This (mildly NSFW) video is кисья ересь (Heresy of Little Cats), by the Russian electro-punk band Barto:

As a non-speaker of Russian who hasn’t found the lyrics anywhere, I’m sure there’s a lot I’m not getting, but I like the song, the band are pretty admirable, and I like the video’s satirical emphasis on the patriarchal intertwining of political and religious authorities – the formal alliance of Putin’s government and the Russian Orthodox Church, making it possible for civil disobedience to be framed as blasphemy, was a point of contention highlighted by the Pussy Riot trial.

I found the song via this post, which discusses the relatively muted response by the Russian underground music scene to the group’s trial and imprisonment. It also corrects the impression of Pussy Riot as (merely?) a feminist punk band, when they are more a product of the intersection between political activism and performance art:

As a matter of fact Pussy Riot, although calling themselves a punk-band and using the sign of punk in their performances, never belonged to the Russian punk scene. They consider themselves as art-actionists, clearly place themselves in the context of contemporary Russian actionism, quoting the names of Prigov, Brener, Kulik and other art-provocateurs of the 1990s.

So Pussy Riot’s frequently mentioned connection with riot grrrl has more to do with the latter’s existence as a DIY subculture involving zines, art, détournement and activism, than with music alone. Which is fair enough; back in the 90s, one of the odder of Courtney Love’s swipes at Kathleen Hanna, in fact, was that “She’s not really in a band… She’s a political activist who took a bunch of women’s studies classes.” On the subject of Pussy Riot, Hanna herself had this to say:

What if people all over the world started their own performance groups, bands, art collectives, etc… and called them things like Pussy Riot Olympia. Pussy Riot, Athens Greece, Pussy Riot Paris, etc….And maybe if this trial turns out as the prosecutors want it to, with the women getting at least 3 years, we all play benefits and go to Russia en masse under the banner that we are all Pussy Riot, Yoko Ono could be in Pussy Riot, Patti Smith could be wearing a mask next to a troupe of girls from Tennesee storming the Cathedral of Christ the Savior screaming “We are all Pussy Riot!!!”

As I wrote in February, it makes sense to consider Pussy Riot in the context of the former Soviet Union’s long and fascinating history of political protest coalescing around avant garde art and music, especially punk. The Western media, perhaps understandably, tended instead to present the band in more straightforward and simplistic terms – rendering them more comprehensible to a Western audience, sure, but often in a less than helpful manner. I’d been hoping someone would pick up on the patronising and infantilising aspects of much of the media presentation of Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina and Yekaterina Samutsevich, and, in this article, Sarah Kendzior nails it:

Imagine this: The three men sit in court, awaiting their verdict. The youngest, a experienced dissident described by the media as a “sultry sex symbol” with “Angelina Jolie lips”, glances at his colleague, an activist praised by the Associated Press for his “pre-Raphaelite looks”. Between them sits a third man, whose lack of glamour has led the New Republic to label him “the brain” and deem his hair a “poof of dirty blonde frizz”. The dissidents – or “boys” as they are called in headlines around the world – have been the subject of numerous fashion and style profiles ever since they first spoke out against the Russian government. “He’s a flash of moving color,” the New York Times writes approvingly about their protests, “never an individual boy.” If this sounds ridiculous, it should – and not only because I changed the gender… Pussy Riot identifies as feminist, but you would never know it from the Western media, who celebrate the group with the same language that the Russian regime uses to marginalize them. The three members of Pussy Riot are “girls”, despite the fact that all of them are in their twenties and two of them are mothers. They are “punkettes”, diminutive variations on a 1990s indie-rock prototype that has little resemblance to Pussy Riot’s own trajectory as independent artists and activists.

Of course, as Kendzior also points out, Pussy Riot have far more pressing concerns than being mischaracterized in the press. But:

Pussy Riot also tells us a lot about how we see non-Western political dissent in the new media age, and could suggest a habit of mischaracterizing their grave mission in terms that feel more familiar but ultimately sell the dissidents short: youthful rebellion, rock and roll, damsels in distress.

A lot of this sentiment is familiar: an impulse to treat protest in which women, particularly young women, are prominent, as fun, flippant, and fundamentally unserious. It’s the reverse of the censorious and sensationalist ‘Rage of the Girl Rioters’ response to the 2010 UK student protests. In the case of Pussy Riot, arguments for their sympathetic treatment are often explicitly predicated on the power imbalance involved – they are ‘just’ ordinary women (or indeed ‘girls’), what threat to the state can they possibly pose? – which surely entrenches the idea of women as both relatively powerless and harmless, rather than enabling any sort of feminist empowerment. Away from such frustrating portayals, however, there’s something to be said for the earlier stages of Pussy Riot’s trajectory, which offer examples both of how music can form part of a wider oppositional movement and for how women’s protest can be collective and anonymous, with no need of iconic or martyred figureheads.

And yes, I do realise this post can be summarised as: “Pussy Riot? Preferred their earlier work, before they got so commercial”. So it goes.

They decline to reveal the smallest details, aiming to maintain total secrecy. They will say only that most of the band members met at the small protests held by Russia’s once-feeble opposition, from monthly illegal demonstrations calling for the right to assembly to banned gay pride marches. Their average age is 25. They are hardcore feminists. Most studied the humanities in university. They won’t detail their day jobs.
– Guardian, 2nd February 2012

Pussy Riot, like the Sex Pistols, have a name designed to make headlines, and a bit more political substance to back up the sensationalism. Formed in Moscow last September, this offshoot of Russia’s complex and fractured political scene has come to prominence in the UK media in the context of protests against political corruption which have been gaining in volume and intensity after parliamentary elections last December. In mid-January, one of the collective’s impromptu guerrilla gigs, taking place on Red Square opposite the Kremlin, ended with its members detained by police.

