Recording and transcript of a Q and A between Rachel Thomson (original WRAP team member) and members of the University of Manchester's Women's Theatre Society. A blog post by Rachel Thomson reflecting on the session.

In 2019-2020 the ESRC funded 'Reanimating data: experiments with people, places and archives'. Part of the project involved staging a series of reanimations using data from interviews with young women from Manchester, conducted thirty years previously as part of the Women, Risk and AIDS Project (WRAP 1988-1990). Each reanimation involved a collaboration between young women, educators and researchers and used creative methods to explore the WRAP data and bring it to life in new ways.
This item is an audio recording and transcript of a Q and A between Rachel Thomson (original WRAP team member) and members of the University of Manchester's Women's Theatre Society. The group interview discusses motivations for the original WRAP study, Rachel's time at university in Manchester in the 1980s and her experience of and some of the challenges of conducting interviews as part of the original research. It concludes with discussion on current issues around sexuality, gender and femininity and participant reflections on social change.

Also included is a blog written by Rachel Thomson reflecting on this session and what she had learnt about social change, plus photos of the memorabilia she brought to share with the group.

WTS09/O

07/11/2019

Ester McGeeney, Rosie Gahnstrom

The Women's Theatre Society, The Reanimating Data Project, Rachel Thomson

The Reanimating Data Project

Research outputs

Interviews (Data collection)

Local history

Social change

Cultural history

Activism

Political change

Modern history

Location

Sexual reputation

Punks

Youth

Career development

Family Planning Clinic

Subcultural groups

Mental health

Mental health attitudes

Sexuality

Political issues

Political awareness

Sex education

Pornography

Heterosexuality

Homosexuality

Discrimination against homosexuals

Motherhood

Archives

Research publications

Theatre

Drama

Performing Arts

Femininity

Double standards

Masculinity

Expectations

Aspiration

Magazines.

Homophobia

Section 28.

Text, Audio

2020

Greater Manchester UK

CC BY-NC 4.0

Group discussion between Rachel Thomson and the members of the University of Manchester’s
Women’s Theatre Society for the Reanimating Data Project
Linked audio file name: PT M1 1001
Group discussion conducted and audio recorded on 7th November 2019 at the University of
Manchester.
Transcribed by Type out transcription services and edited by Reanimating data project team. Photos
of the objects discussed have also been added.
Key:
Text in Bold:
Text not in bold:

Interviewers / Women’s Theatre Society members
Rachel Thomson

[ ]: Content has been added to provide further information / context.

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Can we just start off and ask you why did you do it?

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Why did we do the study in the first place?

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How did you get involved in it?

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I was thinking about that on my way up and I thought maybe I would just show you, so you know
what 30 years looks like for yourselves, I’ll pass you round some pictures of who I was 30 years ago,
to get the mood right. Maybe I’ll say about myself and then I’ll explain with the study because the
things are mixed up. I was a student here in the sociology department, I came in 1985 and graduated
in 1988 and I was really lucky and if you think about it now the idea that when you finish your degree
you just get a job in the department, someone says, “Would you like to be a researcher on this
project?” So in retrospect I was really lucky that Sue Scott who had been my dissertation supervisor
asked me if I was interested on working on a funded research project and the reason for that probably
is that I did a dissertation about women and Aids and the reason I was interested in that was that my
sister was HIV positive, which I guess in 1988 there were very few women who were HIV positive;
not only was HIV incurable but they didn’t know what it was, they literally didn’t know what AIDS
was there was no understanding of the cause, so it was something I was really interested in and
motivated about.

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I actually found, because I’m a hoarder, I don’t throw things away, I actually found my old
dissertation, I thought you would find this interesting when you could handwrite a dissertation; we did
have photocopiers but I thought you might just want to pass that round to have a look at it, so there’s
bits that are photocopied and we did have Tippex, so there are bits that are Tippexed over and I was
looking at this I was thinking this must be a draft, there’s no way this could be the final thing and then
you realise because there’s marks on it so it’s not.

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Is it carbon paper?

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No; there’s photocopying going on there because you can see there are bits that have been
photocopied and cut up and stuck on. Anyway, I was interested in this kind of thing and motivated
around it, so I was employed on the project and the project was a sociology project, they were
feminist sociologists and always with getting funding for any project it has to, particularly if it’s
sociology it has to be seen as a problem like an official public problem in order to be fundable and at
that moment there was a real concern about the heterosexual spread of AIDS because up to that point
people understood that it was affecting gay men they didn’t know why, they didn’t actually know how
it was transmitted which is amazing now to think and it was just at that point where they started
becoming aware that it was a blood-borne disease and there was absolutely nothing that was stopping
it from being spread much more widely; there was a big programme or public research funded into, it
was called the social aspects of AIDS, there was lots of studies about sexual behaviour and until that
time really there hadn’t been very much social research on sexual behaviour it had been something
that was seen as very private outside of the orbit of research really and public knowledge.

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I don’t know if people remember, well they won’t remember Margaret Thatcher but Thatcherism a lot
of it was a bit odd, it was very contradictory, part of it was about asserting the family and the rights of
parents but the other side of it was actually about being quite public about things and public about sex,
so Thatcher infamously both commissioned this research and then banned quite a lot of it afterwards
which was a very Thatcherite thing to do.

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The research was a feminist research project so all of the leaders of the projects which was Janet
Holland, Sue Scott, who worked here [at the University of Manchester] and Caroline Ramazanoglu
who worked at Goldsmiths in London, they were feminist socialists and they wanted to do a piece of
research which was feminist and in a sense critiqued the assumptions about heterosexuality, so the
idea that there was just that moment in sexual politics where feminists were getting really interested in
naming heterosexuality as a thing and so the project was about sort of troubling and complicate
heterosexuality so that’s kind of how it began. I was probably much more interested as an activist I
think, as a member of a younger generation I was kind of more about trying to stop AIDS but also I
guess I was a young feminist but of a different generation.

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That’s a photograph from Section 28 March; Manchester was a really important, in fact the biggest
demonstration around Section 28 was in Manchester and it began a really big kind of explosion of
activism around [sex]. Manchester was a real hot bed of activism around sexual politics at that time in
the 80s, people were really interested, it was really important to people to talk about it, we had endless
conversations about sex. I was thinking about it when I was reading the interviews about how much
people liked to talk about sex at that time it was sort of like a full time job to work it out.

