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Union Rules

This short story deals with matters of identity within a divided culture. It draws upon research developed in Manderson’s novel Lost Bodies and other works. The thread of Scottish literary studies draws on post-colonialist theory (Fanon, Said) but also New Historicism, where the production of a text is viewed as a matter of social politics, intricately linked with national, social and sexual identity (Riach, Brown, Gifford, Daiches). This thread is only one of many making up the weave of Scottish studies, and the particular line of research followed towards this story is to do with the pressures and conflicts within Scottish identity during the build-up to the referendum in 2014. One individual’s attitudes, identity and stance are examined in the light of contemporary national, social and sexual politics. The importance of the formation of a sense of Scottish identity through history (Devine) (Schoene); the formation of sexual politics through interactions which are fundamentally divisive and based on power (male gaze); and the religious and social schisms which form a particular imperialist resistance to the idea of ‘independence’ are all examined through the inner thoughts of a character who has no idea of why he is the way he is, other than the belief that his thoughts are ‘natural’. (Schoene)

The research develops themes in Lost Bodies and Best Man and brings them into the contemporary politics. Unexamined matters of a character’s gender, sexuality and culture form his armour-clad and warrior-like identity which can neither negotiate change nor contemplate its own negation, and so becomes an impossible rigidity which he must maintain (Schoene).

The story contributes new knowledge in that it configures this particular mix of queer, post-feminist and post-colonialist ideas within contemporary politics and reveals the ‘logic’ of a particular sub-culture’s resistance to tolerance and its continuing support for imperialism.