Feminism and Protest Camps: Entanglements, Critiques and Re-Imaginings

Feminism and
Protest Camps
______
E n ta n g l e m e n t s , C r i t i q u e s
a n d Re - I m a g i n i n g s
______
edited by
Catherine Eschle
A l i s o n B a rt l e t t
FEMINISM AND
PROTEST CAMPS
Entanglements, Critiques and Re-Imaginings
Edited by
Catherine Eschle and Alison Bartlett
First published in Great Britain in 2023 by
Bristol University Press

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Contents
List of Figures and Tables v

Notes on Contributors vi
Acknowledgements xii
1 Introduction: Feminism/Protest Camps 1

PART I Gendered Power and Identities in Protest Camps

2 Safe Spaces and Solidarity: Confronting Gendered 17
Violence in the US Occupy Encampments
Celeste Montoya
3 The Pu‘u We Planted: (Re)birthing Refuge at Mauna Kea 37
Māhealani Ahia and Kahala Johnson
4 ‘You Can’t Kill the Spirit’ (But You Can Try): Gendered 61
Contestations and Contradictions at Menwith Hill
Women’s Peace Camp
Finn Mackay
5 Women Activists, Gendered Power and Postfeminism in 78
Taiwan’s ‘Sunflower Movement’
Chia-Ling Yang
PART II Feminist Politics in and through Protest Camps

6 The Feminist Movement in Turkey and the Women 99
of the Gezi Park Protests
Yeşim Arat
7 Feminism and Protest Camps in Spain: From the 115
Indignados to Feminist Encampments
Emma Gómez Nicolau
8 ‘Why the Compost Toilets?’: Ecofeminist (Re)Generations 135
at the HoriZone Ecovillage
Joan Haran
iii
Feminism and Protest Camps
PART III Feminist Theorising and Protest Camps

9 Protest Camps as ‘Homeplace’? Social Reproduction in 157
and against Neoliberal Capitalism
Catherine Eschle
10 Project Democracy in Protest Camps: Caring, the 176
Commons and Feminist Democratic Theory
Anastasia Kavada
11 Feminised and Decolonising Reoccupations, Re-existencias 195
and Escrevivências: Learning from Women’s Movement
Collectives in Northeast Brazil
Sara C. Motta, Sandra Maria Gadelha de Carvalho,
Claudiana Nogueira de Alencar and Mila Nayane da Silva
PART IV The Feminist Afterlives of Protest Camps

12 Feminism on Aboriginal Land: The 1983 Pine Gap 217
Women’s Peace Camp, Central Australia
Alison Bartlett
13 Remembering an Eco/Feminist Peace Camp 235
Niamh Moore
14 US Occupy Encampments and Their Feminist 256
Tensions: Archiving for Contemporary ‘Big-Tent’ Social
Movements
Heather McKee Hurwitz and Anne Kumer
15 Greenham Women Everywhere: A Feminist Experiment 273
in Recreating Experience and Shaping Collective Memory
Kate Kerrow, Rebecca Mordan, Vanessa Pini and Jill (Ray)
Raymond, with Alison Bartlett and Catherine Eschle
16 Conclusion: Rethinking Protest Camps, Rethinking 294

Feminism
Index 308
iv
List of Figures and Tables
Figures
3.1 Puʻuhonua o Puʻuhuluhulu 38
3.2 Hale Wahine and Hale Māhū at Puʻuhonua o Puʻuhuluhulu 42
3.3 Authors at Puʻuhonua o Puʻuhuluhulu during the 2020 camp 57
reunion
4.1 Radomes at Menwith Hill, Yorkshire, November 2005 62
4.2 Moonbow Corner camp as it was when I first visited 65
5.1 Men centre stage in the Main Chamber during the 3/18 84
Movement parliamentary occupation
7.1 The #OrditFeminista encampment, Valencia, 8 March 2020 124
7.2 ‘Free abortion’ demand poster on a tent 125
7.3 Open activities in the camp 127
8.1 Learning circle at the EAT residential course, 2016 141
8.2 Starhawk teaching at the EAT residential course, 2016 141
9.1 Occupy Glasgow tents in George Square 165
9.2 Faslane Peace Camp 168
13.1 Temperate rainforest with moss growing on branches 236
13.2 Moonscape 237
13.3 Logging truck 238
13.4 Woman standing beside a tree in the forest 245
Table
5.1 Interview participants 81
v
Notes on Contributors
Māhealani Ahia is a PhD student in English (Hawaiʻi/Pacific Literature)

