Twisted Seams: A Gendered Social Haunting

Abstract

The starting point for this article is the bitterly fought UK Miners' Strike of 1984-1985 in which women played a significant role. The concept of 'social haunting', as developed by Avery Gordon and applied in the Manchester Metropolitan University Social Haunting project, is used to suggest that the strike activism involved a mobilisation and confrontation with the 'ghosts' of the mining past that involved complex and interwoven experiences of class and gender relations of power. The discussion focuses upon what is normally unspoken and unwritten about the impact of living with coal mining on the inter-generational subjectivities of women from mining families. I argue that the strike raised the ghosts of the injustices of mining history but that its defeat subverted the process that had begun of dealing particularly with the ghosts of gender inequality. The experience of the strike now constitutes a further dimension to the complexity of this haunting. Taking inspiration from Gordon's efforts to transcend disciplinary boundaries, I use a variety of sources and approaches, including sociological and historical research, memoir and the participatory learning achieved in a voluntary arts organisation in the ex-mining town of Seaham, to address this gendered haunting from my own, female perspective, and seek ways of raising, and transcending the ghosts through conscious art practice in a local setting