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Do you think it was Manchester and other places?

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The reason I came to Manchester, I’ve just been asking actually guys here why you came to
Manchester, I came to Manchester for the music completely and I was the only person that I knew
who went to university so that was quite a big thing anyway and then I lived in a little small town in
the south of England and someone had been to Manchester and they had gone to Hacienda as it was
then, this was pre the Hacienda being the Hacienda, actually maybe they hadn’t, they’d been to a club
in Hulme and they had come back and the club was called the Kitchen, it was like a flat club and they
came back and we put this thing on at the Park Road Community Centre in Chichester called The
Kitchen and everyone was wearing Mackintosh coats and pretending to be in Manchester, so
Manchester at that point it was completely the place we wanted to be. So when I went to university I
just went to Manchester, I decided that’s where I wanted to go - I had been thinking about this, we
didn’t even have a prospectus, this is pre-internet, so there was no prospectus, I had no idea what or
where Manchester was and the first time I ever came to Manchester was the day that I was dropped
off to be at university, I had been once before from Liverpool actually, so it was quite a shock to come
here. But when I came I was like I completely fell in love with it and if you had grown up in the south
of England and the south coast which is very chocolate boxy and very Conservative, literally in terms
of politicians, I don’t think there was anything other than a Conservative MP and coming to a city
which was mostly Labour was amazing, mostly Catholic, which I had never really experienced before,
or maybe Manchester is less Catholic now that it was then but it was a new experience and industrial
kind of beautiful buildings.

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I remember the first time seeing those big buildings in the centre of town and just being in love really
thinking this was just great. And then when I started doing the research because I don’t know what
you find as students but there’s always a bit of a tension between being a student and people who live
locally in a city and how do you get to be part of the city and I guess maybe because none of my
friends had gone to university, when I came to university I was a bit disappointed with everybody else
that I met and quite quickly I moved out of university and moved into more of a neighbourhood and
met friends locally. But for me the research was really important as a way of being allowed to have
conversations with people, all sorts of different people, so being able to go all round Manchester and
into neighbourhoods I had never been to, never heard of, meeting young people, having conversations
and finding out how unlike me they were. They hadn’t come from my kind of background and didn’t
have my kind of beliefs so that was really exciting.

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What was disappointing about the people that you met who were studying?

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I’ll pass you this around; I think I was a bit of a rebel girl. This is one of my most precious objects,
this is something one of my best friends made for me when I was just finishing my A-levels. You’ve
got to remember in those days only about 9% of young people went to university so it was a much
smaller group. That’s one of the big social changes, between 5% and 9% over a short period of time
so it was just beginning to grow so most people didn’t go to university and the people who did go to
university were maybe those who were on their ways to being lawyers and very much more of the
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professional education and I think I was just being quite politically active, got really active over the
miners’ strike as a lot of young people did, and my friends were all punk rockers, we weren’t really
naughty at all we just looked really flamboyant I think that’s the thing! We looked terrifying and we
were actually really shy and you know we would just sit around drinking cider which of course causes
a lot of trouble but is not actually that bad.

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When I came to Manchester I was really surprised with the other people I met because I didn’t stay on
at school, I didn’t go to sixth form, I went to the local tech and I was very surprised [that the people] I
had met were the people that had stayed on in the sixth form. I also met nice people eventually. Is it
still difficult to meet people who are from Manchester of if you’re a student, is there still that tension?

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I think so.

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I know quite a few people from Manchester it’s not like the majority but there are quite a few.

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A lot of people I know are from Manchester.

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Do you get to meet people from like outside the uni like in the area?

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There are projects usually a lot of charity projects with the uni which then branch out into the
community and that’s quite fun.

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I’ve been volunteering at a school; we teach English to immigrant parents that can’t speak
English so that’s quite a nice way to meet the community.

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I suppose in my day we would just go out raving together, it was much less a philanthropic, “I’m a
student, I will go and do good and be with the community.” It was more like, “Where are the fun
people? Where are the good parties?” Also people in Manchester, students were a laughing stock in a
way but people also took pity on you and were friends with you. I lived in a house in Moss Side and
within I guess about a month we knew everybody in the street and we were laughed at a lot by our
neighbours and stuff like that but then we knew everybody and in fact I met my partner who is still
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my partner, 3 streets down who was the same age as me but unemployed and just one of the young
people in the area. The reason I asked you the question was my son is at university at the moment in
Bristol and I keep on saying to him, “When are you going to meet someone who is from Bristol?”
And he says, “It’s really hard to break out the bubble,” and the difference oddly I think between being
uni and not uni is … yeah, because there’s more university students so you get housed together, I
don’t know what it is but there’s something isn't there, something is going on?

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(Inaudible; over-talking 00:14:52) if you wanted to have a choice you had to search out but
there’s just so many of us.

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Exactly. And the young people in the neighbourhood and one of the things that came out of the study
is big differences in Manchester between neighbourhoods. So south Manchester and the area around
the university was always much more bohemian and liberal and mixed and mixing, whereas areas out
in different parts of Manchester could be much more Conservative but also wouldn’t necessarily go to
south Manchester, I don’t know if that’s still the case, I wouldn’t be surprised, it probably is, so if you
grew up somewhere like Droylsden that you wouldn’t necessarily come to Didsbury or Chorlton they
would be seen to be sort of places outside of your orbit.

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In the research there’s lots of really interesting stuff with young women talking about the differences
between different neighbourhoods in Manchester and how the area around the students is where some
of the interesting mixing would go on but a lot of young people wouldn’t go into that. They would see
it as too weird, at the time it was seen as weird.

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And how did you get into the [the WRAP project]?

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I was just offered a job; I think probably very non-equal opportunities, I think I did have to have an
interview after they decided I would do it then I had to go down to London and meet the rest of the
team and then they said, “I think we should interview you.” So Sue Scott was my dissertation
supervisor and she was one of the ones who got the money from the Research Council for the study
and she just asked me if I wanted to do it so I thought that would be great; but now you would have to
advertise the job I think.

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Oh, so you just got it through people you know?

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Networks yeah. To be honest we still do when we do research. So with someone like Ester who
started research from being a student we still do roughly the same thing that we find someone we
know that they’re really interested in something and they’re really good and we might then invite
them to apply for a job but now we would do it properly and advertise the job and let other people
apply for it as well so things move on.

