In each case study, I described how a representation of working-class womanhood was received and/or constructed in terms of the grotesque. In the case of Spence, it is the internalisation of class inferiority, the feeling described by Spence that one’s classed identity is aberrant, ugly and faulty, which figures the grotesque as a classed-subjectivity of exaggerated wrongness and out-of- place-ness. In Billingham’s photographs of Liz, the female grotesque is constructed from outside the context of the work and projected onto it by reviewers and critics whose attitudes are shaped by cultural distaste towards the signifiers of poverty, and a disgust of female flesh. In Morley’s case, the female grotesque is composed from the judgements of her interviewees, which form a portrait of a young woman seen as a sexually deviant female grotesque in her rejection of feminine bounds of behaviour.
Having made the argument that these representations aligned with my conception of a working- class female grotesque, I then proposed that they could simultaneously be seen as Anti-Pygmalion i.e. as defiantly positive images of a femininity that rejects aspirational gender presentation. The Anti-Pygmalion figure refuses the norms that make class-passing a condition of social or aesthetic
115 Catherine Hoffman, Free Lunch with The Stenchwench, performed 14th June 2016 at Toynbee
192 acceptability, and instead holds on to and emphasises supposedly faulty or “bad taste” aspects of working-class identity. Given this reframing, I was then in a position to analyse my embodied responses to these works, and see whether they evoked a sublime experience or not.
The question I wanted to answer was whether these supposedly ugly, shameful, transgressive, unfeminine, narcissistic representations of women could be received with pleasure, fondness and recognition. My aim was to demonstrate that these works are open to a wider range of intellectual and emotional responses than has so far been acknowledged or theorised. Middle-class critics missed the possibility of learning something positive from Billingham’s representations of Liz, because they were coming to these works with biases and stereotypes that prevented them from experiencing joyful or interesting embodied receptions. By exploring my alternative responses to these works, which draw on my own lived experience as a working-class woman, I was able to generate new knowledge and contest existing stagnant classist readings.
There is no single, universal type of sublime experience, all three case studies provoked different responses in me. Confronted with Spence’s class-shame series, especially the Middle-Class Values Make Me Sick image, I experienced a strong feeling of anxiety at Spence’s articulation of such a risky point of view: it is dangerous to articulate an unhappiness with middle-class values and hence middle-class people, because it risks offending the very people who might employ and commission you. Such a revolt is brave, and puts one in a precarious position. Yet alongside these feelings of sympathetic unease, I also felt uplifted, amused and excited by the image and its bold statement. In this mingling of pleasure and fear, I felt strongly the unanchored feeling of the sublime. I also considered the image to be a strong embodiment of an Anti-Pygmalion working-class aesthetic. In the case of the images of Liz captured and composed by Billingham, my response contained a much more visceral mixture of emotions and sensations. Reading through the extensive literature on Billingham’s early series Ray’s a Laugh, I found it quite overwhelming and upsetting how negative, harsh and blatantly cruel reviewers were in the way they described Billingham’s family, especially the level of vitriol directed at Liz. Their disgust at her body, her clothes, her supposedly self-evident “bad taste”, is hatefully expressed, as if they were angry at her. I found this part of the research process extremely difficult to take, as one review after another laid into Liz, criticising her, demonising her, making a monster of her.
I grew up with an overweight mother and aunties. As a child, I was aware that being fat carried stigma, but I also loved these women, especially my mother who remains an important and respected person in my life. My mother’s body was a site of comfort, of safety and warmth. Despite knowing that my mother had tried many times to lose weight, and wasn’t always
193 comfortable about her body, to me she was and is beautiful. I found it hard to read dozens and dozens of writers ripping Liz to pieces simply for being fat. Very few attempted to think about other ways of reading these images; all seemed oblivious to what was obvious to me, which was that this woman represented, however ambivalently for Billingham, a maternal figure of comfort and love.
