Inside Julian Maclaren-Ross's Closet

Clothing as Communication in Wartime Britain

Datos Bibliográficos

ID12914554
AutoresCharlotte Charteris (0009-0006-0512-1575, University of Cambridge, autor de correspondencia)
Año2014
Volumen7
Número4
Páginas320-335
Fecha de publicación2014-10-11
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaJournal of War and Culture Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1752-6272 • E-ISSN: 1752-6280
EditorialRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1179/1752627214z.00000000053
OpenAlexW2048613788
IdiomaEN
Referencias citadas16

Nicholas Royle suggested in a 2004 review that literary outsider ‘Julian Maclaren-Ross (1912–64) has for too long been one of those writers more talked about than read’. Little seems to have changed in the intervening decade, the passing of the author's centenary having been marked by several small events that contributed to what Royle termed the ‘expanding mythology’ around Maclaren-Ross, but seemingly inspiring little critical interest in his writings. This article seeks to redress the balance, utilizing the wealth of biographical material produced on Maclaren-Ross since his death in 1964, in a detailed reading of his wartime prose. Taking as its starting point the dichotomy between Maclaren-Ross's dandified appearance and his aggressive heterosexuality, it resituates Maclaren-Ross—and, more importantly, his Second-World-War writings—within an emerging Queer Studies predicated upon the understanding that, whilst many homosexuals are, in their everyday behaviour, not queer people at all, ‘many heterosexuals are extremely queer’. In his peculiar attentiveness to clothing on as off the page, this article contends, Maclaren-Ross demonstrates an understanding, advanced for its time, of the performative power of dress, its ability to queer a society's response to a given wearer, or group of wearers, and in so doing to betray the prejudices of that society, prejudices exacerbated by the exigencies of war

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Closet · Clothing · Literature · Performative utterance · Queer · Redress · Sociology · European history and politics · Gender Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History