Isherwood in Cambridge: Research Seminar and Artists' Q&A

Celebrating the Centenary of Christopher Isherwood's time at Corpus Christi.

Join Dr Eleri Watson for a presentation on their current research into Isherwood's writing and queer life in the twentieth century. Talks take place at 6pm in the Library of the George Thomson Building

Dr. Eleri Watson (University of Oxford)

From ‘island existences’ to ‘queer revolution’: Christopher Isherwood's manifesto for a gay community

Abstract

In a 1954 letter to the poet Stephen Spender, Christopher Isherwood discusses fan mail from his gay readership: ‘it’s heart breaking, the sense you get of all these island existences, dotted about like stars and nebulae’. But in his novel of the same year, Isherwood also offers a means to combat the darkness through community and proximity:

But sometimes, when there was some particular work to be done, half a dozen of us would gather together, each with his own lantern, and the whole lot of us together, why, we’d give forth a powerful amount of light and the darkness would be driven back…

In his lifetime, Isherwood was recognised as an icon for America’s emerging gay community. By the 1970s, Gore Vidal quipped that Isherwood’s gay fans were ‘beginning to believe that Christopher Street’—the site of the Stonewall Riots—‘was named after [him]’.  Indeed, Isherwood sought in his writing to provide a ‘revolutionary’ manifesto for a unifying gay identity and community. Yet through examination of Isherwood’s Down There on a Visit, A Single Man and its pornographic precursor, ‘Afterwards’, I contend that Isherwood’s manifesto cannot be described as ‘queer’. Rather, his manifesto hinges upon the construction, circulation, and proliferation of the image of abject womanhood amidst his ‘tribe’ of gay writers as well as his gay readership.

Dr. Eleri Watson is a scholar of post-45 literature and culture, specialising in deconstructionist, feminist, queer and trans theory and Black thought. Since completing their DPhil in 2022, Eleri has worked as a lecturer and tutor in the Faculty of English and as well as coordinator of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies programme at the University of Oxford. This year, they were appointed the University’s first Fellow in Queer Studies. Eleri is the current Derrida Today scholar and is a Fellow of the Rothermere American Institute. They have previously served as The Huntington Library’s Christopher Isherwood Fellow, Visiting Fellow at the University of Southern California, and Teaching Fellow at The Ashmolean Museum. 

When they are not researching/teaching, Eleri enjoys going to flea markets, trying (and failing) to learn Portuguese, and spending time with their friends as well as their cat, Hieronypŵs Bosch. Eleri’s research has appeared in Modern & Contemporary France and Katherine Mansfield Studies, and will soon feature in The Edinburgh Companion to Queer Reading, Angelaki, and U.S. Studies Online. 

They are currently preparing two book projects: the first, ‘Between Men: Isherwood, his Tribe, and their Women’ traces the development and expression of Isherwood’s gay politic through the circulation of the image of abject womanhood, most notably via the ‘fag hag’, among his ‘tribe’ of fellow writers. The second, ‘The (Im)possibility of Loving Kinship’, questions the fraught relationship between Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous’ deconstructive ethics of ‘loving kinship’ and the ‘return to the subject’ in queer, trans, and Black literature, art, and thought.

This will be followed by a Q&A with illustrators David McShane and Anna Trench, whose visual responses to Isherwood's Cambridge writings are included in the exhibition in the Parker Library.