men’s club.

The most striking aspect of that debate is its similarity in tone to those we observe today, 60 years after Dawson, two and a half millennia after Lysistrata. The real question is: what to do with men?

H-Bomb Protest Major Campaign. Central Committee to Act Article, Cherwell, 8 Feb 1958 Dramatic plans were announced this week for a giant campaign timed to hit the university in sixth week.

The campaign will aim at securing support at all levels for decisive action by Great Britain in the nuclear disarmaments race. Proctorial advise is that the new committee shortly to be established on non-political grounds should limit itself to university agitation only. […]

It is anticipated that the committee will be able to organise a referendum to all members of the university on all aspects of nuclear arms and missiles.

A Study in Futility Editorial Cherwell, 15 Feb 1958

It is a long time since anyone has come round to our door with a petition beseeching Her Majesty’s Government to stop being beastly to the Cypriots, or to start being nice to the Russians, or something else equally un-likely. […] The petition-mongers are, of course, wasting their time. […] The campaign against nuclear warfare will fail. […]

The fact that pictures of nuclear war make people sick is no more an argument for nuclear disarmament than the atrocities of the Algerian Nationalists prove the justice of the French cause. If the sponsors of this Oxford campaign seriously believe in nuclear disarmament as a practical policy, they would do better to avoid horror stories and try to show that it is practical. They will have their work cut out for them.

A Voice For Nuclear Disarmament Letter, Cherwell, 15 Feb 1958 , Dear Sir, Last term’s Cherwell editorials were probably the worst that any undergraduate journal has ever produced, being not only illogical; but illiterate as well. […]

I contest your claim that nothing will be accomplished, because it is based upon the absurd contention that for "public opinion" to produce a change “it must be virtually unanimous”. No, it just has to be articulate and powerful – as shown over capital punishment and, despite your assertion to the contrary, Suez. […]

Why not give space in your columns to the powerful arguments for nuclear disarmament? Why not look at the crowd gathered outside the Co-op window in George Street, which is displaying some illustrated facts on the H-bomb? Instead of editorialising about apathy, and being fashionably cynical, why not do something about that apathy and ignorance? […]

Yours etc., Dennis Potter, New College

23

No Men Campaign Women Ban Sex Article, Cherwell, 1 March 1958 The Women of Oxford and Cambridge are to launch together a nationwide appeal to the women of England to renounce all sex contacts until the H-Bomb is banned. The woman behind the scene is Miss Janet Dawson (St. Hilda’s). The women of Oxford are to be asked to deny themselves the company of men until they agree actively to support nuclear disarmament.

“The Lysistrata Pressure Group”, as this latest move in the ban-the-bomb campaign is called, aims to follow its original in Aristophanes’ anti-war comedy by making things hard for men. Miss Dawson said recently, “With one woman to every six men in Oxford we can wield great power. The self-denial of one woman can affect six men at a blow. Better the temporary suspension of sex than the permanent cessation of life.” […]

The scheme which began with a committee of eight over coffee St. Hilda’s is gaining support […] At Cambridge Miss Jennifer Platt, the first woman undergraduate ever to speak at the Cambridge Union, has declared her support. […]

Male reaction to the news of the campaign has not been altogether favourable and some doubts have been expressed as to who will win if it comes to an endurance test. To date no man has yet promised to change his views with regard to the campaign. […]

But Miss Dawson hopes that three sexless weeks will be enough to provoke a desire in men – to ban the bomb. “If not”, she said, “we shall continue the scheme into next term. In any event we shall disseminate our views throughout England during the vacation. At worst this will have been a gesture; at best it may be a serious form of pressure”.

Lysistrata Editorial, Cherwell, 1 March 1958 We must thank the Oxford Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament […] for two achievements. In the first place, the organisers have not sent round a group of earnest young men and women with petitions for us to sign.

Secondly, the Campaign has inspired what is certainly the most unusual propaganda device since Goebbels discovered the radio. […]

“No Sex For Sadists,” they cry; “Banishment or Ban the Bomb.” And what is worse, they plan to spread their poison throughout the country. Universal monasticism stares us in the face. Have the women discovered the really Great Deterrent?

The idea is a horrifying one. A sexless Britain might soon pray for the H-Bomb to put an end to its miseries. But the silver lining to this particular cloud is the fact that that there is no more chance of all the women of Oxford (or anywhere else) subscribing to this ridiculous form of blackmail than there is of seeing all the Professors of Oxford standing outside the Sheldonian on their heads.

Noisy Climbers Gates – Appeal Success Article, Cherwell, 8 March 1958 Complaints by people disturbed by undergraduettes climbing into Somerville late at night have caused the Dean to question every member of the college. Those who admitted climbing in were gated for the rest of the term.

A protest meeting of the JCR resulted in an appeal being lodged with the Principal and the Dean.

As a result, the gatings have been withdrawn.

24

Sex-Starved Females Seek Publicity Letter, Cherwell, 8 March 1958 Dear Sir, I am surprised that a news-paper of the standing of yours should give such attention to the publicity stunt of the women’s colleges, which they have christened their Lysistrata campaign. […]

It seems to me, Sir, that the whole thing is purely a publicity campaign by a lot of sex-starved females who see this as their last hope before they are forced to admit their uselessness and take the veil.

When I have met an undergraduette who knows why she is against the bomb, and can produce a valid answer to the proponents of the bomb, I will be willing to believe the sincerity of this campaign.

Yours faithfully, Stephen L. Tanner, Trinity College.

Unimportant Letter, Cherwell, 8 March 1958 Dear Sir, The writer of your article on the Lysistrata Pressure Group seems to have been misinformed about the spread of the campaign to Cambridge. Although Miss Jennifer Platt was asked for her co-operation, she at no time gave her support.

Furthermore, the Pressure Group was intended as a very small gesture to get publicity for a very big campaign, and not for the individuals concerned. It is a pity that Cherwell should have publicised the Pressure Group to such an extent that it could find no room for the more serious issue of the Referendum.

Yours faithfully, Margaret E. Franklin, St. Hilda’s College.

