For most homosexuals the 1930s through to the 1950s were characterized by the very real fear of exposure, blackmail and imprisonment. In both Britain and America the police were conducting a virtual witch-hunt of homosexuals (Weeks 1990; Marcus 1992; Loghery 1998; Berube 1990). In Britain this led to events like the Montague trials [Lord Montague and others were accused of indecent assault in 1953]. Gay men also had to contend with the threat of vigilante anti-gay violence and strove to remain invisible in public (Brighton Ourstory Project 1992: 37). (Cole in Welters and Lillethun, 2011. p.216).


In the light of society's and the law's attitudes toward gay men, they devised a variety of tactics that allowed them to move about more freely, to appropriate for themselves spaces that were not marked as gay, and to construct gay space in the midst of, yet invisible to, the dominant culture. 

(Cole in Welters and Lillethun, 2011. p.217).

The Christian owners of a hotel in Cornwall who banned a gay couple from staying have lost their final battle in the British courts to win legal support for their selective guest policy.

The supreme court unanimously dismissed an appeal by Peter and Hazelmary Bull that their right to express their religious beliefs had been breached.

The Bulls operate a policy at their hotel, stated on their online booking form, that double bedrooms are available only to "heterosexual married couples".

The case was originally brought by Martyn Hall and Steven Preddy, a gay couple, whose booking was refused in September 2008.

The supreme court judges said that although the Bulls' rights under the European convention on human rights to manifest their religion were at issue it was justifiable and proportionate to limit them in order to protect the rights of others.

Delivering judgment, the deputy president of the supreme court, Lady Hale, said: "Sexual orientation is a core component of a person's identity which requires fulfilment through relationships with others of the same orientation."

Homosexuals, she added, "were long denied the possibility of fulfilling themselves through relationships with others … This was an affront to their dignity as human beings which our law has now (some would say belatedly) recognised.

"Homosexuals can enjoy the same freedom and the same relationships as any others. But we should not under-estimate the continuing legacy of those centuries of discrimination, persecution even, which is still going on in many parts of the world." (Bowcott, 2013).

she says, she has noticed a rise in the number of straight girls coming on to her in the past year. "It seems like the wild thing to do because it's more talked about." She thinks it's partly about "women allowing one another to be sexual beings rather than seeing other women as a threat". In some ways, this is one of the unexpected boons to have come  out of feminism. (Theobold, 2013).

She had done well at school, and went to an arts college where she became a graphic designer, which seemed an agreeable way of spending her time until she married. (Lessing, 1989, p.11).

He wasn't learning anything, but then plenty of children did not: they put in time at school, that was all. (Lessing, 1989, p.128).


As everyone knows, all these schools have a layer, like a sediment, of the uneducable, the unassimilable, the hopeless, who move up the school from class to class, waiting for the happy moment when they can leave.(Lessing, 1989, p.145).

Is fashionable dress part of the oppression of women, or is it a form of adult play? (Wilson, E. in Welters, L. and Lillethun, 2011, p.324).


This unresolved tension marks a number of feminists debates, for example the debate about heterosexual love, the controversies over pornography and romantic fiction, and the debate about dress and feminist attitudes to personal adornment ... (Wilson, E. in Welters, L. and Lillethun, 2011, p.324).


... the thesis is that fashion is oppressive, the antithesis that we find it pleasurable ... (Wilson, E. in Welters, L. and Lillethun, 2011, p.324).

