This chapter attempts to account for the critical aesthetico-political shift that occurred in Jean Genet's theatre from The Balcony onwards. The Balcony explores the difficulty of revolutionary action in a capitalist economy manipulated by a spectacular notion of community. Special attention is given to a painful existential event that Genet recounts undergoing in the early 1950s, and which he was later to describe in several important essays on Rembrandt and Giacometti as 'la blessure', or wound. The chapter argues that Genet's late theatre, unlike his novels and early dramas which practise a largely individualistic politics of resistance, look to build what the queer and gender theorist Judith Butler has called different 'coalitional alliances' between oppressed subjects. Genet's early experiments in theatre, cinema and dance share many of the same political and aesthetic concerns as his queer novels.

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book considers the transformation of Catholicism and the Catholic Church in the nineteenth century. It reveals that before the late nineteenth century, widespread diversity characterised European Catholicism. The collision of old and new Catholics forced a reappraisal of the state of the church which intensified as the number of Irish in Scotland increased. The book highlights the progressive lay element that emerged in the 1830s and 1840s and worked to inject money, time and energy into the church. It argues that the communities of teaching sisters were actively renegotiating the boundaries of education by committing themselves to the development of elementary and female education. The book also considers the rise in devotional activity and associational or organisational culture between 1870 and 1900.

The Introduction begins with a quote about the nature of decipherment by Alice E. Kober, a brilliant American Classicist whose work was instrumental in the decipherment of Linear B. This is followed by a section discussing proper and improper methods of deciphering undeciphered scripts, including the combinatorial or contextual method (a proper method), and the etymological method (an improper method). As an illustration of a sound and proper method of addressing the decipherment of the undeciphered Aegean scripts, Yves Duhoux’s eleven-step methodology for deciphering Linear A is discussed in detail, with reference to the ways in which the subsequent chapters follow that methodology with regard to each of the undeciphered Aegean scripts. The Introduction ends with a warning to the reader not to take the hypotheses in the book as more than hypotheses, followed by a brief presentation of the chronology used in the book.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book traces a range of gender and sexual identity models current in Britain in the post-war period, and explores the opportunities offered by specific discourses and spaces for individual women to perform distinct gendered and sexual identities. It explores attitudes toward the development of sexual identities and childhood sexuality in the post-war period, through an examination of educational and medico-scientific notions of lesbianism. The book traces the opportunities for articulating a lesbian identity in adulthood. It suggests that, in the 1950s and 60s, a specifically lesbian subculture began to emerge in the residential districts of West London. The lesbians had mixed with male homosexuals, prostitutes and other marginal figures in the growing bar and nightclub scene from the 1920s onward.

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book proposes a lens through which we can view and understand certain instances of contemporary performance which are addressing trauma. The idea that performance might help us to identify where we are as a society is precisely the challenge that Raymond Williams asks us to tackle in identifying a contemporary structure of feeling in the contemporary moment rather than retrospectively. In Modern Tragedy Williams' proposition is that tragic action, in its deepest sense, is not the confirmation of disorder, but its experience, its comprehension and its resolution. While the trauma-tragic mode is undoubtedly symptomatic of the dominant structure of feeling, the book offers an emergent tool with which to approach the task of addressing trauma in or via performance in the early twenty-first century.

The deaf community could not have come into existence without places where socially isolated deaf people could gather and develop relationships based on common experiences and characteristics. Deaf clubs provided the hub of deaf community life and emerged from a number of local voluntary organisations set up to assist deaf people in their daily lives. In this chapter, the development of the deaf welfare organisations during the nineteenth century is outlined and set within the wider context of welfare provision during the Victorian era. An argument is made that the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act was a major influence on the formation of deaf societies and independent welfare organisations. Deaf clubs developed as the social arms of these welfare societies and went on to play an integral part in bonding deaf people together as a community. Without the deaf clubs, the deaf community would have had no geographical focus and deaf people would have had nowhere to come together to socialise and enjoy a range of leisure and sporting activities.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the professional roles, identities, activities and experiences of women police in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (UK) from a historical perspective, using a range of oral testimonies, documentary and visual sources. It argues that women police negotiated their own distinct occupational identity in relation to masculine police cultures, other professional groups, and the women and young people whom they encountered on a daily basis. The book examines the ways in which policewomen's identities and work roles at the interface of policing and welfare were constituted through the cultural and structural formation of a 'feminine' professionalism. It also examines women's operations within the technologies of physical surveillance, dealing with both uniform beat patrol and undercover observations.