Few Conclusions In Referendum Results Article, Cherwell, 26 April 1958 Few conclusions can be drawn from the results of the Oxford H-Bomb referendum. Only 14 per cent voted consistently against the bomb and 9 per cent for it. […]

A remarkable feature was that women’s votes were consistently about 20 per cent more anti-bomb than men’s. 28 per cent of the men, for instance, thought Britain should stop the establishment of missile bases on her territory unconditionally, compared to 47 per cent of the women. […]

25

Letter from Cambridge (by Jennifer Platt, Newham) Feature, Cherwell, 26 April 1958 Another Cambridge term begins. Everyone has either prelims or Tripos, and the reading room at the university library is full by 10.30. Talking point of term until May week will undoubtedly be the H-Bomb campaign now beginning. […]

Last week Newnham held its annual commemoration dinner, and I sat opposite a woman who had been up in the late 30s. I asked her what the great issue had been during her university career, and she said “Oh, Communism, Fascism of course ...”. She remembered marching in a procession wearing sandwich boards demanding freedom for India and one night had plastered every lampost in Cambridge with posters for peace. Ironic parallels are obvious; they are enhanced by the fact that her posters had photo-graphs of Alex Comfort who is now speaking for the campaign for nuclear disarmament.

It is too easy to be cynical. […] I have heard so many fantastic discussions at Union election times beginning: “If A brings out the Tories and the Trinity men, the Tories will vote against B who has the Jewish Society and the Labour Club; but if they get together, they can keep C out, unless the Afro-Asian vote takes the trouble...” […]

Late Nights Letter, Cherwell, 26 April 1958 Dear Sir, […] Hours in Oxford [women’s] colleges are until seven. Nobody minds this; a woman needs a little privacy in the evening even if only to wash her hair. What is absolutely indefensible is the way in which we are flung out of men’s colleges at 9.

The men want us to stay until midnight. We want to stay until midnight but we have to while away the last three hours with coffee in a cafe. In Cambridge the hours are until midnight. The difference cannot be defended.

Yours etc., Anthea Mudie

26

[Personal Column] Ads, Cherwell, 26 April 1958 LADIES, you may with easy conscience employ the services of ELEGANT ESCORTS. We agree that the H-Bomb should be banned.

Write to Box 100/1/1 If your normal partners will not support the ‘Ban The Bomb’ campaign.

The Walden Column (by Brian Walden, Queen's College) Opinion, Cherwell, 26 April 1958 One of the less happy facts about life at Oxford University is that we have one thousand women within the citadel. Not even Mrs. Pankhurst could argue that they contribute anything of value. Beatrice Webb would have been gratified by their sexlessness but disgusted with their intellectual torpidity. They are Oxford’s lumpen proletariat, the silent army of ceaseless toilers, dredging their way towards the B.A. degree. […]

Now I have to report that an event of revolutionary significance has taken place. The mice have expressed a point of view about the world in which they live. There has been nothing like it, since the Cossacks deserted the Tsar. […]

The grandmaster touch, with which they pontificated about the hydrogen bomb, staggered the males. After four years of hearing no political expression whatsoever from them, we were ill-prepared for this outpouring of expertise. […]

Yet our mice live in a dream world, in which there is no link between political cause and political effect. […]

When I see some evidence that our mice realise: (a) that it is necessary to discuss political parties when discussing political decisions; (b) that it is obligatory to possess a party political preference, and to have some intelligent reason for so doing; then I will gladly eat all the offending pages of this issue. I do not think my indigestion is in any danger of aggravation; now or ever.

Letter from Cambridge (by Jennifer Platt, Newnham) Feature, Cherwell, 10 May 1958 When the first Cherwell of this term reached me, I found in it a scathing denunciation by Brian Walden of Oxford women and in particular their political habits. This raised once again the question, of perennial fascination to Oxbridge women, the position of Oxbridge women.

What is their position and what ought it to be? There are two major schools of thought on this. One holds that woman’s function in life is to attract man, and this is to be done by cultivating only those characteristics which distinguish the female sex. Since intelligence is not presumed to be one of them, it should be suppressed; those women who accept this can then also very conveniently be despised for doing so. The other school holds that women are people, and to be taken, like men, on their own terms as individuals; this is theoretically admirable, but those who hold it (men and women) still feel free to criticise as unfeminine women who choose to devote none of their time to the first ideal. […]

Women’s colleges have been grafted onto a man’s world; while there continue to be many fewer women than men, this situation will, like the poor, be always with us. I had understood that women at Oxford were more taken for granted, as part of the university, than at Cambridge. I hope I was not mistaken. […]

Jennifer Platt graduated from Cambridge in 1958. She mastered in sociology at the University of Chicago and, after returning to the UK, started teaching at the University of Sussex in 1964, where she would stay for four decades until retirement. She has become an important British sociologist, whose work was foreshadowed by the letters she sent to Cherwell. In 1958, that young woman was having two conversations: one over dinner at Newnham with a woman who had come up 30 years before her; the other with us, through these letters, that have come 60 years after. These parallel conversations help us understand the generational character and cyclical nature of social change. Many battles are associated with a particular generation, but few are permanently resolved by one generation. The battle fought in 1958 never reached a satisfactory conclusion. The world is still weaponised and women still occupy a subordinate role. Looking back, we can appreciate the symbolism of the struggle that played out in 1958 while cont i nu i ng to look for new ways to address old problems.

27

If I go, will I lose myself?

Emily Louise

28

Well I went.

Here they speak on issues that are mine.

They don’t realise it though.

“Council housing” “The working class” That’s me! I’m here.

Hello?

They served me octopus terrine!

Served. To me?

And I’d never had terrine.

And I didn’t know how to use more than one fork.

The cleaners, the workers in the canteen, I relate to them but they don’t relate to me.

I connect with those back home but home doesn’t know me anymore.

I’m the girl with the new life.

Opportunities for a new life.

How’s Oxford?!

Are you talking posher?

Don’t have time for us no more.

I jump to defend that I’m still from ends I’ve ended up here somehow but I promise I’m not what you think.

My nan couldn’t read or write.

When family visit, I see their shoulders stiffen, voices change.

They’re proud I’m here but it’s still strange.

“Can’t come to the family formal without a full family.

Who would I talk to?”

Words from my mum, my darling mum.

“And you can’t bring anyone home!

They’re used to big homes Not what we have.”

Estates of a different kind.

My sister, oh my little sister.

I’m here, I’m there. I’m caught.

29

Notes on a Shoot

by Antonio Perricone

Unlearning mediocrity: a Singaporean education Meritocracy is one of the fundamental building blocks of the Singaporean education system. Described by researcher Tiana Desker as “reshuffling the deck”, meritocracy has long been regarded as as an essential component of the Singaporean curriculum.