Although in Western literature the veil and veiling are often presented as a unified and static practice that has not changed for more than a thousand years, the veil has been varied and subject to changing fashion throughout past and present history. Moreover, like other articles of clothing, the veil may be worn for multiple reasons. it may be worn to beautify the wearer (Wikan 1982), much as Western women wear makeup; to demonstrate respect for conventional values (Hoodfar 1991; Abu-Lughod 1986); or to hide the wearer's identity (Fernea 1965). In recent times, the most frequent type of veiling in most cities is a long loosely fitted dress of any colour combination, worn with a scarf wrapped (in various fashions) on the head so as to cover all the hair. Nonetheless, the imaginary veil that comes to the minds of most westerners is an awkward black cloak that covers the whole body, including the face, and is designed to prevent women's mobility. Throughout history, however, apart from the elite, women's labour was necessary to the functioning of the household and the economy, and so they wore clothing that would not hamper their movement... (Hoodfar in Welters and Lillethun, 2011, pp.275-277).

Moreover, like other articles of clothing, the veil may be worn for multiple reasons. it may be worn to beautify the wearer (Wikan 1982), much as Western women wear makeup; to demonstrate respect for conventional values (Hoodfar 1991; Abu-Lughod 1986); or to hide the wearer's identity (Fernea 1965).

“None of these books agree with each other.” (Bradbury, 2008, p.52).

And I thought about books. And for the first time I realised that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper. (Bradbury, 2008, pp.68-69).

“Do you know that books smell like nutmeg or some spice from a foreign land? ” (Bradbury, 2008, p.106).

“Books can be beaten down with reason.” (Bradbury, 2008, pp.109-110).

'“What traitors books can be! You think they're backing you up, and they turn on you. Others can use them, too, and there you are, lost in the middle of the moor, in a great welter of nouns and verbs and adjectives.” (Bradbury, 2008, p.139).

Students who research fashion/dress for the first time may think that it has nothing to do with social sciences. However, fashion/dress needs to be studied social scientifically … in order to earn enough respect in academia because we come across abundant nonacademic information about fashion in our everyday life. (Kawamura, 2011, p.18).

The reason fashion magazines have been excited over the M&S coat is because various high-end designers all made pink coats this season. Now, this kind of serendipitous synchronicity among designers does nothing to disabuse me of my belief that what we call "trends" are actually "evil plots cooked up by designers who scheme together ahead of time to make similar colours and clothes to convince the public that in order to look up to date we need to buy their wares." (Hadley-Freeman, 2013).

A theory is a generalisation about a phenomenon, an explanation of how and why something happens. Therefore, theoretical perspectives are interrelated sets of assumptions, concepts, and propositions that constitute a view of the world. (Kawamura, 2011, p.20).

As explanations of the world, fairy stories tell us what science and philosophy cannot and need not. (Winterson, 2013).

There is no one fashion theory per se that is universally accepted, and since fashion/dress studies requires various perspectives, approaches, and interpretations, there are multiple fashion theories that rely on major social theories. (Kawamura, 2011, p.22).

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Last week I got asked to speak at an event called Slut Night, at a new venture called The Other Club in central London. Organised by some bright young feminists, Slut Night sold out surprisingly fast, as it offered various female writers and performers talking explicitly about the joys of sluttishness. The fanny jokes ran as freely as the wine; it was a right laugh. But when I first heard the name of the event, my immediate reaction was, ugh. That word. Slut. No.

My immediate reaction should probably have been more specifically – ugh, slut is a grubby little insult and I want no part of it. Ugh, slut is used to pass judgment on women's desires, their social life, the tightness of fabric around their bum, and I'm not interested in trying to reclaim that degree of damage because language reclamation is a pseudo-alchemy and no abusive thing ever turned into a good thing because you sucked the poison out of the sting yourself. Also, ugh, sluttishness – if sexual promiscuity is as emancipatory as I used to think it was, then how come it could only ever emancipate me in cahoots with tequila, kebabs and a really uncomfortable feeling when anyone used highly stressful words such as "commitment" or "love"?

But no, my immediate reaction was: ugh, no to sluts – I'd much rather be a slag. You know where you are with the word slag. You are, in my mind, in the closing scene of the greatest film ever made, Rita, Sue and Bob Too, written by the brilliant Andrea Dunbar and filmed in 1980s Bradford.

