workers for working too fast, he was called El Campeon (the Champion)’ for the next thirty years (Bachelor, 2001: 294). Such control is predicated on socialisation and power. As numerous studies have pointed out, in various work ‘settings, the old-timers call the new arrivals obscene names, curse them, point out their negative attributes’ and use insulting labels and jokes to put ‘novices in their place: on the bottom of the totem pole’, where they can learn ‘to bend to the group’s wishes’ (Fortado, 1998: 16). Ugly nicknames function similarly to the sort of ‘sick humour’ evident in ‘Auschwitz jokes’, which according to Dundas (1987, cited in Sev’er and Ungar, 1997: 88) ‘serve as a coping mechanism to deal with bothersome issues such as sexuality, racial tension, violence and guilt’. They can also ‘reflect men’s struggle to deal with their anxiety about the changing role of women’. For Aysan Sev’er and Sheldon Ungar (1997: 88), humour of this sort can also reflect ‘power imbalances between men and women’ and help ‘to solidify and perpetuate that power disparity’. From this perspective, insulting nicknames like the ‘Beast of Belsen’ drew on a ‘verbal arsenal of types of conflict talk’, which according Reynolds (2007: 437) ‘comprise powerful discursive strategies … in the everyday negotiation and coconstruction of peer politics and … group social relationships’. This ‘talk’ represents an attempt to develop a language that sets boundaries and contains ‘the possibility for negation, resistance, reinterpretation, the play of metaphoric invention and imagination’ that can be used to dealing with power asymmetries (Scott, 1996: 167. This, I argue, was precisely how the nicknaming of Mary Lions functioned; it provided a symbolic response to the intrusion of women into the traditionally male-dominated Eveleigh workshops and to the power of one woman whose occupation gave her power over the men’s health and bodies. As will be seen, this response was informed by intersecting and
provided a way of enacting a form of symbolic social control over the corporeal, and also psychological threat she posed to their masculinity and their masculine industrial culture. The reconfiguration of Lions’s gender identity served to restore the balance between the norms of hegemonic masculinity and the challenges to the manhood of Eveleigh’s male workers posed by the possibility of accidents, illness, and the intervention of a woman whose behaviour was seen to be more masculine than feminine. It simultaneously obscured the men’s vulnerability and underplayed her womanhood. As Susan Parma (1976: 102, cited in Green, 1991: 125) concluded from her study of the Scottish Outer Hebrides: in an environment of mutual watchfulness and interdependence, the development and use of nicknames provide a source of amusement. In providing amusement, they reinforce in-group solidarity and encourage circumspect behaviour. The of Belsen nickname fulfilled precisely such functions. Conclusion By considering nicknaming as a form of language making rather than simply as a form of humour, this paper has indicated how workers use nicknames, particularly derogatory ones, to comment on the behaviour and performance of other workers. In doing so it has highlighted how nicknaming reflects intersubjective processes through which workers address the tensions and conflicts in their social relationships, which arise from their working conditions and arrangements. In addition, by extending the ‘uncolonized terrain’ beyond the organisation/workplace, the paper indicated how nicknaming not only draws on both localised collective norms and a range of broader social and cultural resources but also reinforces them. Gendered assumptions, norms and stereotypes provide one type of cultural resource that workers