In theory, the education system allocates students to the schools they ‘deserve’ because selection is based solely on exam success. Education is seen as an agent of social mobility. It allows those with talent and a good work ethic to rise to the top. But reshuffling the deck is not enough when the cards are stacked against a large number of individuals. Meritocracy is inevitably and inextricably entangled with the tricky topic of privilege.

Take a walk through any housing estate or suburban mall in Singapore and you’re bound to see at least one poster advertising “TUITION”. This is often accompanied by the promise of a “miracle exam formula” that will transform Fs into As. The age-old notion that Asian parents view their children as investments manifests in a school outside school – exchanging weekends for work and financial capital for academic advantage.

Many parents spare no expense in giving their children the best resources to ensure excellence. If education is the passport to a better future, then Singapore’s tuition industry provides the immigration stamps.

This

flourishing business is a potent

Claire Soh

tool for improving grades, and as national examinations alone determine one’s school, it’s easy to see how a side-serving of coaching can make a huge difference. Despite a wellmeaning government led endeavour to shift the education system’s barometers of achievement away from academic criteria, many Singaporean parents continue to treat academic success as the primary route to a happy life. When one’s academic achievements carry such weight, tuition alleviates anxiety but also creates more competition. Families in the top income bracket spend as much as five times more a month on tuition than the lowest. Increasing awareness of this phenomenon has extended the debate about education beyond the quality of schools to the auxiliary support that pupils receive, underscored by economic advantage.

The Singaporean obsession with tuition barely scrapes the surface of multi-faceted privilege, which is especially problematic when we fail to discuss its ramifications.

The stresses of our education system – on students, on parents and on teachers – make it easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. Compulsory, timetabled Character Education lessons platform the discussion of difficult social issues. However, the sheer number of topics to cover, from sex education to climate change, mean that some issues do not see the light of day. Although discussion of privilege has not yet gained traction in schools, the issue is now at the forefront of national discourse and there is a growing awareness of the need to confront it head-on.

I attended two Singaporean independent schools, of which there are fewer than twenty nationwide. These schools are historically top-performing and were accorded

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this status in the 1980s. My experiences in these schools never felt very far removed from any others, as the feeling of working towards the same national examination quashed any ideas of ‘difference’. I knew that other schools were bound to be much more heterogeneous than mine, but those thoughts remained in the abstract until I started my first teaching position.

The more students I met as a teacher, the more that I came to question my conception of normality. The majority of my former classmates and I have never lived in public housing, even though about 80 per cent of Singaporeans live in government-owned flats.

My household and the schools I attended are largely monolingual, while the conversations I hear daily as a teacher are peppered with an array of languages and dialects. When I named the schools I’d attended, my students responded with “oohs” and “ahhs”, remarking that they’d never get good enough grades to qualify for them. These self-imposed glass ceilings betray an entrenched awareness of inequality. Not everybody can consciously identify the problem, but they are all aware of it to some degree.

Academic results remain polarised, in spite of governmental efforts to champion the idea that ‘every school is a good school’.

It is impossible to stop top-performing students from favouring already reputable schools. Instead, this begs for an alternative conception of what is ‘good’. In July 2018, education minister Ong Ye Kung specifically pointed out that his definition of a ‘good’ school is one that “meets the needs of the child” – one that the child enjoys attending. It is hence painfully ironic that what is meant to be an uplifting statement ends up stagnating, because the common conception of a ‘good’ school is an academically high-performing one – and so we hit the same barrier again.

Nevertheless, Ong’s speech has set the tone for a shift in Singaporean attitudes towards education. One way to level the playing field, beyond the larger structural concerns of wealth and privilege, is by supporting the unique ambitions of each student, academic or otherwise.

Tackling inequality always starts with an ideal – in this case, putting the student first – and this principle should inform any discussion on education, both in or out of Singapore.

There is no single remedy to cure an education system.

Despite constant talk of cutting resources, removing them outright, banning tuition to level the playing field, and reducing the number of exams to alleviate pressure, inequality remains inevitable. There will always be students with Englishspeaking, university-educated parents who spend their time reading Animal Farm instead of basic grammar books, or hesitate to answer a question with the confidence of the person who speaks over them.

Such disparity dampens the utopian ideal of ‘meritocracy’.

We can continue to appreciate the rigour and quality of the education we receive and provide, but it is more important than ever to keep focused on lifting up people who most need it, so that the education system can continue to be an instrument of social mobility.

Most importantly, we cannot have discussions about education that neglect the welfare of the people central to it: the students. Rethinking meritocracy is key to ensuring that education begins to provide equality of opportunity, by acknowledging the implications of privilege and broadening its definition to encompass a greater variety of achievement.

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Carcassonne Adam Husain

“So… what are we all auditioning for next?” asked Julius.

It was as if he’d raised a conductor’s baton. Backs straightened under baggy dungarees; fingers tightened on tote bags; a lone, studded eyebrow, like an oboe’s tuning note, was slowly raised. Then they all started babbling.

But throughout the ensuing symphony – filled with the names of directors and productions unknown to me – I remained silent. I was a fresher; it was my first play rehearsal at Oxford and, before these self-identifying thespians, I was horribly shy. As the conversation died down, Julius looked over to me.

“There’s this fascinating take on the Scottish play that’s auditioning,” he said. “They’re doing the whole thing with puppets.”

There were oohs and aahs.

“And it’s BME only.”

“Oh, but that’s great!” said a girl, playing with her hoop earring.

I nodded along, thinking the same as everyone else – about time those poor ethnics had a break.

But Julius continued to smile in my direction, as if expecting something.

Then, he said it: “You should definitely audition!

It’s perfect for you!”

Everyone agreed.

But I was outraged. It felt as if I had been outed in front of the whole table – and outed for being something that, patently, I was not. I wasn’t a ‘BME actor’. Instead, I had always belonged to a vast, silent majority – the privileged, the public school, the type I had heard bellowing at a party: “I know, it’s disgusting! There are simply too many of us in student theatre!”

I looked back at him.

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“BME?” I felt like asking. “You’re the one from the bloody North!”

It was only later that night, lying on my new student mattress, that I realised how ridiculous I had been. Of course he was correct. I was brown! And I could only have been angry if, despite obvious evidence to the contrary, I had come to think of myself as white, like how madmen sometimes take themselves to be imprisoned kings, or Jesus. And the more I thought about it, the more I realised that I acted the white man, instinctively, in most situations.

Whenever I saw a non-white stand-up or politician talk about their race, inexplicably my first reaction would be indignation. “Here we go again!” I would think.