Laura Barton in the Guardian, picking up on the band’s citing of Bikini Kill as an inspiration, offers a slightly short-sighted view of 90s Riot Grrrl as an antecedent for the expression of ‘an alternative female voice’. While the group clearly do reference Riot Grrrl’s ‘tone of wild irreverence’, it also makes sense to consider Pussy Riot in the context of the former Soviet Union’s long and fascinating history of political protest coalescing around avant garde art and music, especially punk. Adam Curtis’ recent blog is an interesting attempt to make sense of this sort of determinedly oppositional culture which has been notable by its relative absence from the UK’s current wave of socio-political protest. Similarly, the clash of sartorial signifiers which Pussy Riot provide by combining miniskirts and stockings with ski-masks and balaclavas could be a legacy of Riot Grrl too, but as a practical measure it has as much in common with other Anonymous-style contemporary protest movements, not to mention the general history of masking and disguise in protest.

Russia does have a long tradition of women in protest, notably the 1917 revolution in which women played a prominent part, encouraged by the intersection of socialism with many of the goals of women’s liberation. Pussy Riot cite this ‘deep tradition… of gender and revolution – we’ve had amazing women revolutionaries.’ They add that ‘the revolution should be done by women… For now, they don’t beat or jail us as much’. This assertion ties in with historical debates on the ability of women to take part in protest or civil disobedience with a greater degree of impunity than men – an ideal which isn’t always borne out by the treatment of female protesters.

Contemporary Russian politics – like any – are not a straightforward matter, and the extent of Pussy Riot’s relevance and representativeness remains to be seen. But in a context where growing and disparate opposition groups are encountering heavy and often violent repression across the world, the ways in which women participate in protest, and the styles of self-expression they employ, are always worth noting.

On with Part 2, then.

Let’s talk about UK Uncut as a movement. Do you reckon it’s pretty equally gender split, and if so, do you reckon acting as a collective helps achieve this more effectively?

“I wouldn’t feel confident commenting on the gender split in UK Uncut – I’d be referring to tens of thousands of people across the UK. However, in terms of active groups working within the UK, the majority are dominated by white males. But this is why we need to be talking about cuts in terms of gender: to encourage women to join the frontline.

“I do feel that acting publically as a collective has strengthened the movement and UK Uncut’s message – the cuts are something that everyone should be concerned about and everyone should be acting against. However, it is still true that certain vulnerable groups within society are to be hit in ways that the more privileged may not be. Disabled people are losing their Disability Living Allowance, poorer students have lost the EMA that they and their families rely on, and some women will no longer be able to work because they now have to care for elderly family members or young children. I strongly believe that highlighting the different ways in which the cuts fall should spur people into action, on behalf of themselves or those less able, instead of acting in some divisive way. So what if today we’re standing up against cuts to childcare and you don’t have or want children – don’t you want to protect those in society who do?

“These aren’t just issues for women, because protecting women and vulnerable groups is in the interest of the whole of society.”

Have you found any women’s protest movements around the world or in history particularly inspiring?

“There are so many instances of women’s protest that inspire me consistently. At the moment I’ve been reading about the experiences of Assata Shakur and Angela Davis, and find myself inspired by their unrelenting power (and their incredible writing!).

“I am inspired by the endurance of the women at Greenham Common, and the physical strength of the four women who destroyed a Hawk fighter jet with hammers that was being sold by the British government to East Timor to be used in the government’s illegal occupation of the country. I also recall an image of a row of Zapatista women standing in line with their faces covered but still wearing these incredible bright dresses – and that image alone inspires me. But closer to home, I am inspired by the women close to me and the support we provide for each other.”

What would your advice be to young women reading our blog who are concerned about the impact of the cuts? Maybe they’ve never been on a protest before. Perhaps they’re even a little nervous to start – do “clicktivism” and hashtags and so on make a difference in themselves?

“Well, I wouldn’t say hashtags aren’t worth anything – that’s how UK Uncut started! But my advice to anyone nervous to get involved would be that anything that is worth fighting for is going to be a little scary, so that’s even more reason to give it a go. It’s scary because there is so much at stake. The kind of action UK Uncut takes is a great way to get involved. It’s fun and creative and there is always space for people to choose their own style of action, and meet other people who share the same views.

“Although other types of protest can be effective, I believe that direct action is necessary in any situation where other avenues have been exhausted and shut down. And that is the situation we are in now. For example, the reforms the NHS is facing weren’t in the Conservative or the Lib Dem manifesto, and this coalition government is not even acting on behalf of the majority vote. So how is it fair that these radical changes are being made to a health service that Britain should be so proud of achieving, but is instead determined to destroy, without a say from the public who use it?

“The leaders in charge of pushing through the bill do not have the population’s interests at heart, are not interested in what we want or what we have to say. But this is our NHS – we rely on it, and we must protect it.”

Is it hard for protesters to keep momentum going in the face of these cuts? What’s next for you?

“The groups organising actions every week across the country keep momentum going. This issue isn’t going away, the cuts are already being felt, and the fight against them will continue.

“UK Uncut have just announced the next day of mass action, called ‘Block the Bridge, Block the Bill’ – 2000 people are already attending on the Facebook event, and hopefully will be showing how serious they are about not losing their National Health Service by transforming Westminster Bridge into hospitals, medical lectures, and a space to share stories about the NHS.

“On October 12th, the Lords have one last chance to amend the Health and Social Care Bill in Parliament before it is voted on again, and we have one last chance to show that we won’t lose our health service. So join UK Uncut on October 9th and take part in the fight against the cuts!”

Thanks again to Rox for giving us her time.

