The 1980s were by all accounts a tumultuous phase in Anglo-American history. The decade saw a sharp rightward shift from the left-centre politics of the 1970s to the conservative governments of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, from stagnating state-supported industry to massive unemployment and civil unrest; it was a period of both glittering entrepreneurial optimism and grim desperation in the face of privatization and deregulation. Identity politics, too, underwent upheaval and transformation in the wake of the gay rights movement and, later, the AIDS crisis. The so-called ‘permissiveness’ of the 1970s gave way to strict governmental censure of homosexual and non-heteronormative relationships (represented most clearly in the United Kingdom by the passing of Clause 28). Feminism intersected with these issues in discourses of ‘gender performance’, a theory, most famously put forward by Judith Butler, that the apparently ‘natural’ phenomenon of binary, heteronormative gender is actually a lifelong performance, learned and carried out within a compulsory, heterosexual matrix. It is in this turbulent, rapidly changing context that we must view the new wave movement, and analyze it accordingly.

current mood: hungry