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Unnerving: the philosopher Ayn Rand was described as ¡®spiritually male¡¯

An inaugural lecture has explored what ¡°inconvenient deviant women¡± such as Ayn Rand and Margaret Thatcher reveal about ¡°what [women] are still not quite allowed to be¡±.

Lisa Downing, professor of French discourses of sexuality at the University of Birmingham, began her writing career in 2003 with her book Desiring the Dead: Necrophilia and Nineteenth-Century French Literature. More recently, she told Times Higher Education, she has ¡°moved from taking the ¡®abnormal¡¯ as fascinating subject matter¡­towards looking at precisely the ways in which the ¡®abnormal¡¯ subject gets constituted and what that says about the social forces doing the constituting¡±.

This has led to books and edited volumes on ¡°perversion¡±, queer lives in Europe and the ethics of cinema as well as her 2013 study The Subject of Murder: Gender, Exceptionality, and the Modern Killer. Along with co-authors Iain Morland and Nikki Sullivan, she has recently published a book called Fuckology: Critical Essays on [American sexologist] John Money¡¯s Diagnostic Concepts.

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In her inaugural lecture at Birmingham last month, titled ¡°Selfish Women and Other Inconvenient Deviants¡±, Professor Downing reflected on ¡°the disproportionate hatred that accrued to [Myra] Hindley, in comparison to her lover Ian Brady, [which] had everything to do with her transgression of the feminine role of care-giver, a transgression that made her crimes appear far worse than those of her male partner, which were understandable as a mere aberrant extension of masculinity, rather than a categorical travesty of nature¡±.

She went on to develop this line of thought with regard to the Decadent French writer who wrote under the name of Rachilde (1860-1953); Ayn Rand, apostle of ¡°ethical egoism¡±; and Margaret Thatcher.

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All were savaged and dismissed in blatantly sexist terms. Professor Downing stated that ¡°it is ethically incumbent upon us not to overlook¡± that Thatcher¡¯s death was ¡°sadistically celebrated in specifically misogynist terms [Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead], rather than [as] simply the death of an unpopular and ruthless former Tory leader¡±.

Yet what made these selfish women ¡°the most inconvenient of deviants¡±, in Professor Downing¡¯s view, was the discomfort they also caused to many feminists, with one describing Rand as ¡°spiritually male¡± and ¡°a traitor to her sex¡±.

¡°Feminist solidarity can be seen to be overburdened with reliance on the stereotype of women as naturally predisposed towards favouring collaborative, caring and community-based modes of working and forms of action¡± ¨C something that can itself act as ¡°an essentialising straitjacket for women¡±, she argued.

matthew.reisz@tesglobal.com