• Visit UK Uncut’s blog
• Follow UK Uncut on Twitter
]]> /2011/10/05/take-it-to-the-bridge-beyond-the-rage-of-the-girl-rioters-part-22/feed/ 0 7662 /2011/09/23/revolting-women-the-end-but-not-really-and-some-links/ /2011/09/23/revolting-women-the-end-but-not-really-and-some-links/#respond Fri, 23 Sep 2011 08:00:06 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=7554 That’s our Revolting Women fest all done and dusted for the moment at least. Obviously there are loads of things we didn’t manage to cover, but we hope you enjoyed it.

In the meantime, here’re some relevant links, some of which throw the baton to you. If you’re feeling like revolting, now’s the time…

• Block The Bridge, Block The Bill, 9th October: “On Sunday October 9th, join UK Uncut on Westminster Bridge and help block the bill. On one side of Westminster Bridge is Parliament. On 7th September, MPs in the Commons voted for the end of the NHS as we know it. On the opposite side of the bridge is St Thomas’ Hospital, one of Britain’s oldest medical institutions. If the bill passes, hospitals like St Thomas’ will be sold to private corporations, the staff put on private payrolls and beds given over to private patients. Despite the government’s lies, this bill represents the wholesale privatization of the NHS and, with it, the destruction of the dream of comprehensive healthcare provided equally to all. We will not let a coalition of millionaire politicians and private health lobbyists destroy our NHS. Be on Westminster Bridge for 1pm on October 9th and together let’s block this bill from getting to our hospitals.”

  I work at one of the hospitals UKUncut are talking about. It looks no better from the inside. We’re having our birthday party < 48 hours before (you're totally invited! see below!), but I will be hauling myself out of bed for this. Readers, join Team BadRep as we revolt against both Torygeddon and our inevitable shared hangover in one giant last stand.

• TUC March For The Alternative: 2nd October
• All Out: our new favourite campaign. “We are organizing online and on the ground to build a world where every person can live freely and be embraced for who they are. Gay, lesbian, bi, transgender or straight, we need you to go All Out to build this historic movement for equality.” The page on Alice N’Kom, Cameroonian attorney and activist, is particularly inspiring: “I’m 66, and in ten years of defending LGBT people in Cameroon, it has never been this bad.”
• WomanKind Worldwide’s Overseas Aid Mythbuster: “Print off this page, put it in your bag and next time you hear someone complain about the UK giving money overseas challenge them with the facts.”
• Say Yes to Gay YA: authors Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith on young adult fiction and sexuality: “The overwhelming white straightness of the YA sf and fantasy sections may have little to do with what authors are writing, or even with what editors accept. Perhaps solid manuscripts with LGBTQ protagonists rarely get into mainstream editors’ hands at all, because they are been rejected by agents before the editors see them. How many published novels with a straight white heroine and a lesbian or black or disabled best friend once had those roles reversed, before an agent demanded a change? This does not make for better novels. Nor does it make for a better world.”
• COME TO OUR BIRTHDAY PARTY ON OCTOBER 7! We wanna meet you! Find out more and RSVP here!
]]> /2011/09/23/revolting-women-the-end-but-not-really-and-some-links/feed/ 0 7554 /2011/09/22/revolting-women-joan-of-arc-rosie-the-riveter-and-the-feminist-protest-icon/ /2011/09/22/revolting-women-joan-of-arc-rosie-the-riveter-and-the-feminist-protest-icon/#comments Thu, 22 Sep 2011 08:00:54 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=7321 Rather than being about a specific protest movement or person, this post – the last of our Revolting Women series – is going to look at how campaigners in the UK and USA have used iconography based around the idea of feminist “patroness” figures to inspire protest.

I want to think about icons, and how activists use them, particularly how protest movements – satirically or seriously – “borrow” figures from previous eras – art, history, legend – and recast them for current ends. On the one hand, as a post on the F-Word nearly a year ago outlined with feeling, this can create frustration, particularly around the idea of setting up individual “heroes” – even when they are rooted in metaphor – within a protest dynamic, which will usually derive much of its force from sheer collective whump. On the other hand, like any exercise in comparing bits of art, looking at the feminist movement’s choices of icons and allegories paints an invigorating kind of conversation down the centuries.

Let’s start with Joan of Arc, resurrected forcefully by the suffragettes in the early 20th century to grace more than a few posters … and an impressive spate of parades.

Yes, parades.

Deeds, Words, and Military Martyrdom

Check this out.

This is Elsie Howey in April 1909 – the month Joan of Arc was beatified by the Catholic Church – preparing to ride a white charger through the streets of London in armour as part of a parade to celebrate noted suffragette Emmeline Pethwick-Lawrence’s release from prison.

Two years later, in June 1911, Marjorie Annan Bryce (seriously, you have to see this next pic) led WSPU members through London the same way as part of a procession organised a week before George V’s coronation. (The horse was led by a young woman dressed as Robin Hood.) The Women’s Coronation Procession was one of the largest WSPU demos, and it marched with Joan of Arc at its head.

Three years later, in Baltimore, Ida Baker Neepier also climbed onto a horse whilst clad in armour. Earlier that same year, English Jesuit Father Bernard Vaughan had expressed his consternation in a speech that the suffragettes wanted “to make Joan of Arc one of [their] patronesses”.

Joan – canonised in 1920 – was a central icon for the women’s suffrage movement in Europe and North America. The WSPU in particular, with its emphasis on militant tactics, were especially enamoured of her, and Hilda Dallas designed a poster featuring her, wearing a tabard emblazoned with the word JUSTICE, to promote their magazine.

Oh, and here’s the thoroughly don’t-mess Nellie Van Slingerland with a load of “Joan of Arc Suffrage League” flags in NYC. (Would you mess with this hat? I thought not.)