This is a spoiler, so look away now if you haven't yet seen the greatest film ever made. It closes with the two teenagers, Rita and Sue, lying in Bob's bed. His wife has left him because he's been sneaking off and shagging these schoolgirls in his car. The girls' home lives have fallen apart, too, so one after the other, they've moved in with him. Yes, this is all very creepy, and nobody's saying it's a film that depicts a utopian model of living to which we should all aspire. It's grim. Still, after everything has gone really, horribly wrong, there is a moment of sheer joy when Bob finds them both in his bed and dives right into it. They all beam with happiness. The film ends there – on that dive – a moment of joy that we know can't and won't last. The pure joy of being a slag – as the other characters in the film have already labelled them – Bob, of course, being the biggest slag of them all.

Why I like slag so much is not because I want to cast aspersions on people's sexual shenanigans, but because it has now become a great all-round handy insult. If you're not convinced, look how skilfully the actor Danny Dyer once deployed the term to discuss terrorism. "Can't believe it's been nearly 11 years since them slags smashed into the twin towers," he tweeted on 11 September 2012. "It still freaks my nut out to this day."

Still, I should admit here that my fondness for the word slag doesn't always end well for me. I still shudder with guilt when I think of the time I tweeted a friend and told her to bring another friend, "that slag", with her to my house. As a joke. It's a word we use between ourselves, fondly. Only, when I tagged the slag friend, I got her Twitter name slightly wrong and accidentally directed the message to a total stranger with a similar name – who turned out to be a 15-year-old girl in a coma. Whose Twitter account was being run by her loving dad to raise awareness of his daughter's condition. All he could see was that London journalists were insulting his sick child – it took quite a lot of explanation to dig my way out of that one and apologise. Possibly not helped by my friend tweeting him and saying: "No, you don't understand, it was definitely meant for me and not your daughter, because I really am a massive, massive slag."

I recently met a media studies lecturer who told me he uses #slaggate as an example for his students of how not to use Twitter. Oh God.

Still, slut feels like a very American word – even if British grandmothers did use it to describe a messy woman who left things on her bedroom floor, not a woman who left her knickers on other people's bedroom floors. Slut is now a word for online porn ads, popping up all over your screen saying that horny sluts with breasts like balloons and buttocks like boiled eggs would like to live-chat with you now.

Indeed, it turned out that the Slut Night I went to was not about praising the word at all. As the organiser Amelia Abraham explained: "The goal isn't to reclaim the word 'slut'; it's to completely undermine it."

Slutwalks, organised in cities across the world in defence of women dressing how they want without fear of assault, received criticism from some feminists who felt the word was wrong. I realise they were named after the exact words of a Canadian policeman, but still – I'd probably have gone if they were called slagwalks instead. Let's not put the word slag on the linguistic slagheap. (Heawood, 2013).

Students often report that they learn more from working on a project with other people than they do from individual assignments. (Hartley and Dawson, 2012, p.3-4).

Many problems faced by groups are a result of poor (or complete lack of) communication ...

Often groups run into difficulties because they have not organised sufficiently to have a grip on who is supposed to be doing what and by when. (Hartley and Dawson, 2012, p.10).

Belbin’s team roles


Implementer = gets things done and focuses on practical issues

• 
  
• Coordinator = orgnises the task and other group members
• 
  
• Shaper = inspires and leads the group
• 
  
• Plant = generates ideas and being creative
• 
  
• Resource investigator =  identifies useful resources
• 
  
• Monitor/evaluator =  evaluates ideas and proposals and identifies problems
• 
  
• Team worker = gets team members to cooperate
• 
  
• Completer/finisher = works to deadlines and gets jobs done
• 
  
• Specialist = provides specialist technical expertise (Hartley and Dawson, 2012, p.53-54).
• 
  

Toby took up macrame, hoping it would cure her of her daydreaming and fruitless desires, and increase her focus on the moment. (Atwood, 2010, p.229).

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