I remembered admitting to a black friend that I didn’t know what this ‘Ferguson’ was that she kept going on about. Her mouth hung open. My instinct told me she was acting. How could she be genuinely offended, just because I didn’t share her (selfish) interest in race relations? Only later did the guilt descend.

As I thought, looking about the room, my eyes fell on a postcard. It was a sunset photo of the college, taken from the outside. You saw only the spires, the crenellated walls, the arrow-slits. And all of a sudden, with extreme vividness, I remembered something else too.

Mum, Dad, and I were on holiday in an old, fortified town in the south of France. I must have been about eight or nine. We were looking for a place to eat dinner and we came across this elegant little square – a bit like Corpus Christi’s quad, but with a fountain instead of a pillar. There was a traditional café nearby, with a few empty tables outside. Dad was just examining the menu when a small woman came out. She looked kind and mild-mannered; I thought she was going to invite us in.

Instead, she unleashed a few percussive French sentences.

Then, seeing our confused faces, she snapped: “Ve are full, sorry.”

By now, she had reached our group; my father had bent down so as to be on her eye level.

“Sorry?” He mumbled, gesturing to the empty seats. “We would like to eat here... Nous voud...”

The poor man didn’t even get a chance to conjugate his verb.

“Closed,” she said, looking him hard in the eye. “Fermé!”

Then she turned on her heel and disappeared inside.

Dad, who until then had stayed bent down, suddenly heaved himself erect; his body oddly stiff, his chest taught as a bongo drum. He turned away, and my mum followed, with my sister and I after them. I still had no idea what had happened.

“What did she mean, saying it was full? Was it booked?”

“I think that might have had something to do with your dad’s skin,” said Mum. “Oh.” This would never have occurred to me.

“Really, Dad?” With an ironic undertone to his voice, his eyes looking away, he said, “Oh, I think so!”

We were all walking very quickly, in no particular direction, through this idyllic French town.

“Can’t we do anything? Can’t we make them seat us?”

“No,” said Mum, “It’s their loss.”

“It’s our loss too,” I thought.

I can remember my dad afterwards, saying with a false air of nonchalance, “Well, that hasn’t happened to me in a long time!”

Later still, he joked that the restaurant, which was completely deserted when we found it, was hardly in a place to refuse anybody’s service. And eventually, we sat down at another café, a little outside the town, talking about the pretty view of the castle walls. * Well, it’s a far cry from lynchings and burning crosses. In fact, the French Riviera story is perhaps the most vanilla act of racism I’ve ever heard of. No violence; no ugly words. It’s even possible, as my Mum said, that the lady only had a problem with Dad… So my sob story – my little drama – is what exactly? That I was once standing near an act of racism?

All the same, it must have had an effect on me. It certainly soured the rest of the holiday – which was a shame, because it was the first time we had done something ‘properly posh’ and ventured outside of Britain.

But the worst part was my inability to express what I felt. I can remember lying in my hotel bed, like I lay on my student mattress that night years later, trying to figure out something to say – only to realise that I didn’t have the words.

Eventually, frustrated and alone, the best I could do was to push the memory out of my mind.

Until I found myself sitting in a room on High Street, two or three months ago, in a French oral class. In these lessons, we tackle fun topics that aren’t on the syllabus. This week it was le racisme. Being the only person of colour in the room, it seemed natural for the teacher to ask if I had ever been a victim. My first reaction, my instinct, was “Never”. Then, by chance, I remembered my Carcassonne story. Probably thinking it might win me some sympathy from the left-wing, arty kids in the room, I began to tell it. I had only just reached the part where we were examining the menu when, to my great surprise, my French began to break down. My voice began to falter. Tears came into my eyes. I realised, shocked, that I could no longer continue.

The teacher, all sympathy, took control of the conversation and, silent, I kept my eyes on the desk for the rest of the lesson.

It was only walking back to my room that I started to punish myself. After all, those tears, that quiver in my voice, was surely a bit of acting. You don’t really care that much about it, do you? And great bit of improv, not being able to finish! This way, the others will never know how little actually happened!

I opened the door and

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lay down on my student mattress, expecting to cry once more. I even pushed myself with a bastardised Stanislavski method – pictured the square, the woman, my father’s body. I remembered my nausea when, on some other holiday, skyping my Dad, I saw his face shrunk down to an inch on my iPhone screen. I couldn’t shake the idea that it was the shape and colour of a turd. But I didn’t cry. I felt nothing. Probably because now, I thought, there was no audience.

It was one of the many incidents where, since coming to Oxford, I have abruptly been made aware of my skin colour. No, there hasn’t been a whiff of racism. Rather, diversity is almost worshipped – you can hardly move for the hordes of college reps, the myriad equality workshops, the unread stacks of diversity zines. But all the attention drawn to race here – of which this article is a tiny part – seems like another one of its symptoms, rather than a solution to the problem. I can’t help thinking of a friend’s (rather telling) joke: “Nowadays, I only hang around with queers so I can get a bloody rest from discussing homosexuality – these straight people, you know, they’re obsessed with it! Absolutely obsessed!”

It’s a numbers game. There are simply so many white people here that, no matter how much we talk publicly about equality, I won’t stop being different. I can’t stop my chest from tightening a little whenever I realise that I’m the only BME person in the seminar or, occasionally, the lecture hall.

Worse still, class identity is less defined in Oxford than it was at home. Private and state school kids, to a certain extent, rub shoulders. Most accents and slang converge towards what you find in Home County grammars. I can no longer feel part of my closed-off, middle class, London pinko tribe – and, in my adolescent years, this was the strongest evidence I wasn’t brown.

Strangely enough, my (then) superficial identification with the Left, with multiculturalism, was a way of affirming my class privilege and my whiteness. Both poor people and brown people were groups that needed my help. But I didn’t belong to either! I remember seeing a young, black family on a tube carriage and thinking “poor, poor immigrants! And so far from home!” Just the same mental mechanism, the same instinctive classing of people as others, meant that on another day, seeing three track-suited Indians sharing parathas

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on the street, I thought involuntarily, “Savages”.

I no longer feel this superiority with such confidence at university. I’ve developed a kind of insecurity. If I realise that every other actor in the play is white, I can’t help wondering – did I get in because I was brown? Did they mistake me for one of ‘those’ BME people, someone who needs a leg up? I’m not one of them!