at the University of Hawaiʻi Mānoa. Los Angeles-born, Māhea is a Kanaka
Maoli artist, scholar, activist, songcatcher and storykeeper with lineal ties
to Maui. With a background in theatre arts, writing and performance,
she is committed to creating artistic and academic projects that empower
Indigenous feminist decolonial research. She teaches Composition, Creative
Writing and Indigenous Literatures, and edits Hawaiʻi Review and ʻŌiwi: A
Native Hawaiian Journal. A founding member of Puʻuhuluhulu University and
the caretaker of Hale Mauna Wahine at Mauna Kea, Māhea is co-organiser
of the Mauna Kea Syllabus Project.
Claudiana Nogueira de Alencar currently works on the PhD Program

in Applied Linguistics (POSLA) and on the Master’s in Education and
Teaching (MAIE) at the State University of Ceará (UECE), Northeast Brazil.
Claudiana coordinates the Program Viva a Palavra: dynamics of language,
peace and resistance of Black youth of Fortaleza’s outskirts. Her research
on Critical Linguistics and Decolonial Pedagogy focuses on the cultural
grammars of resistance and survival of youth in the urban landscape.
Yeşim Arat is Professor of Political Science and International Relations

at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. She has published widely on the women’s
movement and women’s political participation in Turkey, including
Rethinking Islam and Liberal Democracy: Islamist Women in Turkish Politics
(2005) and Violence Against Women in Turkey (with Ayse Gul Altınay, Punto,
2008) which won the 2008 Pen Duygu Asena Award. Most recently, she
published Turkey: Between Democracy and Authoritarianism (with Şevket Pamuk,
Cambridge University Press, 2019). Yeşim is a founding member of KADER
(Association for the Support and Training of Women Candidates).
Alison Bartlett is Senior Honorary Research Fellow in English and Literary

Studies (now retired) at The University of Western Australia. Her archival
research on Pine Gap Women’s Peace Camp is widely published. She has
also published books on Australian women’s writing, maternal culture, and
vi
flirting in the era of #metoo, and edited volumes on Australian feminist

objects, museum studies, social memory, Australian literature, and more.
She has worked with the National Museum of Australia on feminist activist
legacies and memorialisation, been Chair of the Australian Women’s and
Gender Studies Association, and Editor of Outskirts journal.
Sandra Maria Gadelha de Carvalho currently works in the Faculty of

Philosophy and Education Dom Aureliano Matos (FAFIDAM) at the State
University of Ceará (UECE), Northeast Brazil, where she co-founded and
leads the Intercampus Masters in Education and Teaching (MAIE). Sandra’s
research is on education and social movements, particularly in relation
to popular education and Paulo Freire’s pedagogy. She was president of
the Union of Higher Education Workers (2018–21) and has decades of
experience working with pedagogical development and women’s solidarity
economy projects in the Movimento Sem Terra (MST, Landless Workers’
Movement), Brazil.
Catherine Eschle is Senior Lecturer in the School of Government and

Public Policy, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. In addition to her
award-winning research on feminism and protest camps, she has published
extensively on feminist ‘anti-globalisation’ and anti-nuclear activism. Her
publications include Making Feminist Sense of the Global Justice Movement
(with Bice Maiguashca, Rowman & Littlefield, 2010) and a special section
of International Affairs on ‘Feminist Interrogations of Global Nuclear Politics’
(co-edited with Shine Choi, 2022). Catherine has served as co-editor of the
International Feminist Journal of Politics and on the executive of the feminist
section of the International Studies Association.
Emma Gómez Nicolau is Lecturer in Sociology at the department

of Philosophy and Sociology at the University Jaume I, Castelló de la
Plana, Spain. Emma is part of the research group DESiRES –Sociology
and Methodology Studies of Inequalities and Resistances, and has been a
visiting scholar at Cardiff University (2013) and City, University of London
(2021). Her research interests are feminisms, menstrual and health activism,
and youth studies. She is author of Re-writing Women as Victims: From
Theory to Practice (Routledge, 2020) and ‘Trajectories of Embodiment and
Counter-Hegemonic Readings of the Body’ (Recerca: Revista de pensament
i anàlisi, 2022).
Joan Haran is Honorary Research Fellow with the School of Social