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How did you find people [to] interview?

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It’s quite hard to honestly remember. One of the things I did when I was starting this project was I put
together this kind of log of all the interviews in order, like chronological order. [And then I tried to]
use the date, saying okay so I did this one and try to remember and tried to remember where I had
interviewed them. Because we treated the material anonymously then we didn’t have that much on
record about where we had found people but we have kind of been able to piece some of it back
together, so one way was through youth clubs, so we did work in Moston youth club, in Ardwick
youth club, Middleton youth club so different youth clubs around the city and actually what’s good is

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we can still connect to those people so going back we’ve met some of the old youth workers who we
worked with originally.

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We also sent a letter and questionnaires out through the Education Department of Manchester City
Council so they sent it to everyone; we went through unions. Interestingly, British Telecom was one
of the organisations, so if you think only 9% of young people went to university then that’s because
most of them were at work and there were jobs, so most people your age [would have been] working
and often in quite good jobs. So a lot of the young people in this study are in fulltime work and
earning enough to get their own place and move away from home things that now just seem to be
completely impossible.

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What was the age range?

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16-21.

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When you were selecting people or I suppose a lot of people responded you picked out a few I
guess, is that what happened?

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Yes, we had a questionnaire. Often, we do in a study, we’ll have a questionnaire and ask lots of
questions and then in the last page say, “Would you be interested in taking part in more of the
research?” So we selected people from that.

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And did you specifically seek out diversity and background and class and sexual orientation?

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Yes. It’s interesting about sexual orientation because I don’t think we really sought out diversity and
sexual orientation partly because it was supposed to be a study of heterosexuality but actually there
was diversity in sexual orientation anyway within the project just because people’s experience is
diverse even though you’re sort of accessing them in that way. I think in the 80s it would have been
almost impossible. It would not have been impossible to find lesbian and gay young people but
nothing was badged as ‘heterosexual young people’ if you see what I mean, so it’s a different kind of
politics to now. So there was some diversity in that respect. I would say there was probably a lot less
ethnic diversity in the city 30 years ago than there is now. Part of this study happened in London
where there was much more ethnic diversity in the sample, but in Manchester there was ethnic
diversity. There were young people who were non-white but it was predominantly white young
people. But I think then religion was as important, so whether people were Catholic or Protestant 30
years ago was kind of like ethnicity, if you see what I mean, it was an ethnic marker to be Catholic
and from an Irish heritage in a way that now might not be visible in the same kind of way, I think it
was more then.

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So then the ethnic diversity of Manchester has really changed and particularly some of the
neighbourhoods that we worked in. So we’ve been going back to some of the parts of Manchester that
we did research in previously which were very much white working-class and they are not anymore at
all. They’re really diverse in the areas where there has been a lot of immigration in recent years, so
going to the youth clubs and those neighbourhoods is a completely different experience than it was 30
years ago – it’s interesting.

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I wanted to ask you because when I read the interview a lot of the questions seemed really
personal. When you were interviewing people did they ever seem tense or defensive?

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It’s interesting; everything I’m saying you can disregard because quite frankly I can’t remember but I
can read my field notes that I wrote at the time and I can read the interviews and I can try and get
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there. I think I ended up having the conversation that I could have with that person and they would be
different with different young people. So some of them, for instance the one I’ve been reading on the
way up here with the young woman who was a drama student, it’s quite explicit in terms of what we
talk about around sex and there’s quite a lot of being very specific about different sexual practices
because one of the things about HIV and AIDS was suddenly it wasn’t just sleeping with someone, it
became the naming of the acts and the parts. But there were things that would be really difficult to
talk about so I’ve just been looking at some interviews that I did at a young mothers’ group in Blakely
which is in east Manchester and I clearly found it really hard to talk to these young women about sex
because some of them were married and for me I felt like I couldn’t have that conversation about
whether you’re at risk, they were only like 16-17 but married. It’s like what was difficult with
different people really depended on who they were and who I was.

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I think now listening to some of the questions they just seem so bold but I don’t think I would have
asked a question that felt wrong, I would have always probably pushed it because that was the nature
of trying to do research but I would not have really over-stepped a line because I’ve seen examples
where I can’t do it, where I really find it hard to ask a question so I guess it’s a kind of barometer
really between me and that person but what is it possible to talk about? Looking back at it, it can be
surprising.

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When you first approached the people you potentially wanted to interview were they quite
shocked, because I know the project was about umbrellas under HIV but it was a lot about sex;
how many people did you have to find before someone was like, “Yeah, shocking.”?

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Again, I find it hard to remember. Everyone got a leaflet which explained it would be about sex and
they would have filled in a questionnaire which asked quite detailed information about sexual
practice, so there’s lot of opportunity for people to say, “Oh no, this is not for me.” So usually by the
time had said yes at the end of that then they wanted to talk. And some of the interviews were really
long, like people wanted to talk a lot. I think about this period as being really interesting because it’s
almost like the end of something and the beginning of something new and at one level we have this
very explicit sexual culture now where things are just in the public realm and that wasn’t the case then
but most of these young people had parents for whom just to say anything sexual would be terrible
and they felt that they were a new generation who didn’t have the same feelings of shame or same
feelings of embarrassment as their parents so it was like something new was happening and it was
happening in music and things like ‘Desperately Seeking Susan’ and movies like that where you had
to watch it again, it is as bad as you thought. But there was something happening that was new, things
like Just 17 all those magazines were new. It was a new groovy thing to talk about sex but no-one
quite knew how to do it and you could get out of your depth quite quickly by starting to talk, but also
we didn’t know what each other did or what was normal because it hadn’t really been talked about.

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So there was a lot of calling girls ‘slags’ and older generations sort of having certain kinds of phrases;
we often hear in the interviews these sort of phrases which sound like they’re coming from somebody
else’s mouth, a grandmother or a mother’s phrase, there’s a really awful one something like, ‘A man
won’t look at the mantelpiece whilst he’s poking the fire.’ And you’re thinking what does that mean?
It’s like a horrible warning that might have been used to girls which doesn’t tell them anything about
what risks are but tells them about don’t trust men and it alludes to something without telling them, so
there will be quite a lot of those kind of phrases, and I think people are quite up for talking about sex
and finding out whether what they had said had synergies. The other thing I had to remember is I was
23 when I was doing these interviews and I was only 2 years older than the oldest ones, so it was quite
… I mean I wouldn’t necessarily have anything in common with many of them, I would have
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something different in common with everybody, it’s almost like a Venn diagram isn't it and what’s in
the Venn diagram is different.

