The global wave of social movement struggles between 2011 and 2014 witnessed a revival of encampments as a form of protest. Protest camps were primarily considered as sites of everyday, prefigurative politics, in which an alternative future could be constructed in the here and now. Feminist and queer approaches to encampments, however, have cast light on the prevalence of structural power within them. Through an analysis of the 15-M anti-austerity movement in several Spanish cities in 2011 and of a feminist camp established for International Women’s Day 2020 in Valencia, this chapter will explore both the possibilities and boundaries of protest camps as a form of resistance. It will discuss how safety may be built through recognition strategies that give account of other subjectivities with intersectional vulnerabilities, and how horizontality is always stratified by power. Finally, the chapter updates the concept of woman-only spaces, thanks to the inclusion of Spanish transfeminist experiences in the feminist encampment. From this perspective, if non-mixed camps constantly revise their dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, they can function as a starting point for the recognition of marginal subjectivities and thus for a more genuinely inclusive and transformative politics.
The 1983 Pine Gap Women’s Peace Camp held in central Australia was inspired by Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in the UK and conceived as one of its international support actions. In this chapter, however, I want to reorient this origin story to remember it as a protest site on Aboriginal land rather than one primarily derived from Greenham Common. Protest camps are capable of holding multiple meanings and reorienting the focus can produce new insights and engagements. This particular feature, of Australia’s relatively recent colonising history, differentiates the politics of Australian protest camps from other global protests. Taking three key ‘scenes’ from the archives of the Pine Gap protest camp around racism, men and policing, this chapter constructs key encounters between women protestors through their entanglements and engagements while doing feminism on Aboriginal land.
This groundbreaking collection interrogates protest camps as sites of gendered politics and feminist activism.
Drawing on case studies that range from Cold War women-only peace camps to more recent mixed-gender examples from around the world, diverse contributors reflect on the recurrence of gendered, racialised and heteronormative structures in protest camps, and their potency and politics as feminist spaces.
While developing an intersectional analysis of the possibilities and limitations of protest camps, this book also tells new and inspiring stories of feminist organising and agency. It will appeal to feminist theorists and activists, as well as to social movement scholars.
The Gezi Park protest camp in Istanbul in 2013 was an unprecedented democratic event. Women were active participants in the Gezi protests and engaged in all the camp’s activities. While much has been written on the protests, the relationship between them and the feminist movement in Turkey remains unexplored. In this chapter, I address this relationship and explore whether the feminist movement which has played a democratising role in Turkish politics since the 1980s, also helped shape the Gezi protests. The chapter argues that women – and feminist women in particular – left their imprint on Gezi. It traces the links between the norms, values, modes of organising and resistance of women in the Gezi Park protests and those of the feminist movement in Turkey. Through Gezi, the feminist movement engaged with a cause beyond its specific interest in women’s concerns, built coalitions with new groups and put feminist values into practice.
This groundbreaking collection interrogates protest camps as sites of gendered politics and feminist activism.
Drawing on case studies that range from Cold War women-only peace camps to more recent mixed-gender examples from around the world, diverse contributors reflect on the recurrence of gendered, racialised and heteronormative structures in protest camps, and their potency and politics as feminist spaces.
While developing an intersectional analysis of the possibilities and limitations of protest camps, this book also tells new and inspiring stories of feminist organising and agency. It will appeal to feminist theorists and activists, as well as to social movement scholars.
This groundbreaking collection interrogates protest camps as sites of gendered politics and feminist activism.
Drawing on case studies that range from Cold War women-only peace camps to more recent mixed-gender examples from around the world, diverse contributors reflect on the recurrence of gendered, racialised and heteronormative structures in protest camps, and their potency and politics as feminist spaces.
While developing an intersectional analysis of the possibilities and limitations of protest camps, this book also tells new and inspiring stories of feminist organising and agency. It will appeal to feminist theorists and activists, as well as to social movement scholars.
This groundbreaking collection interrogates protest camps as sites of gendered politics and feminist activism.
Drawing on case studies that range from Cold War women-only peace camps to more recent mixed-gender examples from around the world, diverse contributors reflect on the recurrence of gendered, racialised and heteronormative structures in protest camps, and their potency and politics as feminist spaces.
While developing an intersectional analysis of the possibilities and limitations of protest camps, this book also tells new and inspiring stories of feminist organising and agency. It will appeal to feminist theorists and activists, as well as to social movement scholars.
In 2018, Cornish feminist production hub Scary Little Girls, in partnership with online women’s history publication, The Heroine Collective, launched an ambitious project to record testimonies of women who formed the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp between 1981 and 2000. The aim was to retrieve a history of radical feminist peace activism in danger of being lost from public memory and from British protest culture, and to bring this heritage to new audiences. The work thus involved not only recording interview testimonies, but also creative outreach – an online archive, maintained by a non-profit organisation; theatrical events and concerts; a multimedia exhibition and interactive virtual reality website; and a book. This chapter takes the form of a conversation between Rebecca Mordan from Scary Little Girls, Kate Kerrow from The Heroine Collective, Vanessa Pini from Greenham Women Everywhere, and Greenham woman Jill (Ray) Raymond, facilitated by Alison Bartlett and Catherine Eschle. The conversation explores the processes and ethics of interviewing and digs into the multimedia and collaging techniques through which the lived experiences of campers were recreated years after the event. Finally, we discuss the politics of forgetting and remembering Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, and its legacies.
This Introduction establishes the empirical and theoretical context of our collective project on feminism and protest camps. We begin by exploring the recent history of protest camps and explaining why a feminist revisiting is necessary. We then establish the shared parameters of the feminist approach adopted by contributors, before explaining the organising themes of the book and highlighting some of the empirical and conceptual contributions of the chapters.
Drawing on empirical research on the movements of the squares, including Occupy and Nuit Debout, this chapter outlines the insights offered by feminist thought into the democratic practices of protest camps. The squares movements practised a kind of ‘project democracy’ by building an inclusive system of decision-making that facilitated the undertaking of projects. The chapter shows that, first, the squares movements operated with an expanded notion of civic duty that also included the reproduction of the civic body through activities of caring. Second, it demonstrates how care ethics, with their emphasis on dependence and vulnerability, informed the democratic practices of the movements of the squares. Third, it highlights how these movements challenged the connection between private property and democracy by operating with the logic of the commons, a framework of relationships based on the communal sharing of resources that places care and interdependence at the centre of democratic politics.