Joan was a perfect fit for the suffragettes, personifying militant force and virtue simultaneously. For context, Victorian literary culture allowed plenty room for female heroism of a certain kind; for example, Grace Darling was idolised. But the demands of heroism, when they force the heroine of a Victorian novel out of the domestic sphere, often spring from a moral imperative (the heroine of Wilkie Collins’s The Law And The Lady, for example, defies the men around her to save her man from himself). Adopting Joan as patroness – a woman who had abandoned domesticity for battlefields only to act on imperatives sent to her in divine visions – gave the suffragettes’ cause similarly pressing moral overtones.

Joan herself was something of a hot topic at the time; Sara Bernhardt had appeared as her on stage in 1898 and publically endorsed women’s suffrage after the Joan of Arc Suffrage League welcomed her to the US in 1910. The tragic events of the 1913 Derby saw Emily Davison cast as a literal Joan in WSPU eulogies; they were quick to capitalise on the acquisition of a contemporary martyr-narrative to go with historical ones. In the US, when Inez Milholland, who famously asked the President how long women should wait for Liberty, died of pneumonia in 1916, she was directly represented as Joan by artists.

These days, however, we’re not falling over Joan of Arc button badges (although I do own this pretty natty sketchbook from the Museum of London) and Joan is not the Twitter avatar du jour for fully half your feminist mates, because that honour belongs to another female icon…

The Return of Rosie the Riveter

We still can’t get enough of her. Clasped to the bosom of the women’s lib movement in the 1970s, Rosie’s been a staple on flyers, books and posters ever since.

The woman from the We Can Do It! poster – known colloquially as Rosie the Riveter, although she was not, unlike Norman Rockwell’s poster, which was far more widely circulated, ever officially given that title – has, like Joan in the 1900s, been embraced by feminist campaigners as a a key visual figure. Minimally circulated in the war itself, rediscovered as the women’s movement gathered speed, “Rosie” is arguably as famous in her capacity as a feminist pop culture icon as a piece of WW2 propaganda; having borrowed her, we can’t stop remixing her, making her more bluntly feminist, more cheekily self-aware, undercutting the patriotic feeling of the original, or just because, from under a pile of retrokitsch retouches, she gives many of us a more direct sense of legacy than Joan. Although many feminists claim emotional kinship with the suffrage movement, it is Rosie that they totemically hold on to.

Fridge magnets, wall clocks and coasters, many replacing “We Can Do It!” with “Feminism!” populate Cafepress in mushroom clouds of pouting and elbow-baring with a regularity that is by turns reassuring – look how far we’ve come – and galvanising – and we’re not done yet – but also carries a ring of predictability, mainly because I often find myself hoping we’re all still considering which “we” we’re talking about who “can do it”.

Rosie’s enduring popularity with feminists is good-ironic or hmm-ironic depending how you look at it. Sociological Images produced an excellent article earlier this year, Myth-Making and the ‘We Can Do It!’ Poster which ably demonstrates her limitations as a feminist icon, particularly in terms of her original status as a possible anti-trade union figurehead – we can do it (if you guys don’t ever strike, so better not!).

On the other hand, the persistence and force with which feminists have held fast to Rosie has created a new cultural space in which she exists beyond WWII as a feminist symbol in her own right – we discovered just how often she appears on Google for “feminism” in this post.

There’re many images are out there of real-life Rosies, who often aren’t as primped, glamorous or white. To your right is one such worker in 1943; many women (and men) of colour who did not feature on the war’s posters at all, played a crucial role in winning it. The many Rosie remakes on the market, all of which are uniformly white, have so far not engaged this issue. The more amusing ones include Buffy going retro and Princess Leia following suit. Meanwhile, celebrities including Pink have posed as Rosie. And on the explicitly feminist media front, the cover image of Cath Redfern and Kristin Aune’s Reclaiming The F-Word also references her with a knowing wink.

A section of Judith F Baca’s mural The Great Wall of Los Angeles features a panicked Rosie being swallowed by a television, titled “Farewell to Rosie the Riveter”:



The inference is clear – the reminder that after the war, women went, in droves, back to homemaking. And it’s this that partly sits behind Rosie’s continued resonance; the War is still such a milestone, representing simultaneously the power of a female workforce and the limitations placed upon it.

And what about now?

Everything Old Is New Again (Again?)

… And it’s only in the last century that women have got the vote, women have had the right to go to university, and this government cannot be responsible for taking hard-won women’s rights away from us, ‘cos the damage they’ll do if they pass this bill… will undo decades…

– student protester dressed as suffragette speaking to the Guardian, December 2010

The suffragettes themselves, who once dressed up as Joan of Arc and declared her their cultural totem for the age, are now totemic in their own right. The women who held a woman who died in the 14th century up as their patroness have now inherited their own set of legendary laurels. What do we think about this? How useful is it? I’m honestly not sure.

LibDem Equalities Minister Lynne Featherstone’s office was picketed last December by student protesters dressed in the WSPU’s signature colours of green, white and purple. Whilst on the 26th March 2011 landmark anti-cuts demonstration spearheaded by GoingToWork, I spotted replica pieces of suffragette propaganda being carried down Whitehall.

Meanwhile, feminist climate change pressure group Climate Rush have resurrected the entire apparatus of Edwardian propaganda aesthetics. Their promotional material, which is replete with obvious references to the imagery of the suffrage movement – big hats, button boots and sashes – that dominates the public consciousness, uses slogans such as “In the Name of the Suffragette”.

I doubt this would faze the WSPU leadership, who were adept self-mythologisers even in their time. They knew they were making history, and the Pankhursts particularly were anxious to dispense with self-effacement in the face of what they saw as the pressing need for deeds over words. I admit I’m not sure what I think of the Rush’s implied assertion that the WSPU’s goals, aside from their slogans, would necessarily marry up with those of climate change activists in 2011 (Emmeline Pankhurst did, after all, stand as a Tory candidate, when all was said and done, and the upper echelons of the WSPU did little to help working class women such as Dora Thewlis).

