Ravishing Maggie: Thatcherism thirty years on'

New Formations - ISSN 0950-2378
Volume 2010 Number 70

Ravishing Maggie: Thatcherism thirty years on'
Jackie Stacey pages -

Abstract

Marcus Harvey’s portrait Maggie was the centrepiece of his White Riot exhibition in 2009, the thirtieth anniversary of Margaret Thatcher’s first election victory as Prime Minister and, as it turned out, the beginning of the end of New Labour’s time in office. This article takes Harvey’s compositional strategy of forming Maggie out of thousands of plaster-cast objects as a response to the legacies of the political figure most associated with violating the social fabric of postwar Britain. Involving the spectator in the process of assembling and dissolving Thatcher’s famous resolute certainty, Maggie turns the shattering impact of her policies back on to the status of her image. If the phallic properties of Thatcher’s punishing style of leadership are literalised in Maggie, the pleasurable control of her integrity implicates us all in this encounter. Reflecting upon Thatcher’s promise to unify the nation, repair its wounded pride and restore its lost sense of greatness, the article reads Maggie’s precarious state through New Labour’s modernising national project and places it within wider debates about the current intensification of uncertainty to which we are increasingly subject.

SORRY - you are not registered as being permitted online access to the full text of this article

You have the following options:

  1. If you are viewing this via an institution or academic library you can ask that your institution takes out a Subscription to this journal.
  2. If you already have a Personal Subscription please login below


    Forgotten your username / password? Click here to locate

  3. Purchase an annual Personal Subscription
    PRINT + DIGITAL personal subscription (£45 / year)
    DIGITAL personal subscription (£30 / year)
    A Personal Subscription provides immediate access not only to the single article you are seeking, but also to all past and future articles in this journal up to the expiry of your annual (calendar year) subscription.
  4. Purchase immediate access to this single article (UK£7.00) - Buy article Coming Soon

To cite this article
Jackie Stacey (2010) Ravishing Maggie: Thatcherism thirty years on', New Formations, 2010(70), -

Share this