Abstract
Bryan Appleyard expressed the moment on the front page of The Sunday Times on the day after the funeral of Princess Diana:
A sound like a distant shower of rain penetrated the walls of Westminster Abbey. Shortly before noon it rolled towards us. There it was inside the church. It rolled up the nave, like a great wave. It was the people clapping, first the crowds outside and then the 2,000 inside. People don’t clap at funerals and they don’t clap because people outside are clapping. But yesterday they did.
It was dense, serious applause and it marked the moment at which the meaning of what was happening on this incredible day was made plain.
It was the end of Earl Spencer’s tribute to his sister, Diana Princess of Wales, that had raised the emotional tension to this breaking point.
He had launched another savage attack on the press, saying Diana had been the “most hunted person of the modern age”. What brought grasps from the nave of the abbey, however, was that he had also flung down a challenge to the royal family over the upbringing of William and Harry, pledging to Diana that “we, the blood family, will do all we can to continue the imaginative and loving way in which you were steering these two exception young men so that their souls are not simply immersed by duty and tradition, but can sing openly as you planned”.
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Notes
Reflections on the emotional labour within the context of relationships and ways these have been challenged by feminism are given in Jean Baker Miller, Towards a New Psychology of Women (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. 1976).
See also reflections in Bev Skeggs, Class, Self. Culture (London: Routledge, 2004)
E. Probyn, Carnal Appetites: Foodsexidentities (New York: Routledge, 2000)
H. Safia Mirza, Young, Female and Black (London: Routledge, 1992).
For discussions of Diana’s emotional responses to her situation within the Royal household see, for instance, Bee Campbell, Diana, Princess of Wales: How Sexual Politics Shook the Monarchy (London: The Woman’s Press, 1997)
Judie Burchill, Diana (London: Weidenfeld and Nicoloson, 1998)
Tina Brown, The Diana Chronicles (London, 2007).
For some discussions of the grief and mourning within modern Britain see, for instance, David Cannadine, ‘War and Death, Grief and Mourning in Modern Britain’ in J. Whaley, ed., Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death (London: Europa, 1981).
For further historical background to the shaping of British subjects of the Crown, see Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
An illuminating theoretical and historical discussion of the ways people learn to relate to others is provided in Michael Ignatieff, The Needs of Strangers (London: Chatto and Windus, 2001).
Different ways of conceiving the nature of community are presented in Benedict Anderson, Imagines Communities (London, Verso, 1991)
Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princton: Princeton University Press, 1990)
Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981)
Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking (New York: Routledge, 1989)
Carol Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Standford CA: Stanford University Press, 1988) and The Disorder of Women (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989)
Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking (Boston: Beacon 1989)
Michael Keith, After the Cosmopolitan (London: Routledge, 2005).
Different strands, which went into constructing Thatcherism as a political project dominating Britain in the 1980s, are explored in Martin Jacques and Stuart Hall, ed., Thatcherism (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1983).
For discussions of the sources of Thatcherism and the break that it assumed with traditional ‘one nation’ Toryism see, for example, Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques, eds, Thatcherism (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1983).
For some discussion of a politics of recognition and the ways that this potentially transformed the terms of citizenship, see Charles Taylor, Politics of Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). This is also a theme that I explore in relation to the aftermath of 7/7 in Urban Fears and Global Terrors: Citizenship, Multiculture and Belongings (London: Routledge, 2007).
See also Craig Calhoun, Social Theory and the Politics of Identity (Oxford: Blackwell 1994)
Robert Fine, Political Investigations: Hegel, Marx, Arendt (London: Routledge, 2001).
Jonathan Cobb and Richard Sennett carried out qualitative explorations into changing class relations in ways that illuminated issues of self-worth and respect in The Hidden Injuries of Class (New York: Vintage, 1970). This helped to inform the more generalised reflections about changing forms of civil society in Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). See also shifts reflected in his more recent Respect: The Formation of Character in an Age of Inequality (London: Penguin Books, 2004).
The significance of Protestantism in the formation of modernity is explored in Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Allen and Unwin, 1970).
It is also a theme in Erich Fromm, Fear of Freedom(London: Routledge, 1991) where he explores ambivalences in the notions of individuality we inherit within a liberal moral culture.
Julie Burchill in Diana (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998) defended Diana against the notion that was a ‘victim’ and so had come to represent a victim culture. Rather it was nearer the truth to say that she has learnt to empower herself. As Tina Brown recalls as she struggled to come to terms with her own ‘primal wound of her childhood abandonments and the collapse of her princess dream along with the failure of her marriage’ she would at times ‘do crazy things. Her emotional neediness was forever dragging her down’ (The Sunday Times, 26 August 2007, p. 16).
An exploration of changing conceptions of parenting is provided in John Gillis, A World of Their Own Making: Myth, Ritual and the Quest for Family Values. See also Linda Gordon, Pities But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (New York: Free Press, 1994)
Judith Stacey, Brave New Families (New York: Basic Books, 1990) and In the Name of the Family: Rethinking Family Values in the Postmodern Age (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1996).
A useful discussion of contemporary notions of fathering is provided by Adrienne Burgess, Fatherhood Reassessed: The Making of the Modern Father (London: Vermillion 1997).
Explorations of different notions of childhood and different ways children have been disciplined are provided by Alice Miller, For Your Own Good (London: Virago Press, 1987). She explores the pain and psychological suffering inflicted on children in the name of conventional child-rearing and what she frames as ‘poisonous pedagogy’.
The place of touch within different cultural settings is explored by Ashley Montague in Touching (New York: Perennial Library, 1986)
the explorations Gabriel Josopovici, Touch (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).
The ways men so often learn to rationalise their experience as they learn to discount emotions and feelings as sources of knowledge is a theme in Victor J. Seidler, Rediscovering Masculinity: Reason, Language and Sexuality (London: Routledge, 1986) and Unreasonable Men: Masculinity and Social Theory (London: Routledge 2004).
Some of the tensions between feminism and postmodernism are very well explored in Linda Nicholson, ed., Feminism/Postmodernism (New York: Routledge 1990)
Linda Nicholson and Steve Seidman, eds., Social Postmodernism: Beyond Identity Politics (New York: Routledge, 1996).
See also Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York Routledge, 1990)
Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell, eds, Feminism as Critique (Minneapolis. MIN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987)
G. C. Spivak, In Other Words: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1988) and Outside in the Teaching Machine New York: Routledge, 1993).
The ways in which feminism and psychotherapy have been able to inform each other in the development of feminist psychotherapy is a theme in Jessica Benjamin, Bonds of Love (London: Virago 1990) and Shadow of the Other: Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1998)
Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1978) and Feminities, Masculinities, Sexualities: Freud and Beyond (London: Free Associations Books, 1994)
Susie Orbach and Luise Eichenbaum, Understanding Women (London: 1983)
N. O’Connor and Joanna Ryan, Wild Desires and Mistaken Identities: Lesbianism and Psychoanalysis (London: Virago 1993).
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© 2013 Victor Jeleniewski Seidler
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Seidler, V.J. (2013). Symbolic Resistance, Love and Relationship. In: Remembering Diana. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230371903_7
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