Borderless Young Men? – The ‘Other’ and English Working-Class Masculinity as Represented in Post-Millennial Literature.

Building upon Stuart Hall’s work on national cultures as imagined communities, and the effect of globalization on national cultural identities in Modernity and its Futures this paper will use Raymond Williams’s theory of structures of feeling as a lens through which to read Mick Gordon’s play / performance installation Pressure Drop (2010) and Anthony Cartwright’s second novel Heartland (2009) and will examine how English working-class masculine identities are represented in an increasingly trans-national society. The paper will demonstrate how the blurring of perceived national identities, combined with the absence of traditional vocational identities, leads to a condition in which nationalism emerges as a central theme in the representation of English working-class masculine identities and consider the significance of such representations in a structure of feeling which has seen groups such as the BNP and EDL gain popularity and political ground, and in which the latest Metropolitan Police figures show a 4.3% rise in racist and religious hate crime and a 52.6% rise in crimes which are specifically Islamaphobic (http://www.met.police.uk/crimefigures/textonly_month.htm). Ultimately the paper explores the ambiguities of masculine working-class Englishness (or Britishness) in post-millennial society and how they are represented, and questions what it means to belong, as an English working-class male in the changing political, social, and physical landscape of late modernity.