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And with this young woman who was a drama student there was things we had in common and things
we didn’t have in common but it was quite possible to talk quite explicitly with her; with other young
people it was much more difficult to do that and you can see that in the interviews.

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With the women that were open about it did you sense they were almost grateful for the
opportunity?

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Yeah and also there was a lot of disclosure, what we now call disclosure. So in this interview there’s a
disclosure of rape which when I was reading it on the train coming up I was thinking I clearly am
avoiding her telling the story, it’s like odd. But there was quite a lot of not very nice stuff talked about
in these interviews, sexual abuse, a whole range of things which [for some] people often it would be
the first time they had spoken about it to anybody and it’s one of the reasons why the interviews were
so long because you talk for a long time when something like that is disclosed. There are also
interviews which were about 15 minutes, not many of them but ones where it was really tight and it’s
not really possible to talk; sometimes the field notes are the really interesting thing on those ones
because you have the interviewer explaining why it felt so difficult to talk.

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Do you remember (inaudible 00:31:18)?

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I think now if I was doing the study now and I was the grownup we would have probably put a lot
more in place to support the interviewer and done a lot more debriefing. I think we know much more
now about that so it was probably quite a heavy-duty thing to do at 23 - do all those interviews, and be
worried about people. I remember very clearly taking one young woman to the family planning clinic
at the end of the interview because I was so worried about her and then other young people meeting
them again and again after the interviews because they clearly continued to want to talk and things
like that.

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And you kept the conversation going-

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It was obvious it wasn’t finished and then people told me things after the interview that they hadn’t
told me on the tape, sometimes about abusive experiences and things like that. I think it was quite a
big responsibility as a young woman to do that.

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Did you get some support or not?

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We were a research collective and we met regularly and talked about things so I didn’t feel isolated
but now we would probably put supervision in place. I think we’re just more professional about that
side of things whereas this was very much more a time of consciousness-raising and that’s how
feminism did it really. You sat around and you told the truth and supported each other, but there
wasn’t a sense in which - we didn’t have words like ‘safeguarding’.

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Do you think there wasn’t as much emphasis on mental health?

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I think that’s really interesting because I think now we would see a study like this through the prism
of mental health and it absolutely wasn’t how we looked at it. So, we would now … I don’t know, tell
me what you think, I think we would think about triggers things like that, is it triggering? Could you
ask that because that might…? Whereas in a way this was the stuff that happened before that whole
way of looking at the world came about, this was much more political I think in a straightforward
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way, well nothing is straightforward is it? But it was much more about trying to say, “That’s not fair.”
Or, “Put that into words; what words does that…?” Because we didn’t really have any vocabulary to
talk about sex, people didn’t know what to call bits of their body, they didn’t know how to name
power, and I say ‘they’ I would speak of myself as well, you know, like we didn’t really have a
vocabulary to describe any of these things so it was the basic work.

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We’ve just been doing a piece of work down at Sussex where I work with some of the young men’s
interviews and the response from the young men who are listening in the way that you are listening to
these is very much: how could you be so intrusive? They have a much stronger sense of the fragility
of the young people than we had. What do you think, do you think that is a change or have people
changed?

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Just hearing how what you were just talking about the fact that there wasn’t that much support
for you; just the fact there wasn’t thought given into that which is people weren’t thinking
about it because it wasn’t something that was-

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I don’t think it wasn’t thought, people did think about that a lot or care but it just wasn’t seen as
psychological. I think we have a much more psychological framework now whereas I think it was
much more seen in a right space political framework.

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Where it’s ingrained in us to be like trigger warning, people feel uncomfortable (inaudible;
over-talking 00:36:02)-

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I think your interviews would have been super-different now, even though we’re more generally
open to talk about sex on a larger scale, like you said, you would have been given support, also
to see signs, like when to flag. I think actually when people know that you would have probably
as a professional had to be like this person is sexually abused, because you would have had to
go, “I can’t tell anyone about this but I will have to say if I see a warning sign,” it just makes
people more closed.

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I think also you’ve got to think about this, we know now that people are being sexually abused,
there’s no argument that it’s quite an ordinary experience. I’m not saying it’s not an important and
terrible experience but statistically it’s not that unusual, sexual violence. But at this time we hadn’t
established that as a fact about the world. It was feminist research which revealed the extent of
ordinary everyday kind of power in sexual relations and intimate relationships and our mantra was to
make the personal political, so the real project was to not just capture people’s voices but to bring
those voices in to public domain. This whole project then led into all this lobbying around sex
education, so my job when I finish doing this I went and worked in London for the Sex Education
Forum which was this new organisation and it was all about lobbying to give young people education
about sex but also about giving space to talk about inequalities and talk about power, talk about
consent and things like that.

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You can’t really imagine when there isn't certain kinds of possibilities or certain facts aren’t known
but there wasn’t a widespread understanding of sexual abuse before the 1980s. That’s when that big
‘speaking out’, ‘breaking the silence’, all those phrases, that’s when it happened.

325

Was there an understanding between friends and stuff? What were the conversations?

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Yeah, how did people talk? I think that’s really interesting. When I read the interviews I think that’s
what I’m trying to find out from people is: who do you talk to; what kind of conversations do you
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have? Because I think that’s what I didn’t know as a curious person and I think some people did have
little groups that they talked to but most people didn’t and many people, I mean one of the things we
discovered in the research was that most people learn about sex from their sexual partner, so most
women in the end, most heterosexual women were taught about sex by their sexual partner, which we
thought was a bit of a problem in the sense that it would be good to learn about sex from women but
most mothers didn’t … there were mothers who did and that was really seen to make a difference,
mothers who were open with their daughters about sex but generally young people didn’t get it from
school, often what they learn from their peers was a lot of nasty stuff about not to appear that you
know things and be fearful about being judged, rather than learning much about sex. It was generally
by doing it that people learnt about it, or pornography which wasn’t widespread, well it was as
important then I think as it is now but totally delivered in a different kind of way so people would just
see it in certain places.