I had previously made the connection in my writing between fat and class (2015) and it seemed that Liz represented to these writers the very worst crimes a woman could commit: being fat, being poor, taking up too much space and being shameless. When I look at Billingham’s images of Liz, in particular those in which she is feeding milk to a kitten, and the image in which is haloed by the china masks, I feel again overwhelmed. But this time, it isn’t a feeling of being suffocated by classist misogyny, but of being overwhelmed by how exposed Liz is: all the things she clearly loves are present, in overabundance. This is an image of a woman who possesses love and desire. Just because someone loves kitsch ornaments, feeding rescue animals, working on jigsaws, smoking endless fags and wearing loud floral dresses – all of which is read so harshly by reviewers – does this make her possession of love and interest less valid? I felt protective of Liz, and fond of her. I recognised her. Or at least, I recognised her love of decoration, her joy in making her space her own. I empathised with her nesting, her defence against poverty and deprivation with decorating, smoking, drinking and eating. How unjust to attack Liz for making the best of things.
For me, clearly, the images are emotionally resonant. In this situation, the bias this introduces into my reading is also a strength, as it allows me to give an original reading of the work, to offer a new perspective based on how people who are marginalised in academia and the art world can read the work and experience it positively. My analysis can speak to other working-class women. For example, I show that the way Billingham has composed the “halo” image of Liz speaks of love and value, but not idealisation. Her moustache is visible, as is her blotchy skin. We do not love our mothers for conforming to an ideal of perfect, beautiful motherhood, but because of the people they are to us. This is why these images of Liz should be important to all women, because they show truth, and reject standards that are impossible for many women to achieve. These images express that you are lovable as you are.
The explicitly visible markers of shameful poverty, the sight of a woman who has gained weight and “let herself go”, incite disgust and distaste in the reviewers of these images, who construct them as grotesque. But for me they are shocking, and brave, which is why they are also sublime. Like Spence’s self-portraits, they evoke exhilarating, perilous sensations at the exposure of that which we are taught to hide, causing unease but also pleasure and joy.
194 For my last case study, I found that my feeling of the sublime worked in a different way, and perhaps came from a different place. I felt sympathy with the way in which Morley put herself up for judgement, not defending herself but allowing others to create a portrait of her as grotesque: this made me want her to step in and give her side of things. But allowing this portrait to emerge revealed the way in which all women who breach the social contract of acceptable normative behaviours, sexualities, occupations, politics and identities risk being described and treated as excessively wrong - a wrongness that is found so unpalatable as to be grotesque.
Although I found the film to be exhilarating and nerve wracking, the embodied experience of the sublime doesn’t quite describe my reaction to the film. It does however resonate around what is being described by Debby’s accounts of her and Carol’s antics, which evoke sublime feelings of danger and risk, the excitement of willingly pushing their limits for fun and adventure, simply because they had nothing else to do. When I interviewed Morley, she talked about how at that time of year (Summer) it seemed that everyone was waiting to hear about their kids’ A-Level results, but at that age she wasn’t studying and perhaps this was why she sought out other avenues of experience (Morley: 25/8/2016). What this also suggests is that Debby and Carol felt they had nothing to lose. For young working-class women in the 1980s, their futures were not mapped out with artistic opportunities but with marriage, kids, low paid work, and of getting by. For Carol and Debby, the freedom of the streets, the nights, their bodies and risky sexual (mis)adventures was itself a form of sublime embodiment - not always pleasant, but a way in which they felt that they were living.
Although it works differently in all my case studies, the concept of the sublime has provided a useful way of theorising and taking into account an experience that isn’t easily articulated. The sublime speaks of strong sensations, of emotional and visceral experiences; it moves beyond moral judgements of good and bad, and often conservative and sexist notions of the beautiful and the ugly. The sublime in these works is always about dissent: about pushing back against negative stereotypes, rejecting shame and making visible your reality. It speaks to a desire for experience, a will to be in the world, to be an active agent despite being a girl, or middle-aged and scarred from cancer, or fat and tattooed in a brightly coloured frock.