Controversial Sexualities

Drunk with the Glitter examines the ways in which urban modernity reshapes 'cultural experience'. In particular, it explores the ways that categories of sexual identity and behaviour were reformulated in relation to the restructuring of urban space and the introduction of new cultures of consumption in a period of modernization.

How did the 'altered conditions' of postwar Britain help to inaugurate new patterns of sociability, cultural attachment and intimate encounter?

Each chapter focuses on an area of public controversy which directed attention to those forms of sexual instability identified as threatening to national cohesion, including:

• sexual excitations in World War Two Britain
• the identification of the 'problem girl'
• 'distractibility' and 'synthetic culture' in postwar Britain
• prostitution in new cosmopolitan cultures in the 1950s
• Lawrence of Arabia and debates over male homosexuality in the 1950s
• the scandalous figure of Stephen Ward in the Profumo Affair.

Drunk with the Glitter examines the ways in which urban modernity reshapes 'cultural experience'. In particular, it explores the ways that categories of sexual identity and behaviour were reformulated in relation to the restructuring of urban space and the introduction of new cultures of consumption in a period of modernization.

How did the 'altered conditions' of postwar Britain help to inaugurate new patterns of sociability, cultural attachment and intimate encounter?

Each chapter focuses on an area of public controversy which directed attention to those forms of sexual instability identified as threatening to national cohesion, including:

• sexual excitations in World War Two Britain


• the identification of the 'problem girl'


• 'distractibility' and 'synthetic culture' in postwar Britain


• prostitution in new cosmopolitan cultures in the 1950s


• Lawrence of Arabia and debates over male homosexuality in the 1950s


• the scandalous figure of Stephen Ward in the Profumo Affair.

Gillian Swanson is Reader in Cultural History at the University of the West of England, Bristol. Her research focuses on the cultural history of private life, sexual identity and behaviour, and cultures of consumption and entertainment, particularly in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain. Her previous publications include Nationalising Femininity: Culture, Sexuality and British Cinema in the Second World War (1996, co-editor Christine Gledhill) and Deciphering Culture: Ordinary Curiosities and Subjective Narratives (2000, co-authors Jane Crisp and Kay Ferres).