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Helen Charman
Helen Charman is a writer and academic based in Glasgow. Her first book, Mother State – a political history of motherhood — is forthcoming from Allen Lane in 2024. She teaches in the English Studies department at Durham University.

Articles Available Online


Attachment Barbies: On Watching Grey’s Anatomy

Essay

March 2023

Helen Charman

Essay

March 2023

In August 2022, ABC announced that Ellen Pompeo, currently the highest-paid actress on American network television, was leaving Grey’s Anatomy, the show on which...

Book Review

May 2021

HOLDING THE ROOM: ON HOLLY PESTER’S ‘COMIC TIMING’

Helen Charman

Book Review

May 2021

The last poem in Holly Pester’s first collection COMIC TIMING (Granta, 2021) is called ‘Villette’; it shares its title...

Image: ‘visionary company’ (2021) by Wu Tsang, at Lafayette Anticipations © Pierre Antoine   On entering Visionary Company (2020), Wu Tsang’s exhibition at Lafayette Anticipations in Paris, visitors walk down a curving, carpeted pathway that resembles a backstage corridor In The show is over (2020), a film by Wu Tsang made in collaboration with the poet Fred Moten, the camera follows a set of bodies that move around a stage The floor is wet with mud, and the bodies bask in a dark blue light Nearby, Tsang has placed a sculpture which takes the form of an illusory Penrose triangle, an impossible object that appears as a motif in The show is over (2020) To make the film, Tsang translated Moten’s poetry into choreography, the choreography into film, the film into sculpture – all blending into one space   Tsang works across many mediums, but her recurrent lines of inquiry are translation and community building While studying at the University of California in the late 2000s, Tsang lived in McArthur Park, a historically Latinx and Asian neighbourhood, and one of the poorest areas of Los Angeles She came across Silver Platter, an unassuming bar and home to Latin gay and drag communities since the 1960s It was there that she co-created Wildness in 2008, a weekly club night for experimental performance and electronic music, eventually producing the documentary WILDNESS (2012) The film cast a reflexive gaze on the club night, raising complex questions of responsibility and privilege   Tsang’s practice continues to expand through kinship In 2014, she began working with performer Tosh Basco (also known as boychild) on the sci-fi film A day in the life of bliss (2014–ongoing) It follows Blis (played by Basco), a young pop star by day and underground performer by night, who navigates a world where thoughts are controlled by centralised artificial intelligence Two years later, Basco and Tsang co-founded Moved by the Motion, a collective with fluctuating members – including the dancer Josh Johnson, an early Wildness collaborator, musician Asma Maroof and Fred Moten The collective is shaped by experimentation and friendship Eight members of the group joined

Contributor

November 2017

Helen Charman

Contributor

November 2017

Helen Charman is a writer and academic based in Glasgow. Her first book, Mother State – a political history...

Essay

May 2020

Where do I put myself, if public life’s destroyed? On reading Denise Riley

Helen Charman

Essay

May 2020

How do you read someone who doesn’t always want to be read? This is a question I used to...

Sally Rooney’s ‘Normal People’

Book Review

October 2018

Helen Charman

Book Review

October 2018

Reading Sally Rooney’s second novel Normal People is a compulsive experience. After the navy blue Faber & Faber proofs were sent out in early...
Rendering intimacy impossible, deploy lifeboats (mark yourself safe) Not listening as such, more waiting to speak, above all mark yourself, it’s so important to be safe Carry on, they demand, we’re not reeling / we are reeling Is this the place for a fountain reference? Probably ‘What first attracted you to your wife, sir?’ ‘Her delicacy / her ankles / her hatred of the Tories’                  Alive twice over but that’s a whole life gone too                you know I’m sorry, he holds his hands up, I’m                sorry, he backs away: my conscience couldn’t                keep company with your body I say, your body?                it just made me think: it’s only a nine month stay   The next time you lay a hand on me, I’ll make a perfect gleaming dive into the Thames Aren’t you glad / to be here? I am
Electioneering

Prize Entry

November 2017

Helen Charman


READ NEXT

fiction

June 2016

Beast

Paul Kingsnorth

fiction

June 2016

I stood in the river up to my knees and the river was cold. The water filled my boots...

Art

July 2014

Operation Paperclip

Naomi Pearce

Patrick Goddard

Art

July 2014

‘I began at this point to feel that politics was not something “out there” but something “in here” and of...

Interview

January 2016

Interview with Fiston Mwanza Mujila

Roland Glasser

Interview

January 2016

Roof terrace of the Shangri-La hotel, Santa Monica, Los Angeles, USA; late afternoon, 8 October 2015. We ensconce ourselves in...

 

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