Perhaps the most interesting of these modern takes on early 20th century protest propaganda is Climate Rush activist and artist Cordelia Cembrowicz’s lithographs which feature a more diverse range of women than the many iterations of Rosie.

I do wonder what will be on our posters next. Are we done yet, in these trying times of savage cuts that themselves remind of past eras, with suffrage and sainthood, with rivets and rolled curls? Should we be? I’m not sure.

I’ll be on some of the demos, finding out.

]]> /2011/09/22/revolting-women-joan-of-arc-rosie-the-riveter-and-the-feminist-protest-icon/feed/ 2 7321 /2011/09/21/revolting-women-genevieve-pastre/ /2011/09/21/revolting-women-genevieve-pastre/#comments Wed, 21 Sep 2011 08:00:37 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=7466 This post is part of a series on the theme of women and protest. The full series is collected under the tag “Revolting Women”. Thank you to Sophie of Clamorous Voice for this guestpost!

Geneviève Pastre is France’s leading lesbian activist, poet, writer and philosopher. Born in 1924, she is responsible in a large measure for the creation of the Gay Liberation Movement in France.

Despite the list of titles above, Pastre herself refuses any simple political identity, declaring “Je ne suis pas une activiste. Je suis poéte et danseuse” (I am not an activist. I am a poet and a dancer). Nevertheless, she has also been a journalist, radio broadcaster, publisher, mime artist and theatre director.

Pastre’s coming-out, at the age of 56, followed successful careers as an academic, theatre practitioner and poet. Born in French-occupied Mainz after the First World War, Pastre was educated at the Sorbonne, then became a high school teacher. While in Paris, Pastre studied mime with Marcel Marceau and Jacques Lecoq; between 1960 and 1976, Pastre also directed a theatre troupe, which would eventually take her name: Compagnie Geneviève Pastre.

It was during her time as a director that Pastre began gaining recognition as a poet, subsequently publishing ten poetry collections between 1972 and 2005. In 1976, having privately begun to live with a woman, she began agitating for lesbian rights in France. Her official coming-out was a declaration in print: the 1980 essay on female sexuality, De L’Amour lesbien (About Lesbian Love).

By 2000, Pastre had published a further five books, including historical works. As the titles of Homosexuality in the Ancient World and Athens and the Sapphic Peril suggest, Pastre was one of the first feminist theorists to deconstruct classical myths. Challenging the dominance of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, she argued that Foucault – and with him the male academy – had misinterpreted both ancient languages and lesbian sexuality.

Pastre’s greatest contribution, however, has undoubtedly been to the transformation of queer rights, and thus queer life, in France. A year before coming out in the pages of De L’Amour lesbien, Pastre co-founded Comité d’Urgence Anti-Répression Homosexuelle (CUARH). Mobilising the smaller, disparate French gay rights groups that already existed – including David et Jonathan (gay Christians), and Beit Haverim (gay Jews) – CUARH organised a massive protest on 4th April 1981. 10,000 French LGBT people and allies joined what has since been recognised as France’s first ever gay rights march, campaigning for homosexual sex (decriminalised since the French revolution) to have the same age of consent as for heterosexuals.

Such was the strength of the CUARH protest that a few days later, the French president, Mitterrand, pledged to fulfil their demands. In 1982, Geneviève Pastre organised, with CUARH, France’s first ever Gay Pride celebrations; the organisation went on to fight against homophobia in the workplace and in the adoption process.

The 1980s were Pastre’s most prolific decade, touching almost every area of queer life in France and beyond. In 1982, within months of helping to found France’s Gay Pride movement, Pastre became the president of Frequence Gaie, FM Paris’s gay-interest radio station. Despite leaving FG in 1984, she continued to host a weekly show on Radio Libertaire, showcasing other French queer and feminist activists. In the world of publishing, Pastre not only founded Editions G. Pastre, a press dedicated to progressive and feminist authors, but also Les Octaviennes, a collective for lesbian authors active in France.

However, it was in 1995 that Pastre stepped even further into the political arena, founding Les Mauves, known in English as the “Lavender Party”. Although their most high-profile campaign – to run a candidate in the 2002 presidential election – failed, Les Mauves have campaigned successfully on national and international issues. Pastre’s party helped successfully persuade the World Health Organisation to declassify homosexuality as a mental illness; similarly, France was, in 1999, the first country to remove transsexualism from a national list of mental disorders. Pressure from Les Mauves also contributed to Amnesty International’s decision to support banned homosexuality as one of the grounds for seeking asylum.

At the age of 87, Pastre continues to write extensively on arts, politics and queer history: she has also organised festivals of queer culture, including the 1990 Festival européen de l’écriture gaie et lesbienne, in Paris. Active worldwide in the feminist and queer rights movements, Pastre’s influence can be felt not only in French activism, theatre, academia and publishing, but internationally. Beyond her enviable contributions to French culture, her work with Les Mauves has helped transform the status, rights and prospects of LGBT people around the world. No revolting woman could have done more.

Further Reading:

• Pastre’s blog (now an archive, in French, and if you do read French try this post, pour reflechir: le projet des Politides ou Mauves)
• Biographies of Pastre: Poezibao (in French) and glbtq.com (English)
• Band of Thebes feature on Pastre (from 2007, in English)
• Overview of gay rights in France (aimed at LGBT tourists and immigrants, in English)
• CUARH’s manifesto (1980, in French)
• Amazon UK author page

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• Read more from Sophie at Clamorous Voice
]]> /2011/09/21/revolting-women-genevieve-pastre/feed/ 1 7466 /2011/09/20/revolting-women-women2drive-in-saudi-arabia/ /2011/09/20/revolting-women-women2drive-in-saudi-arabia/#comments Tue, 20 Sep 2011 08:00:28 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=6019 This post is part of a series on the theme of women and protest. The full series is collected under the tag “Revolting Women”.