340

Can I ask how it was distributed?

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We wrote one thing on learning about sex and one of the things we asked was: what were the sources
that people learnt from. So some of them were things like man and woman manuals, these awful
horrible things, dictionaries, lots of people talked about looking up words in dictionaries but also
people talked about - because these were the days of video - video in a sense was a new media and a
lot of the young men, because we did a study of young men afterwards, talked about watching pornos
with their dads or young people watching in groups and girls feeling really uncomfortable because a
porno had been put on, so lots of very difficult situations where girls felt like they had to leave
somewhere or felt threatened and then also magazines sort of found down the canal, that’s always a
nasty place to find nasty things. It’s almost like you’d find porno mags is dark little corners really or
you would have somebody whose brother had some and they brought then to school and then they
showed their friends, these are all little moments of like, “Eurgh.” And it would be boys looking at
women’s bodies going, “Eurgh.” Like horrible depictions of women’s bodies or girls looking at
horrible depictions of women’s bodies and going, “Eurgh.”

354

So it was mostly women’s bodies?

355

Yes.

356

Were there like cinemas?

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There were. Actually you know where the Corner House is that one that’s just slightly up, there’s the
Corner House and there’s a station behind it and is there a little kind of cinema with a round-?

359

It’s gone now.

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That was the dirty picture house and it still was a dirty picture house in the 80s. So you’ve got the
Corner House here on the corner and then here you’ve got like a train station-

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It’s on Oxford Road, it’s across from the Palace and the Principle, it’s like a media studies
building.

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So as part of this project I’ve been going to the archive in the library to look at City Life magazines
because that was the groovy magazine at the time, City Life, and that’s a fantastic thing to look at if
you’re interested in the history of Manchester looking at the small ads, so any like Wednesday night
there would be about 10 different feminist groups meeting in Manchester talking about different kinds
of things and ecological groups and whatever; it was a real hotbed of this kind of thing at this time,
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lots of people meeting up and doing consciousness raising, but also there were lots of controversy
about pornography; James Anderton was the Chief of Police at the time and he was a well-known
evangelical, part of the whole Thatcher thing and he would have the police go to record shops and
remove records that were seen as pornographic so there was quite a lot about censorship, censorship
was a really big issue, there would be public meetings about censorships, young people were really up
in arms about censorship and sex education and the censoring of sex education like what was porn and
what was education was a really big controversial popular issue amongst students and lefties.

376

How can a record be pornographic?

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I’ll send an image of the … it was a band called Flux of Pink Indians, very indie, I’m not sure what
was on the front of the record but they went into Eastern Block which was like the indie record shop
and confiscated them all and there was an outrage and people loved it because it was outrage! But
there was also lots about AIDS education as well and James Anderton was famous for being quoted in
the Manchester News as saying some terrible phrase like, ‘Gays would die in a sewer of their own
making’ or something; AIDS he saw as divine retribution.

383

Who was that, sorry?

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James Anderton, he was the Chief of Police and I think it’s why Manchester was the place where
Section 28 was opposed in the most kind of vociferous and activist ways because James Anderton had
made it such a big issue and people just were not having it. The anti-Section 28 March there were
200,000 people came together in the City.

388

Can you explain Section 28?

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This was during high Thatcherism, so Margaret Thatcher had a very kind of family values approach to
politics, even though at the same time she was a real radical and she was privatising everything and
she was a very contradictory figure in many ways but she used the idea of family values as a vehicle
for mobilising people, a bit like Brexit’s being used at the moment to mobilise people with Boris
Johnson. And one of the targets was local authorities, so Manchester local authority or Hackney local
authority which at the time local government had quite a lot of power, lots of people worked for local
government, there were really good jobs in local government and you could be the advisor for equal
opportunities or the advisor for refugee matters or whatever in a local government. So they targeted
the local governments by saying that local government, equal opportunities officers were promoting
homosexuality and they used the example of a book that was being available to primary schools
which was [Jenny Lives with ] Eric and Martin. Anyway, it’s not far off actually the thing that’s
happening at the moment with the no-outsiders campaign – I don’t know if people know about that
but it’s about teaching about LGBT equalities in primary schools and it was like a huge thing in The
Sun and the tabloid press, making a lot of publicity about something that probably only existed in
about 2 situations but became this very big public battle where there was an argument that children
were being forced to be gay and lots of ‘stuffing things down people’s throats’ is another phrase that
would get used.

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So there was a piece of legislation brought in on the Local Government Bill that prohibited a local
authority from promoting homosexuality as a ‘pretended family relationship’ that was the terminology
and I think this was seen as another bit of trying to make a much more conservative environment but
of course what happened was it backfired entirely and resulted in huge social movements to celebrate
and promote diversity and LGBTQ, feminists, alliances etc. so it had a totally opposite effect than it
was intended to have and Manchester was one of the really important places for that happening, so a
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very volatile time in terms of politics really; a strong right but also a very creative sort of response
from progressive sexual politics.

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Can I ask what was it that initially sparked the desire to reanimate this project and what started
it, why now?

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Well we done a bit of work, I suppose in some ways as a researcher one of my real interests is
thinking about and understanding social change and I’ve done a lot of work about young people and
social change so thinking about what it means to be a young person, a university student, how that’s
changed over the 40-50 year period, about motherhood and how motherhood has changed, what it
means and we were interested in doing a piece a of work thinking about what it means to be a sexual
subject or what does sexuality mean to people how that might have changed over time and how
technology might be involved in that and politics might be involved in that and a whole range of
things. Rather than just going out and interviewing people about what’s it like to be you now, what we
wanted to do was kind of use an archive as a way of engaging people to try and find out how do you
react to what you see there. It’s very difficult to talk about social change you can’t really talk about it;
we’ve tried different ways of doing it like interviewing different generations or following people over
time, but this is like a new way that we thought it might be really interesting for people to experience
and to be able to talk about what history feels like I guess; we talk about history in very dry terms but
how do we live history? Because we do live history in families and communities we do live it so what
does it feel like to live history? How do mothers warn daughters now, or do they warn daughters? And
how will you talk to your children? How does that happen?

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The idea by inviting people into the archive and this is partly inspired by some work that Ester did
with her PhD where she got young people to re-voice and then interview and then think about what is
it like to inhabit that persona that we could find a way of reanimating it like bringing it back to life but
giving it a proper life so that you can start thinking about what it means.

