Sticky and Stuck: The Lift as a Vehicle in the Production of Social Space in Livi Michael’s Under a Thin Moon and Loretta Ramkissoon’s “Which Floor?”

Abstract

This essay analyzes Livi Michael’s novel Under a Thin Moon (1992) and Loretta Ramkissoon’s short memoir “Which Floor?” (2019) to examine representations of female experience of living in high-rise social housing. My analysis draws on the work of Henri Lefebvre and Doreen Massey to investigate the production of the tower block as a social space. The lift is employed as a lens to study the structuring and shaping of the high-rise narrative and explore how fiction can both reinforce and challenge dominant mythologies of social housing. The lift’s role is considered through themes of gendered experiences of disgust (stickiness) and mobilities (getting stuck). In Under a Thin Moon, the tower block lift embodies the narrative of the failure of the utopian solutions to the postwar housing crisis in the UK and its consequences. In “Which Floor?,” although the lift is a space inherent in the facilitation and nurturing of community, it nevertheless similarly captures a narrative of the immobility of high-rise life.