I'm privileged; I’m the elite! Even now, writing this, I want to tell the good-thinking white reader – who might disagree with what I say, but would never openly contradict a PoC over race – don’t let my heritage bias your reaction! Really, I’m just like you!

It’s a question that, somehow, I’m still struggling with.

Am I BME, or am I just pretending?

Why this hesitation, when I know full well the colour of my skin?

For a while, I believed it was modesty. Since it’s fashionable to be a minority in Oxford – in the same way it’s trendy to go clubbing dressed up as someone from the working class – perhaps I had difficulty thinking of myself as BME out of fear this would be a kind of self-aggrandizement, a kind of acting. Wouldn’t I look just like a certain ‘rich leftie friend’ who, despite having skin as white as virgin snow, claims an African great-great-grandmother? Or a non-Jewish acquaintance who contentedly cries “Oy vey!” at every given opportunity…

But I overestimated my moral qualities. Quite simply, the truth is that I’m scared. Coming to terms with being a minority means throwing away one of my most cherished beliefs – that since I’m middle-class and educated in a liberal society, I will always be safe from racism; that, because the castle walls have protected me so far, there could never be a day when the portcullis suddenly lifts – where I am forced out, told by a matter-of-fact, metallic voice, “There is no place for you here.”

To identify as a minority is to recognize that the majority sees you as different. And maybe that’s why I got so angry last year, when Julius said I should audition for the play.

Drawing Beauty Esther Jeon It is always unsettling when the blind spot disappears.

Selective blindness towards my own art, an integral part of myself, was an acutely painful discovery. How was it that every single person that sprang from my mind and my pen looked white? I was an East Asian born in the UK, but not a single one of my drawings resembled any part of me. They were the perfect and the youthful. They were fitted with deep-set, double-lidded eyes with pale irises, David’s high nose bridge and long curling lashes. No epicanthal folds in sight.

only mangas I have read that portrays East Asians in a realistic manner. One may argue that the characters in Japanese manga are whitewashed, and at first glance they may seem so – but to me they have always transcended any Eurocentric ideal to fill a higher plane of otherworldly perfection. In a moment of clarity, I realised that the beauty that I aspired to in my drawings was as inhuman as they were. It was not that I consciously sought to draw Caucasians, but that there was a significant overlap between white beauty and this particular conception of the beautiful East Asian woman. Of course, sometimes I consciously sought to draw a white person, for instance when using a Western piece of art for inspiration, but this was not the case whenever I drew from my imagination.

When doing so, I possessed the same aesthetic idealism with which a manga artist will conceive a character.

This was a racial disconnection with my self-identity that could not have been fixed by a simple lesson on how to draw people of colour. It was to ask myself a difficult question: why had I always drawn people who looked white? I had never drawn another Korean like myself – I did not know how. Whenever I did try and draw members of my own family, I instinctively whitewashed and played plastic surgeon – an enlarged eye here, a ski-slope nose there. The urge to do so was overpowering.

Self-analysis brought me to the initial conclusion that my drawings reflected two decades worth of gazing at, internalising, and loving white-western aestheticism. I had accepted the idea that this strata of vast history paintings, nudes, and Elysian fields were the pinnacle of world art. What other art would I ever need when I had the Renaissance masters, the Pre-Raphaelites and Rodin?

Perhaps I only drew white people because they were the ones I had seen placed on every gallery wall.

Looking harder at my own artwork, the problem no longer seemed to be my lack of exposure to East Asian self-representative art, but the kind I had been consuming. Long before I had ever seen a Hokusai or an Ai Wei Wei, I had seen plenty of Japanese manga. Flick through any shoujo manga of this century and you find wasp-waisted girls with knife-point chins, wisps for noses and immense sparkling eyes. The only source of art I had at hand for drawing people who looked like me was locked in pursuit of a perfect world which I was not part of.

I had traced their intricate strands of hair, drawing eyes as big as fists, and filling them with stars. To this day, Takehiko Inoue’s manga Real is still one of the

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Behind the overtly racial bias of my art lay a more insidious stumbling block. My deepest desire was to draw perfection. In fact, I was so scared of the lack of it, that I could not bring myself to draw the elderly, or anything that threatened the repertoire of immortal, otherworldly facial features that comprised what I thought to be ‘beauty’. I found the answer to this handicap within the chains of modern Korean beauty ideals with which I had bound myself. The reason why I could not bear to draw imperfection was because I had ordered myself to be as perfect as possible. As a pre-teen, I had fantasised about curing my ‘broad bridgeless nose and small eyes’ with plastic surgery, and thought myself a failure for weighing more than fifty kilos. An intense fear of imperfection seeped into my art: I used it as a form of escapism by drawing parts of myself into a reality where my body was obedient and beautiful.

Whatever my reasons, the fact was that I could only draw people who looked white – whether they were supposed to be or not. Since this was an issue that sprung from my limited conception of beauty, the first way in which to solve the former was to break out of those borders, and I found myself doing so through the means of ancient and early modern East Asian art. The women within these artworks were totally unfamiliar to me – the plump ladies of the Tang dynasty with spherical eyebrows by

Zhou Fang; the narrow eyes in elongated faces in Utamaro’s ukiyo-e (Floating World Art); the disparity between Shin Yun-Bok’s Miindo (Portrait of a Beauty) and any Korean starlet of today. The beauty of these women was initially invisible, since I had mentally ruled out Asian features as beautiful in my own mind. But as I dismantled ‘perfection’ and found that not only was there a myriad of ‘perfections’, but that beauty and ‘imperfection’ were not mutually exclusive, my paradigms of beauty shifted and burst. Today, I can draw my siblings and their mono-lidded eyes without the urge to render them with double-eyelid surgery for posterity to admire.

I seek now to draw without idealism, and to draw things as they truly are. Rather than restricting myself to looking at artwork alone, I began with great urgency to draw real people. How much more there was to garner from looking at a solid cheekbone, a

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real hand, a living face, than to study the idealism within another artist’s work. I toiled at shedding the muscle-memory and mental pathways I used to draw, creating them anew. It was crucial to look at things afresh and to break the moulds forged by repetition and aesthetic bias. It helped immensely to study other artists such as Neva Hosking (who I first discovered on Tumblr), whose drawings, rich with sensitivity to depth and light, are akin to landscapes or grand constructions. Realism became more than a way of looking, but a way through which to censor my art from idealistic beauty. Increasingly, my only reliable sources were the features of the people around me, and my means of looking became my own eyes alone. The shadows of my own features and the angles of my face seeped into my drawings, and it became a common joke between my brother and I that every boy I drew had his nose.

