Pride Not Prejudice - Welcome Initiative

Staff and students across the College were invited to vote for their favourite books from a long-list of books exploring equality, diversity, and inclusivity themes. You can find this long-list here. We encouraged all first year UG and PGT students to read one of five books before our launch event on Friday 27^th September 2019.

Click on each book to find out what each panel member spoke about and what some of our attendees thoughts.

Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race

Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit

Attendees' Thoughts

It was interesting to see/read how the church reacted to her sexuality and how they kept trying to change her and eventually gave up when they realised they couldn't. As someone who doesn't have a religion it was interesting to read someone's experiences with it.

The Bible was simply just another piece of literature to the protagonist. She found a home in literature, [...] just like many of us did when we were ostracised by our communities in real life. I like that it showed her journey to self-realisation and acceptance without having a typical "happily ever after" ending. It's comforting to read.

Charlotte Ross' Notes on the Book:

Oranges: Narrates her rather unique childhood in Accrington, Lancashire. Adopted, brought up in Elim Pentecostal Church, destined to be a missionary. Began preaching aged 6. But while she excels at drawing in the crowds at church, she soon becomes a pariah as in her teens she has relationships with girls and women, which leads to a moralistic, repressive response from her mother and the church, including an exorcism.

There is plenty of drama. However one of the novel’s particular strengths is its understated, ironic tone, its dry humour, the lightness with which it tackles some extremely difficult and emotive issues.

It is autobiographical, but not an autobiography; it is about Winterson’s life but is also about how the storytelling that surrounds us everyday, and how storytelling can allow us to escape the constraints of everyday life, and imagine living differently.

Winterson herself has described it as a web of stories that unfold like a spiral.

It is a deconstructed narrative that interweaves fragments of myths and fairytales, with a first person narrative that is peppered with philosophical reflection about how we engage with others, with history, with our place in society, with literature……

It has been described as a Künstlerroman: the coming of age of an artist

It is profound, but also very funny: e.g. characterisation of her adoptive mother, who rails against the world, the Heathen (Next Door), sex, the Devil and slugs. Bashes out hymns loudly on the piano to annoy her godless neighbours, who then bang back on the wall…

Variegated and multifaceted. Gamut of emotions from wry humour to raw sorrow.

On some level it can be defined as a lesbian novel; Winterson has tried to avoid this label arguing it is so much more than that.

Has been on GCSE and A level syllabuses.

Background context: Section 28 (1988-2003), brought in on the back of repeated campaigns by government and right-wing groups to ban books featuring homosexuality in schools.

Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

Robert Webb, How Not To Be A Boy

Attendees' Thoughts

Questions masculinity with a lot of humour. I loved it!

That it is very easy as a man to allow every emotion to appear as anger - and that society almost expects it and is okay with it.

The balance of humour and poignant commentary on masculine stereotypes brilliantly sets the scene for why it's dangerous for boys to suppress emotion.

Adrian Powney's thoughts:

Almost all of us will have encountered Robert Webb’s satire and sharp humour in television programmes such the Peep Show, the sketch show featuring him and his comedy partner David Mitchell (That Mitchell and Webb Look) alongside countless appearances as a panellist on gameshows such as Have I got News for You and Never Mind the Buzzcocks.

So…you might be forgiven for thinking that this autobiography is a humorous charting of his rise to fame. And it is. But it is also so much more than that. This tender, laugh-out-loud, thought provoking, revelatory – the adjectives and superlatives are endless – book ‘How not to be a Boy’, charts Webb’s journey from child-hood to the present day and in particular as he comes of age the realisation he has that boys can, and legitimately do, have feelings, but social constructs of gender mean that men who express ‘non matcho’ feelings are somehow inferior and ultimately seen as feminine. This is a significant problem in itself that by default shows women to somehow be the weaker gender. This leads him to question and deconstruct some of the social constructions and semantics of masculinity, femininity and gender, noting the phenomenal number of words, phrases and expressions that, to quote Webb ‘come pre-loaded with a steam tanker of gender manure from the last century’. What does it mean to ‘act like a man’ as opposed to being a ‘girly swot’ as heard in recent news headlines?

Moreover, Webb details the ‘rules’ (many unwritten) of how to fit in as a ‘proper boy’, which includes not crying, not discussing feelings, not being gay, hating girls, getting into fights, obsessing about sport and then later publically lusting after the same girls that you had to hate…. For Webb, a boy who experienced domestic violence in the home as a child – both toward him and also his mother – ‘being a boy’ was all the more difficult on account of his appearance and interests: he had sticky-out-ribs, loved poetry and hated sport – in football matches, he ‘welcomes the sight of the ball arching towards him in the same way that a quadriplegic nudist covered in jam welcome the sight of a hornet’.

What I also love about this book is the beautiful ways in which it explores the intersection between gender, sexuality and social class. Webb describes the mechanics of changing social class how, having been an ‘aesthete’ at home, you find it handy to release your inner yob at university and whilst he betrays a pansexual metropolitan cool, the narrative he gives is in many ways a very old-fashioned journey involving adjustment and navigation through grammar school and a change of accent as he moves closer to his place at Robinson College, Cambridge.

Webb’s childhood and adolescent experiences were marked by a mother who nurtured him and his talents (irrespective of them not conforming to gender stereotypes) and by a violet stepfather and an emotionally dysfunctional step-father all described in equal mixtures of pathos and humour and interspersed with such important observations to men such as ‘feminists aren’t out to get us…they’re just out to get the patriarchy. They don’t hate men, they hate THE man’. And it’s the creation of the man and the suppression of all the different emotions into just one – anger – that Webb clearly demonstrates in the emotional dysfunction of his abusive father and ‘clueless’ stepfather. This critique of toxic masculinity in How Not To Be a Boy highlights the way the “[The patriarchy] is dangerous for girls. And if I’ve tried to say anything in this book, I’ve tried to say it’s dangerous for boys too. Feminism is not about men versus women; it’s about men and women versus [the patriarchy].”