Slaggy Poetics: Poetry, Performance and Research as Practice

Research Seminar - Department of Art History and Cultural Practices, University of Manchester

Slaggy Poetics: Poetry, Performance and Research as Practice

Dr Katie Beswick, School of Creative Management, Goldsmiths, University of London

Abstract

My recent book Slags on Stage: Art, Sex, Class and Desire in British Culture weaves cultural analysis with poetry and art criticism to explore the concept of the ‘slag’ and its place in contemporary British culture.

The book traces the etymology of the word slag through the twentieth and into the twenty-first century, thinking through the ways ‘slag’ speaks to issues of class, sex and desire. Broadly, slag is an insult bound up with women’s sexual reputations – but beyond this, it is a ‘key’ word that shapes the ways we debate and understand what it means to be a woman. For women who came of age in the United Kingdom in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, ‘slag’ produces complex feelings and has influenced how we have come to know ourselves and understand our sexual and quotidian desires. This book explores the terrain of slag and includes analyses of artworks by artists who have invoked the slag in their practice, including Tracey Emin, Cash Carraway and Michaela Coel. Covering the cultural politics of clothing, motherhood, television representations, sexual assault, sex work and desire, Slags on Stage asks what role does the ‘slag’ play in British culture? Who is she for? And how have women used sex and sexuality to have their own say in cultures that want to control them?

In this talk, I summarise my findings from the Slags on Stage project and outline my approach to research both as and through practice. By this, I mean the ‘practice research’ methods I used (in which poetry became an important mode of affective inquiry and writing), as well as the way projects grounded in working-class studies draw on methods of everyday practice that unsettles notions of ‘objectivity’ and ‘rigour’ — standards that have tended to dominate assessments of academic research quality in Western contexts since the Enlightenment.

Biography

Katie Beswick is a writer and academic based in the School of Creative Management at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research is located at the intersection of cultural studies and performance studies — her work is characterised by the reading together of artworks and the wider social, political and cultural landscape within which artworks are produced, to better understand the cultural and political function of (performance) art in contemporary contexts. Her books include: Social Housing in Performance: The English Council Estate on and Off Stage (Methuen 2019); Making Hip Hop Theatre (Methuen 2022); Slags on Stage: Class, Sex, Art and Desire in British Culture (Routledge 2025) and Class in British Musical Theatre (Methuen 2026). She is the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters, an arts journalist and a widely published poet. Her debut poetry collection, Plumstead Pram Pushers (Red Ogre 2024), explores the affective terrain of the insult ‘slag’ and its cultural meaning in the south east London area where she was born and raised.

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