Sciences, Cardiff University. In 2022, she was an IASH-SSPS Research
Fellow in the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University
of Edinburgh, working on the project Feminist Stories in Movement. She
vii
held a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellowship at the Centre for the

Study of Women in Society, University of Oregon (2015–18) and at Cardiff
University investigated the cross-fertilisation of fictional or artistic cultural
productions with social and political activism. Publications include Genomic
Fictions: Genes, Gender and Genre (University of Wales Press, forthcoming).
Heather McKee Hurwitz is Project Staff (faculty) in the Department

of Hematology and Medical Oncology, Cleveland Clinic Taussig Cancer
Institute, and Clinical Associate Professor of Medicine at Cleveland
Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University
in Cleveland, Ohio. Heather has long participated in and studied social
movements, including global justice, feminist and anti-war movements.
Currently, her research focuses on cancer disparities, prevention, community
outreach and the social determinants of health. She is author of Are We the
99%? The Occupy Movement, Feminism, and Intersectionality (Temple University
Press, 2020), and led the creation of the open-source Occupy Archive.
Kahala Johnson is a PhD candidate in Indigenous Politics and Futures

Studies, with a graduate certificate in Women’s Studies at the University of
Hawaiʻi Mānoa. Their research focuses on gender queer and poly decolonial
love. Kahala is from Nā Wai ʻEhā, Maui, and calls themself a Hina-kiaʻi-
mauna for Haleakalā. Kahala also resided for eight months on Mauna Kea as
a protector, served as founding member and coordinator for Puʻuhuluhulu
University as well as co-founder and kahu (caretaker) of the Hale Mauna
Māhū, recounted in the ‘Native Stories’ podcast interview series. Their
dissertation examines decolonised futures of the Hawaiian Kingdom.
Anastasia Kavada is Reader in Media and Politics at the University of

Westminster, UK, and leads the MA in Media, Campaigning and Social
Change. Her research focuses on the relationship between digital media,
advocacy groups and social movements. Interests include the role of the
internet in alternative practices of democracy; processes of organising,
decision-making and collective identity formation; and how online tools
affect activists’ interaction with targets of their campaigns and the media. She
has published on Occupy, Avaaz and the Indignant Movement in Greece,
in journals such as Information, Communication & Society; Media, Culture and
Society; and Communication Theory.
Kate Kerrow is a writer, researcher and lecturer, and the founder of the
women’s history archive The Heroine Collective (http://www.theheroinecol
lective.com). She co-created the Greenham Women Everywhere archive
with Rebecca Mordan, collating the largest collection of oral testimonies
from the 19-year campaign, and co-writing Out of the Darkness: Greenham
viii
Voices 1981–2000 (History Press, 2021) which brings these testimonies

to print.
Anne Kumer is Interim Team Leader, Technical Services at Case Western

Reserve University, Ohio. She collaborates with library departments, faculty
and students to design and implement metadata schema that will enhance
the search and discovery of electronic resources and digital collections.
She develops long-term solutions for improved metadata management,
enrichment and interoperability, with a vested interest in the changing
landscape of item-and collection-level description as it relates to digital
resources, advocating for consistent, equitable and inclusive cataloguing
practices for library collections in all formats. A former archivist and
taxonomist, she holds an MLIS from Simmons College.
Finn Mackay is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of the West

of England, Bristol, and the author of Radical Feminism: Activism in Movement
(Palgrave, 2015) and Female Masculinities and the Gender Wars (Bloomsbury,
2021). Finn has been involved in feminist activism for over 20 years, founding
the London Feminist Network in 2004 and working to revive the London
Reclaim the Night march. Previously, Finn worked in policy on domestic
abuse prevention education and anti-bullying. They are a Trustee of the
Feminist Archive, an Ambassador for the Worker’s Educational Association
and a Trustee of the British Sociological Association.
Celeste Montoya is Associate Professor in Women’s and Gender Studies at

the University of Colorado, Boulder. Celeste’s research focuses on the ways
in which women and racialised groups mobilise to enact change, and how
these groups work within and outside of political institutions, domestically,
transnationally and intersectionally. Her work is informed by studies of
social movements, public policy, political institutions, political behaviour,
and gender and race politics. She is author of From Global to Grassroots: The
European Union, Transnational Advocacy, and Combating Violence Against Women
(Oxford University Press, 2013) and co-editor of Gendered Mobilizations and
Intersectional Challenges (ECPR Press, 2019).
Niamh Moore is an interdisciplinary feminist researcher in the School of