So, this happened.

In case you’ve been on the other side of the moon these past few months, the media’s much-touted Arab Spring had an interesting tangent via a discussion in the Saudi Council on whether women in Saudi Arabia should be allowed the vote. They eventually decided that yes, they probably should… eventually. We wouldn’t want to rush these things. They won’t be able to contest the elections, of course, but least – if King Abdullah considers the recommendations – they may be able to cast a vote in the municipal elections.

Except that this small pittance of representation didn’t seem to be satisfactory for women in Saudi Arabia. So… well, see for yourselves. Here is Manal al-Sharif driving in Saudi Arabia, and discussing what it means for her to do so.

She was arrested and imprisoned for 10 days for daring to drive.

She’s not the only one. There’s an entire site of these vids (in fact, more than one): women driving in Saudi Arabia, in protest at… well, mostly not being allowed to drive. Here’s a twitter feed of them doing it in style. In fact, June 17 saw 30 or 40 women behind the wheel, following weeks of an online campaign that saw women taping or photographing themselves driving. (If you’re wondering whether 30-40 people is a lot, consider what happened the last time women tested this ban. Think about what ‘punishment’ means in Saudi Arabia. Then try to imagine being one of those women out there on 17 June.)

There is, of course, a danger to conflating correlation and causality. Yes, women protesting by driving happened to take place at about the same time that women’s voting rights were being revived for discussion in Saudi Arabia. It could have been a massive coincidence, and 30-40 women, however courageous, hardly make up a political movement all by themselves. And anyway, what does driving have to do with political representation?

The Times‘s Janice Turner is pretty clear where she stands in a now-paywalled article titled The Freedom of the Road is a Feminist Issue. Consider being a woman in Saudi Arabia. Ignore all the discussions about political representation for the moment, and focus instead on the daily grind. You get up, you get dressed, you have to go to work or to the market or whatever. Luckily, your husband has hired you a car with your very own (male) driver… and should he feel perfectly comfortable in sexually assaulting you, there is nothing you can do about it.

Or how about you forgo the potential dubious safety of a hired car and opt for a taxi. Prepare to walk the streets trying to hail one: streets where your mere presence outdoors may be cast as a sexual provocation. Inevitably, in trying to lock women away ‘for their own protection’, lest they be seen by vociferous male eyes, the Wahhabi religious laws have created a space so deeply hostile and threatening to women that their mere presence is transgressive. It is little wonder, then, that Manal al-Sharif talks about how safe she feels in her car, with her doors locked.

A person’s first car has always symbolised their freedom: be it at 17, with their newly-minted license and the entirety of the countryside filled with welcoming ditches to drive it into, or at 50, with a newly-issued divorce and a hesitant rediscovery of independent living. A woman who has a car gets to choose the place she is occupying. If she wants to leave, she is not dependent on anyone else. What could be more terrifying to the Saudi religious leaders? Never mind that neither the Koran nor the law bans women from driving; they were so terrified at the freedom driving would afford women that they went ahead and issued a fatwa just to be safe.



New Saudi Arabia's traffic sign (women2drive). (Image = public domain via wiki. Created by Carlos Latuff)

So what actually happened on June 17th, when these 30-40 women took to the road? Did governments fall or cities rock? Reports differ. For one thing, no one can agree on the number. Even the Guardian seems confused, using the 30-40 figure in one article, and “at least 45” in another. The government of Saudi Arabia is in flat-out denial, refusing to acknowledge that the protest happened at all (despite a traffic ticket being issued).

Two weeks on, five of the drivers were arrested, despite early comments from the government that they would allow their families to ‘deal with them‘. Despite this, campaigners are not deterred, continuing to maintain a significant social media presence. And even before the protest took place the Shoura declare that they were ready to discuss women driving “if requested“. I’m thinking that women risking arrest in order to parallel park in Riyadh would qualify as such.

Meanwhile, Manal al-Sharif hasn’t given up. Since her release from custody, the former prisoner of conscience has been spearheading a movement to teach more and more women how to drive. With the moderate King Abdullah on the throne, and the authorities apparently turning a blind eye to the recent on-road excursions by three women during Eid, it looks like the driving ban may not be in place for much longer.

 

]]> /2011/09/20/revolting-women-women2drive-in-saudi-arabia/feed/ 1 6019 /2011/09/19/revolting-women-la-pasionaria-or-the-woman-who-fought-franco/ /2011/09/19/revolting-women-la-pasionaria-or-the-woman-who-fought-franco/#comments Mon, 19 Sep 2011 08:00:36 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=7385 This post is part of a series on the theme of women and protest. The full series is collected under the tag “Revolting Women”.

“¡No pasarán!”
(‘They shall not pass!’)

-Dolores Ibárruri, July 19, 1936 (Madrid, Spain)



Dolores Ibárruri age 82

No, not Gandalf: La Pasionaria.  Or, ‘The Passion Flower’ in English.  Before I continue to talk about Ibárruri, I acknowledge that I’m a bit of a giddy schoolchild when it comes to praising anything Basque in a public sphere and that having a Hispanic Studies degree means I take some knowledge for granted.  So some background information is probably going to be pretty useful for you all.

The Spanish Civil War began in 1936 when General Francisco Franco led troops in an attempted coup d’état against the Second Republic. Although the government were caught unawares and significant numbers of Spain’s army were behind Franco, the events of July 1936 turned into a three year civil war.  Having written several thousand words on the subject during the course of my degree, I could go into much greater detail but I don’t want to detract from our main focus.  Basics to remember: Franco et al were far-right/fascist; the Second Republic was left/socialist.  Now we can move on to our woman of the hour.

