Lewis Wood

What sparked your interest in this subject?

An explanation by way of autobiography. I was raised in Ramsbottom, a post-industrial village straddling the county borders of Greater Manchester and Lancashire, and came to consciousness around the beginning of the millennium. My mother was a cook at the nursery I attended who later retrained as a nurse; my father, a trained carpenter, worked primarily with my grandfather as a landscaper and gardener. Both my grandparents would tell stories of either their own time in the textile factories or their proximity to them through their own parents and grandparents. The factories, now dormant or gentrified into gin breweries and housing developments, contoured the geographic and psychic landscape in which I was raised.

I once heard Don Paterson speak about how class has become an embarrassing frontier for progressive identitarian politics: no one likes talking about it, and particularly not as anything other than an abstraction, and I suspect this is because so much public commentary and critical theory is imported from America where class is bound to a different set of concerns and implications. But class is nevertheless an operative determination for the precariat back home – a place where the claustrophobia and delimitations imposed by one’s origins manifest in a high prevalence of poor health, abuse, discrimination, suicide, drug dependency, and imprisonment, all of which are endemic to quotidian life and the routine subjects of Sunday-dinner speculation.

One might presume that this constellation of vulnerabilities and harm – this exacerbated precariousness – would lead to the gestation of a powerful political consciousness, but it instead presupposes an individualism from which arises a powerful and hateful suspicion of otherness. Racism, misogyny, and homo- and transphobia served as elucidatory principles and the bedrock of working-class white communitarianism. This archetype of rural conservatism is provocatively depicted through a gay lens in both Édouard Louis’ autofictional novel The End of Eddy, and its antecedent, Didier Eribon’s memoir, Returning to Rheims, both of which provide grating if resonant analogues to my own departure from home – grating because I work to avoid the scornful condescension with which both Louis and Eribon reflect upon their origins after successfully effecting, through literature, their own class transition, and which I disavow precisely because it glosses the dichotomies and exceptions within these communities. I cannot unpack all my generalizations here, but they are, of course, conditioned by my own singular subjectivity.

As a member of the last generation to come of age without the expansive imaginary potential of contemporary social media, recognizing my queerness – something which was clear to me and readable to those around me early on – within an environment in which otherness was condemned wholesale necessitated an examination of, and extrication from, the dominant ideologies which were presented with moral certitude. Perhaps here is the inception of my love of reading, an activity we know to be replete with encounters with alterity; it is certainly the site of my interest in relational ethics.

My occupation of a position outwith the dominant conception of normative subjecthood initiated a questioning of the other prejudices within which I was inculcated. Narcissistic as it may be, it was my own sense of alterity which brought other forms of otherness into relief and through which the quite egregious racism of my childhood and disavowal of animal life became questionable. We all inherit prejudice, consciously or otherwise; to live an ethical life is thus, for me, to strive continuously towards an identification, overcoming, and transformation of prejudice when it arises – an ongoing project of self-edification which is never complete and in which there is enormous joy and liberatory potential.

This potted autobiography is relatable to many; it is narrativized frequently in queer and working-class literature, but the coalescence of queerphobia, racism, and speciesism in my childhood emphasized very clearly to me Audre Lorde’s claim that ‘there is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.’ It was not until I went to the University of St Andrews on an access scholarship that I found theories which gave voice to my cognizance of vulnerability and my concern for how precariousness can generate coalition – or, antithetically, an anti-relational turn. While my literary research specifically uses the AIDS crisis to explore these questions, it is guided by an abiding original concern: how do we circumvent difference – or more specifically, the trenches of identity politics – to create coalitional alliances with a view towards harm reduction and social equality in broad terms.