Social and Political Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Scotland. She has
published extensively on ecofeminism, including the book The Changing
Nature of Eco/feminism: Telling Stories from Clayoquot Sound (UBC Press,
2015). She has also published widely on methods and ethics in research,
co-authoring The Archive Project: Doing Archival Research in the Social Sciences
and co-editing Participatory Research in More-than-Human Worlds (both
Routledge, 2017). Her forthcoming book, DIY Academic Archiving (with
ix
Dunne, Hanlon and Karels) draws on the experience of creating the online
archive, Clayoquot Lives: An Ecofeminist Story Web.
Rebecca Mordan is Artistic Director of Scary Little Girls (https://scary

littlegirls.co.uk) and a graduate of the Bristol Old Vic. She founded Scary
Little Girls in response to the dearth of diverse roles and opportunities
for women in the performing arts. She is an experienced writer, director,
producer and performer, with her work appearing in the BBC’s Cornish
Voices Writers Room and on BBC Radio 4. With Kate Kerrow, she co-
created Greenham Women Everywhere (https://g reen hamw omen ever ywh
ere.co.uk) and co-authored Out of the Darkness: Greenham Voices 1981–2000
(History Press, 2021). Rebecca has been an anti-war and feminist activist
since her childhood at Greenham Common.
Sara C. Motta is a proud Mestiza-salvaje of Colombia-Chibcha/Muisca,

Eastern European Jewish and Celtic lineages currently living, loving and
resisting on the unceded lands of the Awabakal and Worimi peoples, NSW,
so-called Australia. She is mother, survivor of state and intimate violence,
poet, bare-breasted philosopher, popular educator and Associate Professor at
the University of Newcastle, NSW. Sara has long worked with resistances in,
against and beyond heteronormative capitalist-coloniality from around the
world. Her latest book, Liminal Subjects: Weaving (Our) Liberation (Rowman
& Littlefield, 2018), won the 2020 best book award from the feminist section
of the International Studies Association.
Vanessa Pini has 15 years’ experience of teaching drama and leading in

schools. She is also a writer, performer and producer, and has staged her work
at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival as well as in her home city of Leeds. She
joined Scary Little Girls in April 2020 to work on the Greenham Women
Everywhere project.
Jill (Ray) Raymond was an artist and hand weaver until Greenham
Common Women’s Peace Camp sidetracked her life. In 1986 she moved into
an ex-MoD truck to ‘spend more time with her family’ at Bloo Gate. She
is now a trustee for Greenham Women Everywhere, interviews Greenham
women for the archive and is involved in the promotion and outreach of
the project.
Mila Nayane da Silva holds a degree in Pedagogy and a Master’s degree

in Education and Teaching, both from Ceará State University, Brazil. Mila
is a collaborating professor at LECAMPO in Dom Aureliano Matos Faculty
of Philosophy, at the campus in Limoeiro Norte. She develops research with
women from the Landless Rural Workers Movement (known as MST). She
x
is currently studying curriculum design and teaching methods to integrate

sexuality into early childhood education.
Chia-Ling Yang is Associate Professor at the Graduate Institute of Gender

