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Gail Lewis

A psychotherapist and long-standing member of Brixton Black Women’s Group and a cofounder of the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent, Gail Lewis has written extensively on feminism, intersectionality, the welfare state and gendered, racialised experience. She is a former faculty member of the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, and has taught at the Open University and Lancaster University. According to Lewis, her political subjectivity was formed in the intensities of Black feminist and anti-racist struggle and emerges from a socialist, anti-imperialist lens. Among her political and intellectual concerns, she notes, are the formation of and resistance to gendered and racialised social formation, including the lived experience of inequality within organisations, as well as bringing psychoanalytic and sociological understandings of subjectivity into creative dialogue in an effort to generate what she calls a ‘practice against the grain’.

Lewis has been a member of the editorial collectives of the European Journal of Women’s Studies and Feminist Review. She is the author of Expanding the Social Policy Imaginary (2000) and Citizenship: Personal Lives and Social Policy (2004), among other volumes, and has published articles in numerous journals, including Race & Class, Cultural Studies, Feminist Review and Feminist Theory.

BB/RZ Throughout much of your work, you explicitly draw on your own life experience as part of your theorisation of a problem. How do you articulate the relationship between one’s experiences in the world and one’s intellectual and political work? How do you describe this method as you’ve developed it in your work?

GL You see, I don’t really know the answer to that question. If I were to choose where to start this whole conversation, I would begin with something I said during analysis.

As I was explaining to my analyst, throughout my adult life, I’ve felt impelled to understand the world through lots of political and analytical frameworks – I’ve felt I really need to understand Marxism, imperialism and anti-imperialism, feminism, post-structuralism and all of these things, right across the board. But everything I’ve done to try and grasp this complexity, and every framework I’ve tried to think though – in the end, it’s all because I’ve been trying to understand my mum. So that’s why I don’t know how to begin. To say I’ve been trying to understand my mum means that I’ve been trying to understand what it means to be a gendered subject in a particular nation-state formation, through different times and in the context of transgressive cross-racial sex and yet to still inhabit whiteness at those moments when she felt intense despair, pressure, fear. What does that mean? How does one understand the structure of their household through lenses of racism, and watching, experiencing, an ebb and flow in which she moved nearer and farther away from whiteness when she’d also been, as mum was, positioned as a transgressive, bad girl?

In a way, that’s what I’ve been trying to understand: the dynamics of a working-class household of multiraciality, living in the mid-to-late twentieth century, and why my granddad – my white granddad – was committed to working-class politics, an absolute socialist, but racist as fuck, excuse me, when it came to his daughter and me. And how do you understand that? What did it mean? So, I suppose, I’ve slowly come to more understanding across a life course; that statement to my analyst came not too long ago, when I could reflect back on my life and what shaped it. But it wasn’t that I was aware of what I was trying to understand; it was generated by the possibilities and the pains of that kind of household formation.

It was possibilities, as well: the possibilities of what can happen when jazz is played, and how all that has a connection. I mean, what do I know about jazz as a musical form? Other than that it provided the soundscape of my childhood and adolescent life. But for me, that language seems to capture so much of what it felt like. On one level, carrying the exciting energy of change and possibility, bouncing out of and yet in excess of a given script, against the odds. On another level, capturing the sudden eruption of the unexpected – drawing you up short or propelling you on – that seemed to make the unarticulated, the disorienting somehow intelligible. Sort of announcing the expected/known right alongside or interwoven with the eruptive/unknown. And that’s how I think it felt; it was like what happens when you walk outside and you’re assaulted with racist abuse and the intimate connections just collapse. I think jazz is a sort of biography of a particular generation, in a particular space with languages of trade unionism, anti-imperialism and class politics around the household. And yet, one where all of the things that we were supposed to be opposing were being enacted. Not just in school, not just on the street, but at home in the living room, too.

Although sometimes, when I’ve written stuff like the ‘Birthing Racial Difference’ article,¹ people have said: ‘Oh, you work autoethnographically, don’t you?’ ‘You use an autoethnographic position as a kind of a case study of the now, in order to apprehend wider social and cultural patterns?’ I didn’t know what that was – autoethnography – but I did want to capture something about a life as constituted socioculturally. Again it links to this question of the household, of its generative side and as the motor of my intellectual journey … And I was concerned with the lies that were being told, in the early 2000s, about where Britain was in relation to itself as a racial and racist formation. They were saying: ‘Look, the fastest-growing demographic in the population are those called mixed, isn’t that good? We had a bit of a tricky moment in terms of being racist, or thinking that some people were racist. But we’re not a racist formation, and it will sort itself out – and we’re certainly not the United States of America.’ And it’s true: Britain is not the United States, but it is itself, with a long colonial, imperialist history and deep implication in enslavement and indenture!

And I thought, on one register, it was just lies, absolute lies; on the other, I thought, what are these disavowals? Where do these lies come from? And, let us tell the stories of how such households are not immune from the dynamics of racism; and how, in its articulation with class, they’re also totally imbricated in that racial formation – and might even be implicated in the reproduction of racism at the level of the everyday, you know, just the ordinary, ‘going about life’ kind of way. And it wasn’t as if I was going to get Economic and Social Research Council, or other research grant money, to interview people to tell me about that kind of dynamic; I didn’t believe I would get money to do that kind of research. But, I thought, I can tell my story.