Of course, though I never cast away the freedom to channel the fantasies of my own mind, I am now hooked on the potential of realism to breathe soul into a drawing.

Even as I departed from the usual ‘Western’ subject matter of my art (Arthurian legends, Tolkien, Alice in Wonderland, Ovid’s Metamorphoses) and turned to the Korean myths I had loved as a child – such as the tale of the sky-nymph and the woodcutter, and the rabbit making rice-cakes on the moon – my desire to cling to realism anchors me. Other Korean inspirations include the matriarchy of deep-sea divers on Jeju Island, and the steely eyes of the murdered Empress Min, the last queen of Joseon. Outside of East Asia, the more I look at the people of this world – through documentaries about kidnapped brides in Kyrgyzstan, the cross-dressing Bacha Posh in Afghanistan, and the matriarchal society of the Mosuo tribe in China – the more I am amazed and inspired by the utter diversity of

appearance. Efforts to ram whole continents of people into pre-packaged categories are futile: the human race cannot be compartmentalised. Ethnic ambiguity should in theory be a reality for all of us. Whenever a stranger croons “Ni hao!” or “Konnichiwa!” in my face, they do so on a presumption of singularity, and a disregard for complexity.

Making art is often an intensely personal experience, but in the midst of self-contemplation I cannot forget that, since art creates as much as it is created, it is all the more important for it to manifest a world of equality – rather than endorse existing hierarchies of beauty, race and power. The process of de-whitewashing my art and exploring non-Western and non-classical influences continues. But now, I am finally able to draw an East Asian.

I seek in my own small way to undo the harmful stereotypes of East Asians within media. I recall American fears of ‘the yellow peril’, and Tintin’s rat-toothed nemesis Mitsuhirato in Hergé’s 1934 The Blue Lotus, as well as the various classmates in my childhood who pointed out my ‘slit eyes’ or ‘flat nose’. Artists throughout time and space have sought meaning through a myriad of ways.

For me, it was the acceptance of reality and the move towards realism that granted me the power to draw people on their own terms; to make peace with my own face, and attain freedom from beauty itself.

Not of Sound Mind Kei Patrick The world is not of sound mind.

Left sanity behind in the city sitting sipping tight-lipped liquid from bottles dripping liquor; reliable literal wit on faces thirsty for colour, parched in straight-laced places where people have outlines. Outlined, left behind.

Gone to overflow, treading over the meadow.

Back some time tonight.

The world is not of sound mind.

Gone to overflow over the meadow, backlit, warmed by sunlight, my sunlit shirt light on my back – I’ve got to go, to be away, to hear myself say something we all know, but forget sometimes: the world is not of sound mind.

Tread sunlight into my shoes, plough the wind with my fingers. * For a long time, I'm meadow walking, finding cool air currents, climbing the river into the sky.

I bet I look a lot like my dad when he was at school.

I bet he overgrew too.

He had curly hair, not like mine; he had a different outline, but I bet I look a lot like my dad when he was at school.

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My dad who dreams.

I bet I seem a lot like my dad: when we think things are serious, sometimes we steam.

“You serious fool!

You're homesick; go home.

You're lovesick; let go.

Go be a thoughtless child and speak out loud like a fool, jump in a pool, go soak your head.

When you resurface, steam can rise from your ears and maybe she'll notice, and she’ll catch your eye, and realise why you seem so filled with hot air: it's because you care.

So go be a gushing fountain, fool.

You care. Why worry so much?

Don't hold back; cut yourself some slack.”

That's what we should say to each other, me and my dad who dreams.

My dad, who is what he seems.

He said we have a choice sometimes, when we think things are serious: between fear and laughing.

Sometimes when he sings, he laughs out loud.

He sings, and he sees the world is not of sound mind, and that's fine.

Well I think my dad sounds a lot like me when he sings, and I'm so proud.

It'll overflow when I go home, dreaming out loud.

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Beach Script Meredith Kenton EXT. BEACH – MORNING A wide and flat stretch of beach, painted the sort of grey that gets tangled in your hair and caught in your shoes to be emptied out later. It is early morning and the only walkers are those with dogs. The air is cold, and the wind is such that conversations cannot be overheard. A YOUNGER WOMAN and an OLDER WOMAN are walking side by side; they do not have a dog. Their shoulders occasionally touch as they walk. The Older Woman pulls a crumpled tissue out of the pocket of her thick coat and blows her nose, before stuffing the tissue back and digging her hands into the slight warmth of the pocket. She sighs.

OLDER WOMAN: I’m sure that Simon must have had affairs.

YOUNGER WOMAN: Did Jen know?

OLDER WOMAN: Yes, I’m sure she did.

YOUNGER WOMAN: Hmm. I suppose you do what you can to get by, or who you can. Either way, she’s clearly not coping.

OLDER WOMAN: She’s doing okay. But she is still visiting every week, a newly-baked seed loaf in one hand and a half-baked political opinion in the other.

YOUNGER WOMAN: Well, I think she has a point. We can’t be too careful. They’ll start closing all the shops soon.

OLDER WOMAN: Filling the country with immigrants.

She sighs.

OLDER WOMAN: I just tell myself it’s her age. After a certain point you’re allowed to say things like that. You’ve earnt the right to be incorrect.

YOUNGER WOMAN: It comes in the post with your free bus pass.

OLDER WOMAN: Sad really. The ignorance, not the free travel.

YOUNGER WOMAN: Nothing sad about free travel.

OLDER WOMAN: Until you run out of places to go.

The Younger Woman bends down to pick up a pebble that has caught her eye. It was clearly once perfectly round but now has a small chunk missing.

YOUNGER WOMAN: Are you going to the house this year?

OLDER WOMAN: No, I’ve decided to let it go this year. I’ll sell my part to Rob’s kids.

The Younger Woman nods in acknowledgement and throws the pebble back.

YOUNGER WOMAN: You did say you’d do that last year.

OLDER WOMAN: Yes, but it’s different now that Simon’s gone. Now they’ll all be getting involved.

YOUNGER WOMAN: Do you ever wonder why a group of people fight every year for a share in a house that noone can stand being in?

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OLDER WOMAN: That’s not true. I enjoy our visits.

YOUNGER WOMAN: No one enjoys their visits after what happened.

OLDER WOMAN: We don’t really know what happened.