Education, National Kaohsiung Normal University, Taiwan. Her research
interests include women in civil society, social movements in Taiwan and
migrant Chinese workers in Sweden. She has published on the gender politics
of the ‘Sunflower Movement’ in Social Movement Studies (2017).
xi
Acknowledgements
This book was mostly written and put together during the COVID-19
pandemic, during which time our academic lives were sharply reduced –
chiefly to our homes, the Zoom screen and email. As a result, the ideas in
this book did not travel far while in development and our acknowledgements
are briefer than they could have been. We would like to thank each other
for being there when needed, and our authors for sticking with us in
difficult times.
Pre-pandemic, in 2018, Alison spent study leave from the University of
Western Australia as a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced
Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, which enabled her to
meet Catherine, Joan and Niamh in person and spend some time talking
about mutual interests. Catherine thanks her colleagues in the Strathclyde
University Feminist Research Network (SUFRN) for inviting Alison to
give a talk on her research into the Pine Gap camp and for coming along
to the ‘brown bag’ research-in-progress session to give feedback on the
work that was eventually to morph into Chapter 9. Subsequently, a group
of us made it to the European Conference on Politics and Gender held
in Amsterdam in July 2019. Joan, Niamh, Heather, Rebecca, Yeşim and
Catherine presented very early drafts of our papers on a panel with a view
to exploring the possibility of an edited collection. We are grateful to the
conference organisers for that opportunity and to the audience for their
enthusiastic and constructive response. And we are particularly grateful for
the hospitality of Manuela Maiguashca and her family, who hosted several
of us for the duration of the conference, and to Bice Maiguashca for helping
to sort that out. The fact we decided to keep going and write a book is in
no small part due to what a great time was had in Amsterdam, courtesy of
the Maiguashcas.
Beyond that, we would like to express our thanks to our commissioning
editor Shannon Kneis for her enthusiasm for the project and her persistence
in those early stages when the idea was still in development, and to editorial
assistant Anna Richardson for her hard work shepherding the manuscript
through review and completion. We acknowledge the extensive feedback
from the anonymous reviewers for Bristol University Press –two for the
xii
newgenprepdf
Acknowledgements
proposal and one who read the initial manuscript in its entirety. We hope
we did justice to your comments. We would also like to thank the designer
of the wonderful cover for this book, Andrew Corbett, as well as Annie
Rose of Newgen for her forensic attention to detail and her patience with
the process of preparing the manuscript for publication. Finally, we are
enormously grateful to Janine Wiedel for permission to use her striking
image of Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp on the cover. You can
see more of Janine’s remarkable photographs of marginalised and resistant
communities at: https://archive.wiedel-photo-library.com/index
The book is dedicated to Alison’s daughter, Izzy Bartlett, and Catherine’s
mum, Sheila Eschle. Mum, your trips to Greenham continue to reverberate.
I am proud that you were part of feminist and peace-making history, and so
glad you sometimes took me along. And Izzy, thanks for coming with me
to Greenham decades after the camp finished just to see where it happened.
xiii
1
Introduction:
Feminism/Protest Camps
Like freshly sharpened pencils, red rings painted on sleek white,

the ready for business missiles line up efficiently in their silos
while the women’s peace camp sprawls in contrast the other
side of the fence. New circle of tents blooming colours onto the
empty scrubland … but those who live permanently here, it is
obvious, sleep under sheets of grubby plastic tarpaulin thrown
over a pegged down tree. … [W]omen have learned to live with
only the amount of stuff that can be held in your arms during
an eviction. ... Immediately it feels as though I have wandered
into an enchanted forest.
Jane Campbell1
Love or its sister/

forces has stained Cumhuriyet Caddesi
with blood but les pavés pressed
hand to hand dry flowers become barricades,
underneath, roots of the red apple.
We aren’t static, aren’t mad.
Come see what our revolution has done to us!
Andrea Brady2
This book asks feminist questions of protest camps. An increasingly important

social movement tactic, protest camps are set up by activists as a temporary
home in spaces that are politically useful, symbolically resonant or otherwise
important to a community, in order to facilitate action for specific political
ends and often to prefigure alternative ways of life. Camps can be spaces of
1
personal experimentation, radical lifestyle innovation and muddy, colourful

