In the Conclusion, I draw together the ways in which, rather than being revolutionary, the women in fact maintained a pervasive concern with being respectable throughout the lifecourse. I discuss how this was informed by the intersections of age, class and race and interrogate how intimacy and romantic relationships produce and reproduce the intimate workings of heteronormativity.

It was becoming clear that Stiff Records were fatally holed below the waterline and taking on water at an alarming rate. Debtors could be held at arm’s-length no longer, rumours of bankruptcy abounded and some said Dave Robinson, who was working on a follow-up single to ‘The Wild Colonial Boy,’ had his bags already packed. The author relates how he grabbed the chance when Flicknife Records, started in 1980 and had The Velvet Underground’s Nico and the legendary Hawkwind on their roster, expressed interest. Spanning hard rock, progressive rock and psychedelic rock, Hawkwind were retrospectively considered an influential proto-punk band. Originally to be entitled Playing Cards with Dead Men, the project centred around the extent of human suffering that existed behind the statistics and news stories heard on TV and radio. ‘Playing Adult Games’ was another old song that dealt with how paramilitary gangs recruited from the young and vulnerable.

When Cohen started to write songs, the musical formation of which he was first a part was the folk scene. Cohen reports that socialist folk singers in Montreal first got him interested in songs. When he decided to pursue a career as a singer and songwriter, he went to New York, because it was the hub of North American folk music. He hung out and performed at such folk venues as the Bitter End, and his songs were first recorded by such folk singers as Judy Collins. Cohen’s earliest songs display the influence of this scene, as did his preferred style of performance, accompanying himself on an acoustic guitar. His unhappiness with the way some of the songs on his first album were produced seems to have stemmed from their not sounding like folk. And yet the lyrics of Cohen’s songs have little in common with those typical of a genre that claimed to reflect the people rather than the individual. This chapter considers how folk molded Cohen’s work, and where his work pushed the boundaries of the genre.

Fatema Abdoolcarim’s article develops an interdisciplinary methodology of multiple voices (historical, art historical, poetic, fictional, and personal) to speak to the specific practice of khatna within the wider discourse of female genital cutting. By looking closely at an Indian miniature painting of the past that depicts a group of women cutting themselves – cutting into that painting with the abstracted voice of lived experience – Abdoolcarim reassesses the nuanced complexities of the practice, of female community, of desire, of sexual and aesthetic pleasure. Cutting is hereby reimagined as a reparative gesture.

This chapter looks at local politics in 1980s Manchester. With its history of radicalism, from Peterloo and the free trade movement to the Suffragettes, the city had long been a Labour stronghold. But in the 1980s a struggle broke out between the old guard and young pretenders. The Thatcher government was squeezing council budgets, and militant young leftists wanted to fight back. Councillors Pat Karney and Graham Stringer led the charge, but their focus on radical political gestures did little to win over voters facing high unemployment, and they were widely labelled the ‘loony left’. The Conservative victory in the 1987 general election prompted them to change tack. They decided that the only way Manchester could finance a better future was to compete for central government funding competitions, European grants and private investment. This ushered in a new entrepreneurial period for the city leadership.

When the theme of post-modernity emerged a few decades ago within our political and philosophical horizon, it was associated with a variety of dimensions. In that sense, it was more the reflection of an epochal new perceptual field than a precise theoretical stand. Theoretical attempts at capturing its meaning did not, however, take long to come forth. The perspective concerning heterogeneity has important consequences for the way we approach the question of the discursive apprehension of collective identities. The simplification of social structure under capitalism would eliminate all heterogeneity, and the final act of history would be a simple showdown between the capitalist class and the proletariat. Privileging the constitutive nature of heterogeneity and presenting homogenizing logics as always operating within that primary heterogeneous terrain has led us to invert the traditional relations of priority between concept and name.

One might argue that Cohen expressed the world through sex – or vice versa. Some of his most memorable songs (“Marianne,” for example) use individual paramours as prisms that refract larger experience. His lyrics, while not explicit in the sense that some rock or rap songs are, often evoke the power and pleasure of sex. Both of his novels are more about sex than anything else, and his drawings feature female nudes. Cohen has asserted that he finds no tension between sex and spirituality, and songs like “Hallelujah” insist upon their deep imbrication with each other. He has been called, and called himself, a “ladies’ man,” but he also dismisses the assertion that he has been especially successful with women. In the era of #MeToo, one might think that Cohen would have come in for more condemnation, but his genuine interest in women and a lack of guilt about sex perhaps combined to forestall this. This chapter explores the uses and the meaning of sex and sexuality in Cohen’s work.

Situated in a working-class, enclaved British Asian neighbourhood in a fictional English town named Dasht-e-Tanhaii, Nadeem Aslam's 2004 novel Maps for Lost Lovers revolves around the 'honour killing' of a pair of lovers, exploring both the events that led to the crime and its repercussions for the families involved. With its focus on an immigrant Muslim family and written using some of the conventions of the social realist novel, it bears comparison with Brick Lane. Aslam's portrayal of a segregated Muslim community riven by honour crime is precariously poised on a faultline of twenty-first-century British multiculturalism. This chapter considers the novel's negotiation of the relationship between creative freedom and the sacred before exploring the extent to which it can be read as a critical artistic intervention in discourses surrounding honour crime and, more broadly, British Muslims and multiculturalism.