436

Was it you that decided that you wanted to do it again in a different way?

437

Yes, so I’m the one who got the money, I’m the one like Sue was back in the day.

438

How did you get the money this time?

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It was really hard; actually we nearly got the money 3 times, it’s a bit like a fairy tale, once from the
European Research Council, we got to the very end, we nearly got £2 million, we didn’t get it. We
nearly got it from the Arts & Humanities Research Council, we got to the very end of it and we didn’t
get it. And this time we got it from the Economic & Social Research Council for a much smaller
funding, almost like an experiment, a methodological experiment. So what they’re funding really is
the methodology rather than the topic but and so we’ve kind of framed the study as a series of
experiments so you guys are joining in really with one of our experiments, we’ve made sound
installation and we’re doing work with different youth clubs. It might be when this project has
finished that we might be able to go for more research to do something as a result of this.

448

Why drama?

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Well I think it’s that notion of stepping into somebody else’s shoes, because even when I’m going
back and looking at these interviews it’s not me, it’s a leap of imagination. So I guess that’s what we
would all be doing in entering these kind of materials really, what was it like to bring it back to life
and what does that phrase feel like now? All the different ways you could say that. It’s almost like
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understanding how rich this material actually is like it’s endlessly rich. We’ve just been doing some
work using some of the sound from the study and a lot of artists came to see it and they were like,
“What, you’ve got all this stuff?” It’s like, “Yeah, we’ve got all this stuff.” I don’t think people quite
understand how rich the material is and all the sorts of things you could do with it, so I suppose we’re
trying to encourage and think about who might be interested in this and encourage them to get into it,
because the archive at the end of the project will be available publicly.

459

Did the original interviews have to give consent for that?

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We had a quandary at the beginning of this study whether we should work with the original consent
which was to make the material public in an anonymised form or whether we should go back to the
original people and we took advice from people who are specialists in ethics around this and we kind
of worked out, (and we may not be right) that it was less defenceable to ask people to read an
interview that they had given 30 years ago and to consent to it, than it was to anonymise it and to
make it available. It maybe and it will be that there are some people who were original interviewees
who then find the material but we’re not asking people to go back to the material themselves, so
we’ve taken that other path, so it will be made available but in an anonymised form. But the original
consents were to make the material public and at that time it meant in books which is what we did, so
the world changes so there are new ways of making it public but things like re-voicing it is a way of
doing that ethically without, obviously we don’t have the audio for the young women’s material, we
were only just working with the young men’s material with the audio.

472

Do you have any questions?

473

Is the interview you’ve looked at, have you looked at several?

474

We had (inaudible; over-talking 00:57:19)-

475

There was only one that I thought was the woman who was a drama student.

476

Yeah, all 3 that we have I accidentally renamed it so we have it as MAG.

477

Yeah, MAG50 I think it is but we call her MAG.

478

We have Katrina and I can’t remember the other one.

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I suppose when I was looking at that I was really the one that’s about drama and the drama circles I
was really interested in whether you thought that was still, cos that really struck me as almost like a
‘me too’ interview, about this really pressurised environment around something that now probably
doesn’t exist anymore in drama circles and in drama clubs and training, or that she talks about this
forced intimacy or that young actresses have to do what’s necessary to get a part or be available and
so I was interested in whether you feel that the world has changed those of you who are involved in
sort of theatre, or is it still like that, or is that familiar?

486

I don’t think it’s maybe as prominent but I don’t think it’s gone away at all.

487

Explain?

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I think like definitely in the professional world women are still confronted with that pressure
but even in youth groups I remember always as a kid being like, “I’m not going to audition for
the main part because I’m not the pretty petite little girl,” going for Wizard of Oz. I think there
is still this pressure of being that certain female stereotype.
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I don’t think it hasn’t left from society so it’s probably going to increase.

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It’s so prominent in mainstream like mainstream arts if you look at Hollywood it just
completely still-

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Well that was the thing about, ‘Me Too’ it’s not almost like Hollywood or the entertainment business
is worse than anywhere else, not it’s just as bad but it’s a real epicentre or it’s really strong there so
I’m interested in why that’s the case actually.

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I think because in drama the role of the director or the leader of a project has so much power
and often like for actresses/actors, like women acting like they’re playing roles, when you’re
acting you’re being vulnerable and a lot of times it’s like encounters are maybe a bit sexual or
they have these intimate romantic scenes, even in amateur dramatic societies I have experienced
men being so creepy towards me or like to other people just because there’s that power dynamic
and that maybe need for validation that you have when you’re acting you’re insecure about
what you’re doing maybe, I don’t know, I think that’s a field where that kind of power dynamic
can like-

506

Do you mean like forced, like you were mentioning the physical exercises like fake intimacy?

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I’ve experienced that but that was in the US when I was younger and older directors being a bit
weird. But at uni I haven't experienced that but I think there’s definitely power dynamics,
maybe I’ve observed that but haven't been part of female/male sexual relationships and also the
creative work, I don’t know, maybe.

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Not to say that all men are creepy but the fact that there is such an imbalance in those power
roles in the industry just means we have less agency in those fields because it is so dominated by
men, I feel like they naturally assume figures of power in that space because it’s assumed that
they would be in that role in a lot of places.

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It’s like the Harvey Weinstein you just see it as it is part of the … the reason they want that power is
to be able to get that kind of-

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I also think the reason that it’s so bad in the film industry because there’s I think black-holing
people, like if you’re a lawyer, I’m not saying it wouldn’t be your reputation but directors can
call up other directors and be like, “Do not hire this actress she’s difficult to work with.” And
even if you’re not a creepy director, was it Peter Jackson that said he listened to Harvey
Weinstein when he came forward and was like, “Fair enough I did do that, I listened to him
when he was like don’t hire this girl I don’t like her,” he just did it and it was because she
refused to let him sexually assault her.

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I think it stems from that power thing because there’s no-one that will go against it, like you’ve
got actresses who need work and it’s that, do I work/do I not work? My friend got an agent and
he was just like, “Keep your sex appeal, because you’re blonde and pretty this is the role you’re
going to get.” No actress can go against it because they’re in this really weak position. And then
it’s all men at the top.