contrast with adjacent militarised or corporate structures, as indicated in Jane
Campbell’s testimony of her time at Greenham Common Women’s Peace
Camp in the UK. They can also be spaces of intense if fractured collective
identity formation and of violence from the state and other sources, as
intimated in the haunting imagery of Andrea Brady’s poem, written in
solidarity with activists protecting Gezi Park in Istanbul. While protest camps
have been much documented and analysed, as we will show later, this book
seeks to explore a dimension that been neglected in the academic literature.
It asks: how do the politics of gender intersect with other social identities
and power dynamics to shape protest camps? What happens when feminists
are involved in protest camps or set up their own? How can contemporary
feminism help us see afresh both the limitations and the potential of the
protest camp form? What are the legacies of past involvement in camps for
feminist theory and practice?
The contributors to this book answer such questions by together
examining a range of protest camps, including those at Gezi Park and
Greenham Common, as sites of gendered politics and feminist activism.
Propelled by feminist experiences, both negative and positive, in recent
camps across the world, the book is also rooted in the legacy for feminism
of western Cold War women’s peace camps like Greenham. Uniquely,
then, this collection brings together case studies of both women-only and
mixed-gender protest camps. Reflecting on these cases with the help of a
range of feminist theoretical and methodological tools, the contributors
from around the world offer the first sustained feminist analysis of the
possibilities and limitations of the protest camp form, as well as telling new
stories of feminist organising and agency.
In this three-part introductory chapter, we discuss the rationale for the
book by exploring the recent history of protest camps and explaining why
a feminist revisiting is necessary. We then outline the feminist lens shared, in
broad terms, by contributors. Finally, we explain the organising themes of
the book and highlight some of the empirical and conceptual contributions
of the chapters that follow.
Why a feminist book on protest camps?

Protest camps gained unprecedented prominence in 2011–12 as a crucial
element of a ‘global wave’ of mobilisation, also known as the ‘movement/
s of the squares’, centring on the occupation of public space. Beginning
with the iconic Tahrir Square camp, when the so-called ‘Arab Spring’
reached Egypt (Ramadan, 2013; Roccu, 2013), this global wave then
rolled on to Spain, where camps were established by Indignados in several
Spanish cities (Dhaliwal, 2012; Kaika and Karaliotas, 2016), and to Athens
2
Introduction
and the mobilisation of anti-austerity protestors in Syntagma Square camp

(Goutsos and Polymeneas, 2014; Kavada and Dimitriou, 2018). Shortly
afterward, the Occupy movement began in Wall Street, New York,
before spreading to many cities worldwide (Kohn, 2013; Graeber, 2013;
Lorey, 2014). Since then, high-profile encampments have been set up by
government critics in Gezi Park in Turkey, mentioned earlier (Ağartan,
2018); by participants in the 2014 Sunflower Movement in Taiwan and
Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong (Rowen, 2015; Yang, 2017; Wang
et al, 2018); at Standing Rock in the US in 2016 (Cappelli, 2018); at the
Extinction Rebellion climate change action in London in 2019 (Gayle,
2019); and in the democratisation protests in Khartoum, Sudan, the
same year (Morgan, 2019). Even in pandemic conditions, protest camps
remain irrefutably important to contemporary social movement struggles,
as evident in the camps set up in 2020 at road junctions across Bulgaria
as part of anti-government protests (Al Jazeera, 2020). Together, these
much-reported camps have brought renewed visibility to what is in fact a
long-held and widely practised social movement tactic of standing ground,
of occupying place.
It is thus unsurprising that camps have attracted burgeoning attention
from social movement scholars. Most notably, publications by Anna
Feigenbaum and colleagues have developed an innovative theoretical
framework for making sense of the dynamics, implications and potential
of protest camps (Feigenbaum et al, 2013; Frenzel et al, 2014; Brown et al,
2018). There has also been significant research into individual camps that
were part of the ‘global wave’ and beyond, as well as on the commonalities
or differences between them, and the political lessons that can be drawn
(see, for example, Ramadan, 2013; Sbicca and Perdue, 2014; Chabanet and
Royall, 2015; Ancelovici et al, 2016; Perugorría et al, 2016; Fernández-
Savater and Flesher Fominaya, 2017). Taken together, these diverse works
on protest camps constitute a substantial new academic field of literature.
Yet there is a glaring lacuna in this otherwise exciting research: with a few
exceptions (Feigenbaum et al, 2013: 215–17; English, 2018; Wang et al,
2018: 119–20, 124; Eschle, 2018), social movement scholarship remains
largely silent on gendered dynamics in camps and on feminist responses
and perspectives.
Existing feminist studies do not yet fill this gap –despite a growing,
vibrant body of academic feminist work on the phenomenon of women-
only peace camps in Europe, the US and Australia, in the later period of the
Cold War (for example, Krasniewicz, 1992; Roseneil, 1995, 2000; Bartlett,
2011; Feigenbaum, 2015; Eschle, 2017). Such work clearly shows how
participant re-creation of daily life in these camps, and their contestation
of state militarism, drew upon but also challenged norms of femininity and
heterosexuality, in a close if often conflictual relationship with the broader
3
contemporaneous feminist movement. However, there has as yet been very

