Abstract
For four years, I volunteered for a London-based organisation called Opening Doors, which provides services for the older (50+) lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT, hereafter) community.
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- 1.
Opening Doors London (ODL) is in partnership with Age UK Camden as the lead agency, and in partnership with Age UK across London. It is the biggest project providing information and support services with and for OLGBT people in the UK; see http://openingdoorslondon.org.uk/.
- 2.
All names used in this text are pseudonyms to protect the confidentiality of key participants.
- 3.
I use the present tense as till today I experience and observe this kind of reaction.
- 4.
This reaction is related to the fact that the older lesbian and gay community is now an over-researched group and suffers from research fatigue—a long way from the mid-1990s when it was a burgeoning field.
- 5.
Once while helping out produce a short film about the befriending services offered by Opening Doors, I made friends with one of the filming crew, an Irish woman in her mid-to-late twenties. Upon mentioning the theme of my research, she started recounting memories from her childhood. She reminisced how as a young child growing up in Ireland, she would run in her mother’s kitchen wrapped up in a large towel after having a bath. She recalled the smell of her mother’s cooking with nostalgia. As she was transported to her childhood kitchen, she vividly described the warm atmosphere, the light colours of the kitchen walls and the AGA range cooker. Despite the fact that her parents are divorced, she expressed that she still had warm memories of being in her mother’s kitchen. Such recollections were a common reaction to my topic, which in turn helped me understand more broadly the symbolic meaning of the kitchen in a British context.
- 6.
I use the term ‘these’ as most of the older lesbians I shared time with explained how back in the 1980s they were involved in political activism through the Women’s Liberation Movement and the Gay and Lesbian Front Movement too. Some of them were also part of the lesbian feminist separatist movement, and lived in squats and collectives in London.
- 7.
For more information about these networks, see: http://www.olderlesbiannetwork.btck.co.uk/; http://www.lesbianlinkbrighton.co.uk/; and http://www.kenric.org/. From my previous anthropological research with older lesbians in Brighton and Hove (Scicluna 2010), I am aware that some networks, despite having an online presence, do keep a low public profile. This is because some of the older members, who are now in their 80s, were deeply affected by Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988, where some even lost their jobs back in the 1960s and 1970s just because of their sexual orientation.
- 8.
There were other forms of tension in the group, especially between different classes. This came out, for example, in how women articulated their views on certain films. For example, after I showed the French drama film Tom Boy, which follows the life of a ten-year-old tomboy in the outskirts of Paris, two working-class women told me that they did not appreciate the slow scenes of childhood experimentation of dressing as a boy. While another woman, who is middle class through her education, disagreed saying that this type of filming expounded reality and the mundaneness of life itself. Another lesbian relentlessly proposed to organise disco parties, as she had done in the past, but no one seemed interested as many preferred to do more art-related activities. For example, the annual Christmas play, directed, written and acted by older lesbians, was always well attended. Often an evening meal was combined with viewing the play.
- 9.
Moreover, this shift in focus is also tightly linked to the flexibility inherent to the open-ended ethnographic method and its practice. The issue of flexibility and choice of methodology is an important aspect of this book, one which cannot be separated from my interpretation and the final outcome.
- 10.
Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988 prohibited local authorities in England and Wales from ‘promoting’ homosexuality by teaching or publishing material. For more information on Section 28, see http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/9/section/28.
- 11.
Female artists took this role of the women-in-the-kitchen more seriously, such as Martha Rosler’s 1975 feminist parody video and performance titled ‘Semiotics of the Kitchen’. The video, which runs six minutes, is considered to be a critique of the commodified versions of traditional women’s roles in modern society.
- 12.
I borrow the term ‘simultaneities’ from Shirley Ardener ([1993]1997), where she is looking at the relationship between women and space and suggests that this complex interdependence should be thought through such terms.
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Scicluna, R.M. (2017). Introduction: The ‘Other’ Side of the Kitchen. In: Home and Sexuality. Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46038-7_1
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