Isidora Dolores Ibárruri Gómez was born on 9^th December 1895 in Gallarta, within the borders of the Basque Country in Spain, into a poor mining family.  In 1918 she adopted the pseudonym ‘Pasionaria’ on the publication of an article, highlighting religious hypocrisy, which coincided with Holy Week in a devotedly Catholic country.  In 1920 she was appointed as a member of the Provincial Committee of the Basque Communist Party and in 1930 moved up to the Central Committee of the PCE (Communist Party of Spain).  In ’31 she moved to Madrid alongside the formation of the Second Republic and was jailed in September ’31 for the first in several arrests over the following five years.

There are many amazing things that she did as a prominent pre-war communist woman in politics in Spain, and for a succinct overview of them all I urge you to have a look over on her Wikipedia entry.  There’s only so much I can say within one article and I want to focus on her wartime contributions to the fight against Franco and fascism.

During the war she was, above all, an astounding orator and a passionate figurehead for the men and women trying desperately to battle Franco’s advances.  As a communist she was no stranger to strong retaliations against her speeches and actions, but during the Civil War she became much more than just a voice for communism.  She became a central figure for the Republicans trying to push fascism back and defend Spain against Franco.

The whole country cringes in indignation at these heartless barbarians that would hurl our democratic Spain back down into an abyss of terror and death. However, THEY SHALL NOT PASS! For all of Spain presents itself for battle.

[…] The Communist Party calls you to arms. We especially call upon you, workers, farmers, intellectuals to assume your positions in the fight to finally smash the enemies of the Republic and of the popular liberties. Long live the Popular Front! Long live the union of all anti-fascists! Long live the Republic of the people! The Fascists shall not pass! THEY SHALL NOT PASS!

– Dolores Ibárruri, No Pasarán speech (translated here)

• Youtube:an original speech
• Youtube: Maxine Peake reading her International Brigades’ sendoff speech

 



La Pasionaria statue in Glasgow

Most people will know, however, that Franco won.  Ibárruri spent much of her life thereafter in exile, but returned to Madrid in 1977 and lived in Spain for the remaining 12 years of her life.  On her 90^th birthday, the PCE organised a party in Madrid with upwards of 15,000 guests; when she died of pneumonia at age 93 thousands of people paid their respects and attended her funeral, where they chanted “They shall not pass!”. The life and actions of La Pasionaria were felt internationally (e.g. there’s a statue of her in Glasgow) and there remains strong opinion on both sides of the political spectrum on her in Spain (if you read Spanish, have a glance at some of the comments on the YouTube video).

I know this has been brief, but there is plenty more to discover for yourself; I am only here to open the door.

It is better to die on your feet than to live forever on your knees.

– La Pasionaria

Sources and further reading (other than Wikipedia)

• Daniele Conversi, The Basques, The Catalans and Spain: Alternative Routes to Nationalist Mobilisation (2000)
• Helen Graham, The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction (2005)
• Paul Preston, The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution and Revenge (2006)
]]> /2011/09/19/revolting-women-la-pasionaria-or-the-woman-who-fought-franco/feed/ 3 7385 /2011/09/16/a-second-revolting-women-linkpost/ /2011/09/16/a-second-revolting-women-linkpost/#respond Fri, 16 Sep 2011 08:00:18 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=7402 comes to a close today!]]> Week two of Revolting Women comes to a close today! We’ve got one week to go, and then we’re back to normal service (or possibly a leetle bit longer than that depending on who else is Seized By The Muse between now and then). Hey there to any new readers we’ve picked up! We hope you’ll stick around. Here are some thematically-relevant links sent in by various of Team BR and by you lot.
• Maegan of the wonderful Tara Books sent us this blogpost on Sultana’s Dream – “a feminist parable that inverted the norms of late colonial Bengal.”
• Nancy Upton takes a swing at American Apparel.
• Egypt’s Revolution through the eyes of five women
• Let’s picket the Tory Party Conference on October 2, people!
]]> /2011/09/16/a-second-revolting-women-linkpost/feed/ 0 7402 /2011/09/15/revolting-women-harriet-beecher-stowe/ /2011/09/15/revolting-women-harriet-beecher-stowe/#comments Thu, 15 Sep 2011 08:00:59 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=7319 This post is part of a series on the theme of women and protest. The full series is collected under the tag “Revolting Women”. Welcome back to guest blogger Libby from TreasuryIslands.

Women have played their part in revolution since time immemorial. The Trung Sisters rebelled against Han-Dynasty rule in China, 40AD; Boudicca led the Iceni tribe in uprising against occupying Roman forces in 60AD; Queen Margaret of Anjou fought for the crown, successfully, at the battle of Tewkesbury in 1471; Lorenza Avemanay led the Ecuadorian revolt against the Spanish in 1803. Women have proven themselves to be worthy opponents on the battlefield and in the halls of power. Harriet Beecher Stowe, though, did none of these things: she wasn’t possessed of great oratory skills, or handy with a sword, and she didn’t lead a great army, nor overthrow an oppressor. She wrote a book.

One of thirteen children, Stowe grew up in a deeply Christian family. Her father and seven brothers were all ministers, and when she married in 1836, she chose as her husband a scholar and theologian who was much respected by his peers. From the beginning of their marriage the Stowes were ardent critics of slavery. Their first home became a part of the Underground Railroad, temporarily housing numerous runaway slaves on their journey to asylum in Canada. Stowe began to write articles addressing the problem of slavery and making a name for herself as an abolitionist who didn’t run with the pack.

This might have been the extent of Stowe’s abolitionist activities had it not been for the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.