One final reflection on home and its inspiration by way of illustration and memorialization. Grindr’s utility in networking and community formation is often overlooked in its mainstream cultural life but, in rural communities, the people who dare publicly to reveal their faces become well known to you. Steven Dyson was one of these profiles: not a friend or lover, but someone precisely my age, a fellow homosexual in a strange place to be queer, and someone I would acknowledge casually when visiting home. In 2017, when I was nearing the end of my undergraduate degree at St Andrews, Steven left a New Year’s Eve party on my home estate after being assaulted by a boy I went to primary school with. ‘Extremely scared’ and covered in blood, he left and supposedly headed home alongside our village’s river, the Irwell, from which his body – and his new shoes – were retrieved six days later. It remains unclear how Steven ‘ended up in the water,’ with the local Detective Inspector describing his route as ‘very precarious,’ but Steven’s mother casts doubt upon his trajectory because Steven was ‘very fashion conscious and had new jeans and shoes on;’ ‘he would never have taken that route when there were much cleaner ways to get home,’ she clarifies. I think about Steven stepping out of his mum’s house to celebrate the new year in his new shoes all the time; I think more about the overlapping systems of power, and the violence which erupts from them, which meant he only ever wore them once. Precarious terrain indeed.

What’s the most surprising thing your research has taught you about your subject?

I assume very little in advance, so one could say that I’m never really surprised (because I try to adopt a continuously open disposition) or that I am constantly surprised (because everything is new and unexpected). To reinterpret the terms of the question, one of the things about doctoral study which I have found most surprising is the prevalence and unavoidability of theory. Undergraduate and master’s study at St Andrews was culturally oriented; doctoral research, certainly in literature, necessitates the discovery and adoption of a new theoretical critical register – and that’s an intimidating and difficult thing to achieve while one is also always expected to be getting on with writing. I just read Michelle de Krester’s superb autofictional novel, Theory & Practice, in which she recounts her transition from undergrad to postgrad study, and had one of those superb moments of blinding affinity:

‘After a day spent with Theory, I’d come away from the library feeling headachey and crushed. My undergraduate years had taken on the aspect of a wasteland. The foundations on which I‘d expected to build were mere rubble underfoot. […] I spent evenings lying on my bed, re-reading Woolf’s novels, all the while feeling guilty that I wasn’t reading Theory.’ (42).

The surprise here, however, is that theory can be a source of immense pleasure – even serving an essential function; Sara Ahmed writes about this enriching personal relationship at length in Living a Feminist Life in which she describes it as ‘a lifeline.’ Theory, for Ahmed,

‘can be a fragile rope, worn and tattered from the harshness of weather, but it is enough, just enough to bear your weight, to pull you out, to help you survive a shattering experience’ (12).

While theory is a challenge of doctoral work, it is also, then, one of its central rewards, and the doctoral process and SGSAH’s outstanding provision have given me the support necessary to pursue intellectual avenues as they arise – specifically, for me, in relation to the environmental humanities, queer theory, and psychoanalysis.

This year, I was fortunate to be selected as a Scotland-based EARTH Scholar on the British Council and SGSAH’s collaborative EARTH Scholarship Programme, an account of which I’ve written elsewhere. I also attend the renowned Sexuality Summer School hosted by the University of Manchester, a week long queer-theory focused intensive period of study led by Professor Jackie Stacey – an icon of feminist scholarship – and supported by Dr Monica Pearl – a foundational AIDS literature scholar – and as part of which we were given intimate opportunities for engagement with other scholars and activists of renown including Professor Tavia Nyong’o, Pratibha Parmar, and the incomparable HIV activist, Marc Thompson. 

Attending the inaugural session of the (Trans –) Sexualities + Psychoanalysis Summer School at the University of Amsterdam in an attempt to develop an emerging and salient theoretical interest was also transformative – intellectually, personally, professionally. Organised by three scholars of distinction – Professor Misha Kavka, Dr Diego Semerene, and Dr Marija Cetinić – and featuring two clinical psychoanalysts as mentors – Dr Patricia Gherovici and Dr Antonios Poulios – the intensive programme unpacked the overlaps between queer theory and psychoanalysis, highlighting areas for theoretical development, whilst serving also as a Freud-to-Lacan conversion camp. If someone had told me two years ago that I’d be passionately reading Lacan’s Seminars in Edinburgh’s parks and cafes throughout the summer I’d have rolled my eyes with disdain, but such are the surprises, affairs, and tribulations of doctoral life. ‘You either die a hero or you live long enough to become the villain.’

 

What’s the most surprising thing your research has taught you about yourself?