There is a large gust of wind that sweeps the characters off-course before they adjust themselves straight ahead once more. The Older Woman stops to look at the sky. Momentarily, the sun has become visible from behind the mass of clouds, illuminating a patch of sea before slowly retreating back behind cover.

YOUNGER WOMAN: Maybe the water was poisoned.

OLDER WOMAN: Stop it.

YOUNGER WOMAN: Come on, that was one of Jen’s best. Every visit is another education.

OLDER WOMAN: Whether intentional or not.

YOUNGER WOMAN: The secrets stroll around that house, mocking us for thinking we could get away with it.

OLDER WOMAN: They come out every now and then with the turning of the mattresses.

YOUNGER WOMAN: Like Jen’s first husband.

OLDER WOMAN: And his children.

YOUNGER WOMAN: And his convictions.

OLDER WOMAN: Don’t remind me.

YOUNGER WOMAN: At least he’s gone.

OLDER WOMAN: For now, anyway. Distant relations can smell final testaments like sharks can smell blood.

YOUNGER WOMAN: What we really need is some old-smiting-striking-testament. Eat the forbidden fruit, you’re out. Murder, you’re out. Covet thy neighbour’s house, you’re definitely out.

The Younger Woman extends her arms out, so her palms are facing the sky.

YOUNGER WOMAN: The wrath of Jen. OLDER WOMAN: You’re being daft now.

YOUNGER WOMAN: I wonder who she’d smite first.

OLDER WOMAN: I know who I would.

YOUNGER WOMAN: I also know who you would.

Unfortunately, we don’t really have that power.

OLDER WOMAN: Shame.

YOUNGER WOMAN: Yeah, shame.

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Inconceivable Maebh Mulligan Smith

I know that she’s judging as she hands me the pill and can’t quite conceive I’m not to blame for this ill.

Thirty-five pounds – the first fee of many, and trauma seems to charge by the penny.

I pass by the station, no intent to go in – after all, it was my fault for having that gin.

And actually, how could it have happened like that if my dress weren’t falling off, battered old tat?

I go to a clinic, wait through the queue – why don’t you report it? Sure, what can I do?

He’ll do it again to some other kid, but what I do now won’t undo what he did.

There’s a ten-day window for DNA; I’ve given enough; won’t give this away.

Do you really think, after what he did, I’ll let them inside to ‘open my lid’ – yes, we deal in euphemism, image incessant, because we won’t grant language to what isn’t pleasant.

Sure, if the key fits, it’s bound to go in, and this is such a familiar sin.

Two months later and I’ve put on some weight; that's really quite normal; it stems from self-hate.

It’s not that I hate myself – but you might – just that I hate the events of that night.

So I’ll listen to you, while you tell me I’m lucky; that I don’t know hardship; that I let him fuck me.

Adopting the language, the anger which flows, a pilgrim’s youth lost – ah well, so it goes.

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It’s three months later and I’m lying in bed, crying myself through consensual head.

PTSD? I’m not really sure; could he not have found some desperate whore?

Not really, no, that’s not quite the point, there’s more to this than my ‘supple joints’.

It’s a bit flattering, at least, that he chose you.

That’s like being flattered that you’ve got the flu, like, “Yeah, this virus wants me so much, thank Christ it’s caught me in its iron clutch.”

Half a year later still paying the cost – half a night’s folly; feigned innocence lost.

I put on the dress that I wore that night, I turn up the sleeves, see blood catch the light – Nine months later, but yes, really, I’m fine, (except when I think of that other time – the time that it happened, the time before; the time that it made me good Father’s whore.)

So maybe it’s true, and maybe it’s not, that fault lies with me far more than I thought.

I pay the price with unoriginal sins, innocence taken by even my kin and maybe it doesn’t amount to all that and maybe it’s me that’s the battered old tat.

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It's not like it's your fault Leela Jadhav It’s not like it’s your fault that you couldn’t roll your r’s – tongue stumbling through a mouthful of undulations and when you press it against your teeth

“literally just press it to the roof of your mouth” the sound that you throw spills confident over the cusp of your lips, leaks under the crease of your jaw.

And you pause in confusion, your tongue upside down and it’s sweet so I I don’t mind that you say Koh-i-noor wrong, or curdle the sounds that collect in my throat.

It’s not like it’s your fault or anything that your A is like ant and not aunt – when your tranquilised vowels slice my surname in two or my inflections are choked by your parabolic glue.

I don’t really know why it bothers me when you can say fjord but not makhni and I really don’t want to overreact so I’ll keep my thoughts tangled and flat but oh my god sometimes it’s just so annoying

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It’s not like it’s your fault when I’m asked why I care about feeling exotic except it’s your friends and you’re sitting right there and I’m just trying to eat my tagliatelle but I suppose even then it’s not like it’s your fault really judging my mood from the force of my chewing isn’t exactly easy and then I laugh to shake off the situation and the ripples roll

towards you

stitched together with a nonchalance that won’t betray my frustration, so I end up weaving smiles around the tension in the air and now it all seems forgotten and alright which is fair.

I only wish I’d had the conviction to say that thing about your diction and then maybe we would have progressed from there, so it’s not like it’s your fault or anything

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JUDGES SIMON ARMITAGE is Professor of Poetry at Oxford and one of the UK’s most respected poets. His work is internationally renowned for its dark wit and lack of pretension. He also writes for radio, television and film, and is the author of four stage plays. Simon has won numerous awards including The Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize, The Sunday Times Young Author of the Year and one of the very first Forward Prizes. He was awarded a CBE for his services to poetry in 2010.

For this term’s 500 words competition we asked readers to respond to the theme ‘ROOMS’. With 39 submissions from universities across the country, we received everything from a Woolf-inspired short story about a feminist apartment block to a meticulously constructed word collage from famous poetry snippets – as well as a submission from a certain ‘Jonathan Wasteman’. Our team discussed them at length, made a shortlist, and from this our judges chose a winner and runner-up.

POLLY TOYNBEE has been a prolific columnist for the Guardian since 1998 and was named Columnist of the Year at the 2007 British Press Awards. She previously worked for The Independent and as social affairs editor of the BBC. In 2003 Polly published Hard Work: Life in Low-pay Britain after voluntarily living on the minimum wage to highlight the critical conditions of low-pay British jobs. She is now President of the Social Policy Association and deputy treasurer of the Fabian Society.

BERNARDINE EVARISTO is an author of astonishing breadth, working in both verse and prose and inventively exploring the poetic freedom of both forms.