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If the roles that are being created are that type of, they’re not expanding the breadth of people
they’re looking for or the roles they’re being put them in or represent them as.

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It’s almost like all these other fields move on like the law or journalism or academia where you see
women in the senior positions but then the entertainment industry is kind of like it always was
weirdly; I don’t understand why it changes.

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I don’t know if other fields move on; in Italy where I come from the sexism is more overt and
my ex-boyfriend’s mother was complaining to him that she’s a doctor and she’s 50-60 and she
was complaining that none of the male doctors seem to take her seriously just because she was a
woman and being an older woman she was even disregarded as a centre of attention sort of
thing, just because she was surrounded by males she did not have a space to voice her opinion,
her medical professional opinions.

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I think also the women that do get to the top have to portray quite masculine associated
tendencies and also give up what usually other women get like they can’t devote their life to
their kids and it’s like the whole pregnancy (inaudible 01:06:02) which we associate more with
men and we shouldn’t.

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I went to the Sheffield Documentary Festival over the summer and there was a panel of
documentary makers and they were actually saying that there’s actually so many women
making documentary films and making work, so I don’t know that was quite positive.

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I think one thing that happens is that women go into particular kinds of areas, often areas where there
maybe isn't such extreme sexism or you’re not so exposed and they make it more female and it
becomes more attractive for other women. So the sort of thing I do in academia, where I work pretty
much everyone is a woman, so we’re all women professors but then you’ll just go over to the physics
department and there’s no women, so you get pockets of women. And I think what’s happened like
this last week where all these women MPs are resigning en-masse it seems like where it’s obviously
getting too hard and too exposing to be an MP as a woman, you’ve got to have a panic button in your
house; your children are going on the radio critiquing what it’s like to have a mother who is an MP,
you realise that maybe women will … still it’s just too hard in some areas and some areas get harder
and harder rather than easier and easier; see that’s really helpful for me because what you’re saying is
change is really uneven so things might seem better here but actually they might be much worse over
there.

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I think it’s a harder decision to make to put yourself in that position as a woman, like you said
using a politician as an example because whatever you do you’re making a statement, like if you
choose to adopt those masculine tendencies and statement if you don’t you’re so exposed, it’s a
more difficult environment to be in and I think that’s why less people make that bold choice to
do it and to get there in the first place is really hard.

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But then the politics gets more macho. One of the reasons they’re stepping out isn't it is because it’s
getting more macho so it’s how you respond to that. I suppose there are always the issues about you
feel that there is solidarity between women MPs actually you get a real sense of that and with all the
whole awful stuff around Jo Cox there was a real sense in which women gathered together to protect
each other but what is the cost? You saw what happened to Jo Cox, would any woman, sane woman
put herself in that situation and her family?

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I think it’s also difficult because no matter how far you can push if you want to adopt the
masculine stereotype stuff, you’ve still got within the life of family women are still
predominantly the carers, whether they make half the money too, like my mum and dad both
work but I was predominantly raised by my mum she had to come back and work almost like 4
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jobs. So it’s just really hard for a woman because although we’re progressing professionally
there’s still not that thing where men can also, it’s obviously getting better but I think generally-

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That to me is really interesting if we think about in this research 30 years ago the thing that was being
argued between men and women was sex in some ways or that’s at least what the research frames that
there is an argument between men and women about pleasure and about sex, like whose pleasure and
sexual agency. Would you say that that’s actually not where the action is now it’s somewhere else? It
feels to me in some ways that sex is less of a big deal now in odd ways; the evidence seems to be that
people are having less sex and it’s more mediatised sex.

582
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That’s probably a symptom that it’s more of a big deal because you put a lot more weight the
way I see it on that choice to have sex or to not have sex.

584

So it’s dealt with less casually? It becomes more important.

585

It’s not much of a big deal, people are like it’s not worth it.

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That woman predicts it doesn’t she in that interview, MAG, she talks about delay, “It’s too
complicated, I’m just going to put it off.” I was thinking I think a whole generation did that in a way.
She’s like really typical of something that happened en-masse where people just say, “It’s too
complicated.” And you feel that in a way that’s where people have got to now.

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I feel like we like to pretend it’s really casual and that might be part of the problem why 1) it’s
happening less and 2) people are actually suffering but because there’s this consciousness, I
don’t know if it’s global but large consciousness that it’s a really casual thing and we need to be
really open about it and we’re actually so liberal the problems are more hidden I think now.
Whereas it sounds like in the time that you were conducting the interviews people were really
open and just wanted to talk about it.

596

I think it was new to talk about.

597

Yeah but now it’s like, “Oh, we’ve been there.”

598
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There’s no shock factor that is no less important; I feel like because there’s not the shock factor
it’s getting brushed under the carpet, especially where girls loads of time don’t want orgasms-

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It’s too complicated, “Don’t worry about me it’s fine, it’s too complicated,” yeah. I think there’s the
thing about the psychological that it could easily be seen as someone’s own problem as well. If
someone for example, if someone was not having an example at this time I think it would be seen as
the sex was not good enough, whereas I feel maybe now everything is getting kind of made into a
syndrome isn't it, so it would be somebody’s syndrome that they had a particular anxiety condition or
they had a particular almost medical syndrome which meant they couldn’t have pleasure as opposed
to there’s something wrong, you’re not trying hard enough.

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You know like the psychological awareness or people thinking, I don’t know maybe you think a
lot more about how you’re feeling when you can articulate it better and then I think I have
experienced that people blaming it on themselves a bit more, it’s because, “It’s because I was
being this.”

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One thing we have been really picking up on or thinking about is because I think culture is much
diverse now and public spaces are much more diverse now that we know that we can’t make
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assumptions that there’s one set of values about sex in a way that I think you kind of feel in these
interviews that there is assumptions. I think now we would understand that there would be different
cultural/religious sensitivities involved that for some people sex outside marriage would just be not
okay and that is something to respect as opposed to just ride rough shod over it, which I think is what
happens in these interviews. That is not in the same way possible or desirable and that feels to me in
some ways that’s a real progress that’s happened that there’s more awareness, I don’t know exactly
what it is, but that awareness is a sign of sensitivity and it shows how un-sensitive maybe we were.

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I feel like that had to happen though to get here because they were so (inaudible; background
noise 01:14:45) one way and not talking that it needed to totally the other way like just putting
all these things out there so that we can from that learn and then refine it as we go along.