So in a sense, I decided to use myself as an example, a case study. But don’t forget, I was very much schooled by Ambalavaner Sivanandan in a politics of linking the individual to the collective – that brilliant phrase of his: ‘making an individual/local case into an issue, turning issues into causes and causes into movements and building in the process a new political culture’.² But another part of me is saying: this is also lived experience; you don’t just need to present this sociologically, but also psychologically – through one frame you could call affect, or through another we could call emotions and interiority, and think about the way that stuff gets ‘in’ us and forms, in part, our subjectivity. So I was saying, let us hold on to the ways in which this is emotional life, too, and could tell us something about the social culture.

Hence ‘Birthing Racial Difference’ is written in that form; it is a kind of letter from the position of a child that says: ‘I don’t understand – this happened and that happened, and it felt like this, didn’t it?’ And everywhere you look, the story of the reproduction of race is there, including in the music that we love so much. The music both speaks about, shows us, what racism means, and shows us its constant reproduction; of course, in the Foucauldian sense, we can see the idea about discourse constituting that of which it speaks in action. The music speaks of us and we identify with it. The first version of that ‘Birthing Racial Difference’ article was for a small conference called ‘The Cultural Politics of Reproduction’, organised by Imogen Tyler, a sociologist at Lancaster University. I was trying to think about the cultural politics of reproduction, and domestic life in that sense.

So what is it called? It has to do with the constant, iterative co-constitution of the systemic, the structural, the psychically interior, the affective, the emotional, the experiential – trying to capture something of that. This increasingly felt to me to be a really important project because sociology was, in my opinion, increasingly denuding itself of living people. Where are the people it speaks about? By then, I was gesturing towards self-analysis, psychoanalysis, but I also needed to be able to grasp something about a lived demonstration of the sociostructural culture.

BB/RZ How were you able to identify, write and make connections between specific emotions and emotional states, and the sociocultural and the political-economic? How did you draw the connections between gender and race as social relations and forms of power, and these very strong emotional states?

GL I don’t think that’s what I thought I was doing, even if that’s what I deliver. In a way, I don’t really know what I thought I was doing. I wrote From Deepest Kilburn in the early eighties, not too long after my mum died, and I think of that now as my ‘love’ piece – ‘let’s make it all pretty, sort of happy, in the end’ kind of thing. But of course, it was in the face of an unbearable loss. My mum is this person who you think you know through the ‘Birthing’ piece and its narrative of her strengths, her pains, her bravery, and her retreats into whiteness. I adored my mum. But as I came to recall her more honestly, more fully, in what I guess we could call all her humanness, I came to understand that adoration is also a way of defending against the negative – hers and mine. And if I’m going to really be true to her, I need to be able to begin to dig around and see: Where does the negative develop? For me, to be angry about things she did that warrant anger and that I should be able to show my pain about is difficult. I mean I did seven years of the first analysis, and still, my analyst said at the end, ‘One day you will be able to be angry with me’ – in other words, one day I’ll be able to acknowledge my ambivalence. But for so long, I just couldn’t do it.

The analytic categories available to us (here I’m thinking about those generated by feminism) lacked the capacity to help us to understand that. We needed to try to think about what happens when we’re face-to-face, knowing that the battle is around the importance, the centrality of the legacies of imperialism for the making of our lives as women in Britain at that time. But actually, what it means is asking, who are we facing? We need to know that stuff; we need to have ways of understanding that colonialism transcends, even in neocolonial times, apparently, formal independence. It ricochets down through the generations, but also down into the interactions between one constituency and another. At the Birmingham National Women’s Liberation conference,³ there was a big fight in the plenary session around imperialism. (It was also around sexuality and all sorts of other things.) We said, ‘You cannot begin to move forward unless we can grasp Britain as a neoimperial power.’ Its links with Israel and Palestine, and Ireland at the time – those old modes of imperial/colonial power – were part of the ‘nowness’ of empire. Women stood up in that great big hall screaming at each other. This wasn’t just a battle between an ideological position that said to understand Britain now we need an anti-imperial lens, and another that said we need to form around gender; it wasn’t just those ideological positions confronting each other, but groups of actual women saying, ‘You are this, that, or the other’ – abusing each other, in one way or another. So who is facing who then? Who have we become?

It’s no longer Gail Chester and Gail Lewis on opposing sides of that ideological argument; it’s a phalanx of white women facing us, and from her perspective, probably a phalanx of Black women (and I am aware of the imagery of that language!). If we’re going to make an intervention to expose the limits of white feminism in whichever political frame – its limits, its incapacity to really grasp what it might mean to be a gendered subject in South Africa, a Black woman in Brixton, in Gaza, in Toronto – what might that mean, actually?

The feminist project did not and does not have the capacity to engage that; it needed something, and yet there we were: feminist subjects facing each other in battle. Everyone running away feeling wrecked. Everyone going home feeling like, ‘Well, I’m never going to go to a feminist conference again.’ With us being blamed for wrecking the conference, or the plenary at least. So in part, I want to understand how there can be such explosions, and I want to understand them psychically, affectively and emotionally, not only structurally, because I think politics needs an emotional understanding too. In that I’m totally influenced by my social, cultural and psychological biography, alongside theoretical approaches of people like Raymond Williams and his ‘structure of feeling’ concept; Wilfred Bion and his theory of thinking; Frantz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter, with the sociogenic principle; or Audre Lorde and notions about anger, the ‘master’s tools’ and silence. These are all part of an intellectual inheritance available to me.