She is widely recognised for her contribution to British literature – The Times heralded her verse novel The Emperor’s Babe as a “book of the decade”. She received an MBE in 2009. In addition to her literary work, in 2012 Evaristo founded the Brunel International African Poetry Prize, aiming to diversify the arts and promote the inclusion of authors of colour.

HILARY MENOS is a poet, farmer and former restaurant critic who has published two full collections of poetry, Berg (2009) and Red Devon (2013), as well as two pamphlets. Berg won the Forward prize for Best First Collection. Her poetry explores the dark underbelly of rural life and the fragility of the relationship between man and nature in a warming world, though it touches on pretty much every subject under the sun.

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Zoetrope A black crescent of tobacco lines a trail of vintage dust on the window ledge; a fine ministry of secret cancer infused with the debris of dried pot, soda water, dandruff, skin. A calmness makes me nostalgic for halfempty faces where intimacy once rested its sulphour.

We felt doomed & selfish & loving in the past, listening to music every day; simply desiring to become it, selling our weight for abstraction, speechless orgasm or black & white putlocker viewings from childhood’s cabinet of cheap television, wrapping our secret rooms in static joy, shadows seemingly poignant in the honest trash viewings in low-lit flats, drunk confessions of what we regret saying; the entire universe as an endless catch-up that dazzles in a shade

“A truly unsettling study of the notion of “house” and “home”. […] The poem never rests on familiar formulations of language, always looking to startle and surprise. Recognisable but strange. And those descriptions of odours - it’s a poem I can really smell!”

of premature doubt. We were not brought up to be meaningful, resisted the ancient call to purpose & laboured to be a full-time expression of the soul’s instability: bad television, bad parenting, irreducible facts of our fatal grace.

Stealing words & lighters & money from the house that didn’t feel like ours, not the house we bore in our ribs like a surrealist sketch, the house we invited countless others into as they brought to each room their music, films, books & poems. & on occasion, even their light, a pale midnight’s conversation ending in tears.

The unreal architecture of home seems to tease us all with its warm mirage, but instead it extends, demolishes, rebuilds & bears us to the diminishing character of others.

Alex Matraxia

“This poem flows beautifully with some striking lines and images that jump out of the text.”

– Bernardine Evaristo

– Simon Armitage

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The Stuff of Life “Only two things grow in Dicton,” said one woman to another over the bus’s growl. “The graveyard and the amount of stuff in Mr. Overton’s room.”

She was right. In south Shropshire’s Dicton Priors the sun rarely shone. The town had slipped down a crack during the last ice age and remained there ever since. All the young people had left for good, while all the old ones left for food – relying on the weekly bus which took them to the market at Quatcham.

“That Overton’s a lifesaver,” replied the woman’s bus partner.

She was also right. Doubly so. When it snowed in Dicton it snowed and the Quatcham road was made impassable. Impassable, had it not been for Overton, who, after inheriting a decrepit tractor from a decrepit farmer, always managed to plough a path. The result? Dicton pensioners had never missed a Quatcham market.

But Overton was also a lifesaver, in the sense that he preserved lives. His retirement venture had been antiques and he’d hastily converted the downstairs room of his house into a shop for them. People whistled when he told them how much he’d spent on the sign: British racing green, Overton’s Antiques. He took everything and anything, and in return for keeping the winter roads clear, Dicton let him.

Over twenty years, as modernity ambled down Dicton’s high street, Overton’s swept up the stuff left behind. Cassettes became CDs, while the Da Vinci Codes and Diana dishcloths piled higher and higher. Plus, when the young left town, or the old shifted off to Dicton’s other ‘growing’ attraction, he took what was left and not wanted: broken board games, dog-eared books, worn-through slippers...

“I’ve never been in that room, mind,” responded the first woman.

This was also true for anyone who gave Overton anything.

Only travelling tourists ever looked in Overton’s, let alone entered and bought anything.

“Oh, take it; it’ll only waste room here,” was what they had all said to him. Next thing they knew, they were walking through the rooms of their ill-fitting houses gripped by

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grief. They had kept the photos, the medals, the presents, and handed over their stuff. But it was this that told them ‘a life had been lived’: a ten-year old’s monopoly tantrum, a battered holiday book, or a warm fireside conversation.

It was their stuff which now sat in Overton’s Antiques. But everyone in Dicton called it his ‘room’ to cling to a sense of domesticity. What terrified them most was the idea that it might be sold – not seeing if it had helped their grief.

“Oh, I was there yesterday after putting the flowers on my Harriet,” said an old man, wistfully.

The women knew he was lying. The poor guy can throw flowers on his wife’s corpse, but he can’t enter a shop for fear that her sewing machine’s been sold…

By the time the bus entered Quatcham, the snow was as high as the hedges.

A shared sentiment was spoken: “Thank heavens for Mr. Overton.”

“A world is summoned up with a few pen-strokes, a reporter’s eye, and a natural sense of sympathy for its subjects.”

– Polly Toynbee “It is well planned and nicely paced, and the writer clearly has an ear for the comic, and a neat turn of phrase” – Hilary Menos

Arthur Charlesworth

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Editors: Katie Meynell and Lev Crofts

Creative Digital Director: Antonio Perricone

Deputy Editors: Leela Jadhav, Michael O’Connor, and Jorrit Donner-Wittkopf

Creative Events Director: Natalia Ameen

Digital Director: Jack Hunter Fiction Directors: Bethan James and Jerry Amokwandoh Fiction Team: Georgie Whitehead, Fenella Sentance, Louis Davidson, Esme Bright, Dominic Weatherby, Isabelle Stanley, KwannAnn Tan, and Maebh Mulligan Smith.

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Creative Events Team: Bessie Yuill, Jessica Wallace, Maria Branea, Clara Grinyer, and David Hubbard Club Events: Lauren Sneade (director) and Amber Shrimpton Broadcasting Directors: Maddie Parr and Ani Gilmore Broadcasting Team: Iona Kennedy, Sophie Fox, Jessica Wallace, Jonathan Lau, Meredith Kenton, Emily Wilder, Georgia Tulley, and Amy Ryder Business and Marketing Director: Daanial Chaudhry Business Team: Hon-Ming Gianotti and Lucy Manly Social Media Manager: Eleanor Burgess and Bertie Harrison-Broninski Columnists: Moritz Schnorpfeil, Fenella Sentance, Jennifer Donnellan, Lea Gayer de Mena, Verity Babbs, and Lou Lou Curry

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