The truth of Freud’s edict: ‘the ego is not master in its own house.’ There is a conceit that doctoral research is a straightforward way to extend the carefree hedonism of one’s student years; this is a falsehood. I came back to academia after three-years of professional work as the Executive Officer to the Principal and Vice-Chancellor of the University of St Andrews, Professor Dame Sally Mapstone, and I planned my transition in the full confidence that my sophisticated professional skills, capacity for quick work turnaround, and refined self-discipline would make research a breeze. Not the case.

For me, reading and research are unfailingly pleasurable tasks, but academic writing is difficult and requires sustained periods of unbroken concentration and isolation. This seems obvious, but the conditions I need to write supersede the artificiality of the nine-to-five, five-day week, so the work necessitates a routine repression of life’s social aspects. There are mythic exceptions: I know some researchers who can supposedly work anywhere and poets who write entire collections in their Notes app. Power to them. As far as I’m concerned, writing as labour depends upon an iron-clad routine and meticulously controlled environment. I stave off self-diagnoses of obsessional neurosis by finding comfort in the travails and routines of my idols: Sontag wrote in bed with great difficulty on a combo of speed, black coffee, and cigarettes; Franzen insists on a lack of internet access; Levy has a writing shed; Angelou rented a hotel room; and Proust, patron saint of neurotics, had his famous cork-lined cell. If anyone reading this has a spare garden and lavishly bedecked writing hut, with or without cork lining, please interpret this as a cry for help.

If you were your own supervisor what advice would you give yourself?

‘Protection against stimuli is an almost more important function for the living organism than reception of stimuli’ (Freud [again], ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’).

Which researcher would you particularly like to spotlight?

Foremost amongst the queer behavioural traits I’ve internalized is a drive toward excess which frequently manifests as diva worship (perhaps better expressed by David Halperin as the gay tendency to possess ‘specific, non-standard attachment[s] to certain cultural objects and cultural forms,’ or more queerly by Shola von Reinhold in their sublime novel, Lote, as a predisposition to transfixion). My attachment to Susan Sontag, one of my long-term transfixions, hinges upon what I perceive to be a shared tendency for passionate accumulative absorption.

I’m still working through the effects of the (Trans –) Sexualities + Psychoanalysis Summer School and the field of research it has opened up. Each of the five programme leaders has a fascinating body of work, but in the interest of not playing favourites I’ll pick Eva Hayward, a scholar to whom I was introduced by the programme but who had no formal role in it. Based currently at the University of Arizona, Hayward’s work combines environmental and science studies, sexuality and transgender studies, psychoanalysis, and aesthetics with an attentivity to language and grammar which I find genuinely thrilling. The influence of their doctoral adviser, Donna Haraway, is clear in the concern for relationality which Hayward specifically invokes, often in relation to AIDS, but with an interrogative bite towards the notion of ontology which is currently serving a healthy, if destabilising, riposte to the theoretical foundations of my own research. More than anything, Hayward’s work is erudite and pleasurable: their longer articles reward attention, but anyone interested in sampling them first can read one of their provocative short pieces, ‘Don’t Exist’ (2017) or ‘Transecology?’ (2024), both published in Transgender Studies Quarterly.

No one inspires me more, however, than my friends, and I wish to close by spotlighting two: Dr Alberto Tondello, until recently a Marie-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Universities of Edinburgh and Bern, whose subtle, attentive, unpretentious scholarship on Joyce, Beckett, and Derrida – alongside his general affability and supportive orientation – make him a model academic. And the rising star of Dr Heather Milligan, formerly of Edinburgh and now a Vice-Chancellor Independent Research Fellow at Loughborough. Heather’s concerns, both literary and social, are indexed in both the titles of and rigorous analyses within her first two publications – ‘The Queer Time of Ecogothic’ and ‘How to Blow Up a Novel: Pipeline Insurgency and Narrative Form in Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria’ – while their latest piece, ‘Against Entanglement,’ convincingly serves a much need critique of an over-mainstreamed concept while delivering the compelling injunction to rethink ‘distance and alterity as forms of ethical relation.’ The power of Heather’s argument notwithstanding, I am grateful every day to be intellectually and socially entangled with such fine scholars and recommend both to readers seeking quality literary criticism.

[Interview and Feature by Isabella Shields]