This article addresses the poetics and politics of "Refugee Tales, A Walk in Solidarity with Refugees, Asylum Seekers and Detainees" against a framework which foregrounds freedom of movement and access to the language as fundamental human rights. Drawing inspiration from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the project, which aims to raise awareness on indefinite immigration detention in the UK and reclaim its abolition, summons and combines the world-making power of storytelling and the extraordinary bonding potential of walking in solidarity to reconfigure the English polity as a welcoming space of listening and 'appearance'.
This essay explores Margaret Thatcher's political agency and leadership style in terms of her reliance on discursive and media strategies which thrived on the "confusion" of gender stereotypes and her ability to play with multiple, long-established archetypes of women in power, characterized by violent and aggressive femininity. Thatcher's frequent self-projection as a "masculine" character, the "honorary man" of British politics, and her special grip on British public opinion and fantasies, were never disjointed from her ability to don, exploit, subvert and redirect "motherly' (or at least "womanly") performances at will, in order to serve her political agenda. Focusing on her strategic deployment of a rhetoric and discourses of aggression, divisiveness, conflict and war, the essay highlights Thatcher's ability to re-create and keep alive the idea of a national community always under siege, where extraordinary economic, disciplinary and defence measure were required in order to resist and overcome domestic and foreign "enemies". The Falklands War will be taken as case study, for it provides an outstanding example of Thatcher's powerful revision of female political authority against the backdrop of the conventionally masculine, heroic imaginary of war. Her masterly and coterminous performances as war leader and "super-mother" of the nation allowed for a complex and hybrid self-projection which still acts as an empowering model whose disciplinary subtext entails a nostalgic investment in imperial national history.