Is it true that they have been passing a law forbidding people to give meat and drink to those poor colored folks that come along? I heard they were talking of some such law, but I didn’t think any Christian legislature would pass it!

– Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ch. 9

The act underlined the illegality of harbouring fugitive slaves and ensured that anyone who did not aid in the capture of fugitive slaves was criminalised too. For Stowe, this was entirely at odds with the teachings of Christianity. The law may punish those who work against the slave trade, but Christian law was above that; “Love worketh no ill to his neighbour,” said the Bible, “therefore love is the fulfilling of the law” (Romans 13:10). Stowe’s abolitionist philosophy is one of the natural rights of individuals – it is the philosophy of Hobbes, of Locke and of the founding fathers and a philosophy written into the Declaration of Independence: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights. That among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.


It was clear to Stowe that slavery denied huge numbers of people these rights. She wrote in a letter to Lord Denman in 1853,

[A]s a woman, as a mother I was oppressed and broken-hearted, with the sorrows and injustice I saw, because as a Christian I felt the dishonor to Christianity — because as a lover of my country I trembled at the coming day of wrath. It is no merit in the sorrowful that they weep, or
to the oppressed and smothering that they gasp and struggle, not to me, that I must speak for the oppressed — who cannot speak for themselves.

As a woman, Stowe could not effect change by voting or being elected to public office. But she could write. When Gamaliel Bailey, editor of abolitionist newspaper the National Era, offered Stowe $100 to pen a special antislavery piece, she already had a story in mind. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published serially in the National Era beginning in May 1851. When she began writing, Stowe could not have anticipated the impact it would have.

Reading the book today, the text of Uncle Tom’s Cabin contains troubling racist stereotyping in itself – I re-read it in its entirity recently and blogged the experience in more depth here on my own blog; this post forms a sort of companion piece.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin centres around the lives of a group of slaves working on an Kentucky plantation. The book opens with a discussion between owners Shelby and Haley over the sale of two slaves. Though Shelby’s wife is not happy, the sale nevertheless goes ahead.

The slaves in question are the eponymous Uncle Tom, a good man and devout Christian, and young Harry, the only surviving son of house slave Eliza. The narrative follows them as they leave Kentucky, Tom on a ship bound for Ohio, and Eliza and her son as escapees pursued by professional slave catchers. Throughout their journeys Tom and Eliza witness the cruelties and indignities of slavery: Eliza is refused help for fear of repercussions; Tom witnesses a suicide and hears of slave babies bred to be sold. When he is sold to a particularly cruel master Tom finds violence not only from owners, but among the slaves themselves, an indignity that suggests that those who are oppressed by the system lose both self-respect and any perspective of right or wrong.

While revealing the brutalities visited upon slaves from inhumane masters, the novel also relentlessly mocks the hypocrisies of so-called ‘benign’ slave holders, represented by Shelby, who, though they are not violent and cruel themselves, support those slave holders who are less kindly and keep the system running. Slaves were, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and in life, under constant physical and psychological assault.

Stowe made sure, too, to implicate the world at large in the horrors of the slave trade. She directs the story to her readers, referring to ‘us’ and things ‘we’ think. Readers were therefore in cahoots with Stowe from the very beginning, so when she asks of her readers, ‘But sir, who makes the Trader?’ (ch. 12) readers would be bound into guilt, and with good reason. Not just in America but elsewhere too, households profited from the exploitation of slaves; they bought sugar, they milled cotton. Stowe could not have used better means to galvanise support among white American moderates.

The novel was released as a two volume book in 1852. The original print run of 5000 was woefully inadequate: in the first year, 300,000 copies were sold in the US, more than 1 million in the UK. Opinion was divided. According to Richard Yarborough, quoted in this paper by RS Levin, freed slaves viewed the novel as “a godsend destined to mobilize white sentiment against slavery just when resistance to the southern forces was urgently needed”, while for abolitionists it was a vindication. Readers south of the Mason-Dixon Line were more likely to find the novel sensationalist and unjust – slavery was a much bigger part of their way of life.

Following the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin support for the abolition movement grew. Minstrel shows and stage plays based on the book – ‘Tom Shows’ as they came to be known – became popular, bringing Stowe’s message to a wider audience, and transcending barriers of class and literacy. Inevitably, some Tom Shows took on a pro-slavery stance, but this does not seem to have diluted the effect of the work on the populace. The now famous author began speaking tours, even visiting the UK in her attempt to bring abolitionism to a wider and wider audience.

The abolitionist movement continued to grow. When Abraham Lincoln won his Presidency in 1860 it was on a platform of antislavery, so when eleven pro-slavery states seceded to form the Confederacy in 1861 war seemed suddenly inevitable. Of course, slavery was not the sole cause of the American Civil War; there was a significant difference in culture, economy and industry between Northern and Southern states and disagreements over federal rule versus state autonomy too. Despite these factors, when the fighting began it became clear: this was a battle between pro- and anti-slavery states. When Stowe visited Lincoln in 1862 he is reputed to have said to her, “So, you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.”

Slavery was finally abolished in the United States in 1865 with the Thirteenth Amendment, which put an end to all involuntary servitude save for those convicted of a crime and freed 40,000 or so slaves that had not been granted their freedom in previous state-by-state laws.

In later years images from Margaret Mitchell’s adapted Gone With the Wind (1936) would supersede those of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the popular imagination as the picture of the antebellum South. No doubt both have some degree of accuracy, but it is Uncle Tom’s Cabin that changed the opinion of a nation.

• Libby earned her feminist stripes interning for the Fawcett Society where she was horrified by most of the stories she heard. An accidental activist, she is a regular contributor to BCN, the UK’s only 100% bisexual publication. Her latest project, TreasuryIslands, is the home of her other passion – children’s literature. Libby is very proud of her bad reputation.
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