623
624

That’s why it’s good to have the archive because you can kind of get back into it and just because it’s
past doesn’t mean you can’t do something with it maybe.

625

Thank you.

18
Too much?
Rachel Thomson
Originally posted as a blog on 20th May 2020
http://reanimatingdata.co.uk/uncategorized/too-much/

The idea of working with a group of drama students came about when re-encountering the
original data set and finding and remembering an interview (MAG50) with a young woman
studying drama at Manchester University. MAG50 was eager to talk about her own
complicated emotional life as well as the ‘false and forced intimacy’ of the drama
scene. She shared stories of non-consensual sex as well as intense relationships with
powerful older men. She also articulated her understanding of the sexual politics of the
theatre industry where women may need to be sexually available in order to get work.
Reading this interview in a new historical moment framed by the #metoo movement
and the exposure of predatory men within the entertainment and creative industries
encouraged me to take this material to todays drama students at Manchester University. I
wanted to find out if they would be interested in the material and in collaborating in a
project of reanimation that would help us think about social change and continuity. We
began by making contact with Alison Jeffers in the drama dept at MU who put us in contact
with Elena and Lea – two third year students who had recently taken over the stewardship
of the Women’s Theatre Society – a student led theatre society for women.

The work began. We shared two further transcripts with the group – both interviews with
young women who were drama students at UM in 1989. After 6 weeks of workshopping
the material I was able to join them.
Before leaving for Manchester I gathered some memorabilia to take with me – objects from
my life at the time the research was done; an old diary, photographs and a copy of my
handwritten Masters dissertation on Women and AIDS, which lead to me being part of the
WRAP project. I also read MAG50 again on my way to Manchester as well as reading my
dissertation. Through these objects I tried to remember my 23 year old self. When I met the
young women that evening they jumped, as if they had seen a ghost. I understood that they
had got to know a version of me in the interviews and that meeting the 53 year old me was
strange for them. I tried to explain that it was strange for me too.

I shared my memorabilia and to began a Q&A session that lasted over an hour where we did
the work of weaving feminist webs between our shared relationship with this interview and
our shared co-presence, uncannily in the very building where the original research had
taken place. There were a number of moments in this conversation when connections were
made between the old me and the new me, between the young women and MAG50,
between 1988 and 2019 in that building. I felt like we were doing a collaborative analysis.
Making sense of the boldness of the sexual discourse.

A burning question for the group was how it was possible for the original conversation to
have taken place. It was so bold, intimate, open. At first I thought that they were telling me
that from their perspective the research was unethical, that the questions too direct,
transgressive. But over the discussion I began to understand that they were curious about
how such a discourse became possible. They wanted to know about the staging of the
interview and the lead up to the conversation (did they know what would be asked?) and
about whether I had supervision to prepare me for the ‘heaviness’ of the discussion. It
became evident that having a conversation like this now would be very difficult, constrained
by concerns about safeguarding, consent and triggering. But rather than chastising me for
bad practice I discovered that the young women were eager to re-enact this way of talking.
Rachel: I think that’s really interesting because I think now we would see a study like
this through the prism of mental health and it absolutely wasn’t how we looked at it.
So, we would now … I don’t know, tell me what you think, I think we would think
about triggers things like that, is it triggering? Could you ask that because that
might…? Whereas in a way this was the stuff that happened before that whole way
of looking at the world came about, this was much more political I think in a
straightforward way, well nothing is straightforward is it? But it was much more
about trying to say, “That’s not fair.” Or, “Put that into words; what words does
that…?”Because we didn’t really have any vocabulary to talk about sex, people didn’t
know what to call bits of their body, they didn’t know how to name power, and I say
‘they’ I would speak of myself as well, you know, like we didn’t really have a
vocabulary to describe any of these things so it was the basic work.
Together we worked out the relationships between now (2019) and a time (1989) where
speaking out about sex and about power was a project of making the personal political,
naming the unnamed and developing a new vocabulary. As threads connected the two
moments in time the young women articulated that this formed a necessary foundation for
a future culture that is saturated in the knowledge of sexual violence. Yet we also mused
that something had been lost in the reframing of sex from a political to a more psychological
register. We realised that there is a complicated new kind of silencing that reigns in the
young women’s worlds in which sex is both seen as casual and no big deal, as well as too
much trouble, too difficult and too important.
#metoo
At the end of the session I asked them about the #metoo movement and about the sexual
politics of the drama world and the entertainment industry. Again the young women told a
story of unevenness and contradiction. In many ways things are better for young women –
there are pockets of feminist practice and areas of the business dominated by women
(documentary film was given as an example). Yet elsewhere in the industry things are worse
then they have ever been, with market forces determining what it valued and valuable. An
actress still has to rely on her body and her youth. It is not sexism as such that is to blame,
but the laws of the industry and the preferences of the audience. We talked about women
withdrawing from exposed patriarchal spaces, deciding that it is just ‘too much’ and not
worth it. I began to understand what they were trying to tell me about contemporary
sexuality and to grasp how what came before is part of what is now in a way that escapes

the linear narratives of progress and decline that stand in the way of generational
connection.
Urgent mini interviews
The evening culminated in an urgent series of mini interviews, with young women choosing
fragments from one of the three interviews to revoice and discuss or simply asking me to
ask them questions like I had asked the WRAP young women. The interviews were double
documented – I recorded them as ‘data’ for our reanimating project and Elena recorded
them as useful material that the group might use for devising a performance.
I learned a lot from these conversations: that it was still hard to be a virgin; that it was hard
to find a ‘middle ground’; that the protection of men and families is vital for many people
still; that loving oneself can be harder than loving someone else. It was an overwhelming
and moving experience that I am in the midst still of understanding. These re-enactments
were the frenzied culmination of a long slow process of engagement which I would like to
think of as a single method spread out in time and space and certainly a kind of coproduction that we both documented and made our own.
Watching the performance several months later I could see how strands of our
conversations in the workshop had been worked with creatively and brought to life through
performance. Although the performance did contain extracts from the three interviews,
reperformed by the young women, the focus was on the 2019 young women’s stories. In
the discussion after the show the young women told us that engaging with the material
gave them permission and a desire to tell their own stories and to think that someone out
there might be interested in listening.