‘A very unusual self’: Queering the Home in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and A Taste of Honey

Abstract

This article re-examines the symbolic and aesthetic uses of the home in the British New Wave. Key works of scholarship on the cycle have tended to position the home as a site of stable return for the young protagonists, and as a privileged expression of the reproductive heterosexual maturities that the films are seen ultimately to endorse. This article argues that, far from such reliable bastions of normativity, these domestic spaces are depicted often as visually strange and ideologically unstable. There is, consequently, a distinctly domestic emergence of queer forms and figures to be found in the British New Wave, exceeding the critical attention to the queer in these films, which has hereto focused almost exclusively on the cycle’s lone denoted homosexual character. The article focuses first on Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, in which I argue that signs of gender subversion, homosexuality and transness make the home a primary site of ideological tension for the aspiring patriarch. I then discuss the queer home-making of A Taste of Honey, in which imitation and subversion of ‘traditional’ domesticities present opportunities for resistance, critique and creativity. Ultimately, I argue that the queer lingers within these films as query, occasioning an un-making of the ‘normative’ family and an imaginative re-making of kinship that can be appropriated to a project of queer hope.