little feminist scholarly attention to more recent mixed-gender camps, or
to protest camps as a distinctive mode of social movement activism and
political organising. Nor has feminist scholarship systematically considered
how participation in protest camps, whether women-only or mixed-gender,
and the exclusions and alliances forged in such spaces, have shaped the
development of feminist theory and practice more generally. Indeed, it can
be argued that participation in protest camps has been not only underplayed
in dominant stories of the history and development of feminism, but actively
disavowed (Moore, 2008, 2011).
This book begins from the assumption that a feminist study of protest
camps remains acutely necessary, for at least two reasons. Most obviously
from a feminist perspective, protest camps can be significant sites of gender-
based violence and inequality in activist communities, intertwining with and
compounded by heteronormative, racist and transphobic marginalisations. As
we discuss in the chapters that follow, many camps have seen high-profile,
well-documented incidences of rape, sexual violence and gender-based
harassment, along with other forms of marginalisation and silences, such as
the persistence of the gendered division of labour; racist stereotyping; hostility
to feminist, queer, anti-racist and trans interventions and their dismissal
as divisive ‘identity politics’; and White, male, straight, cis dominance of
speeches and other forms of communication (Eschle, 2017, 2018). Such
phenomena have posed pressing dilemmas for activists in many contexts
(see, for example, Glasgow Women’s Activist Forum, 2011; Anonymous,
2012; Hafez, 2012), and raise crucial questions about the inclusivity and
sustainability of the protest camp form as well as its capacity to prefigure a
more equal world.
Conversely, protest camps have also been important sites of feminist
engagement. Compelling evidence for this claim is provided by the feminist
research on the Cold War women-only peace camps already mentioned,
documenting as it does how these camps were spaces for experimentation
with gender, with womanhood, with women’s political and intimate
relationships, and with feminist ways of life. Moreover, feminists have
been highly active in mixed camps. For example, the encampments of the
‘global wave’ saw feminists work with queer and anti-racist allies to enable
the fuller participation of a diversity of voices and bodies, to create safer
spaces for all on site, and to integrate feminism into camp visions of a
better world (Talcott and Collins, 2012). It remains an open question how
successful these strategies have been, and their impact on camps and wider
movements, along with the legacy of immersion in camps for individual
feminist activists and for the broader trajectories of feminist mobilisation
and feminist theory.
4
Introduction
How is our approach to protest camps feminist?

While the main drivers of the book are empirical and political in character,
we also have a more intellectual motivation, in that it is the joint conviction
of all contributors that feminist ways of thinking can offer distinctive insights
into protest camps. To put this another way, it is not just the substantive
focus on women and on gender relations that makes this book feminist,
but also its approach. As we will show in this section, our contributors
share a feminist lens on camps, in broad terms, with both theoretical and
methodological dimensions.
Theoretically speaking, our contributors are all attentive to gender as
structuring protest camp dynamics and outcomes. Drawing on a wide
range of theoretical traditions, the authors conceptualise gender in different,
if overlapping ways. Some treat it as an identity, socially constructed or
performed in camps. Others analyse gender as a power relation in camps,
as a key factor in structuring relations of privilege and oppression or in
disciplining individuals, permitting some to enter and to lead, and excluding
or marginalising others. In some chapters, gender is a symbolic or discursive
system that permeates conceptions of activism, leadership and social change
circulating in and from the camp. All the contributors, we suggest, view
gender as a pervasive feature of social and political life, as constitutive of
camp life and outcomes, and as deserving of greater reflection among
contemporary activists and protest camp scholars.
Crucially, whatever the specifics of how it is understood, gender is viewed
in the chapters that follow through an intersectional prism. Since its influential
early articulations in Black feminist thought (Combahee River Collective,
1977; hooks, 1981; Crenshaw, 1989), ‘intersectionality’ has become the
dominant analytic deployed by feminists and others to conceptualise power
and identity. This means gender can never be considered in a vacuum: it
should always be treated as constituted in and through other forms of identity
and power. In this book, the contributors prioritise the relation of gender to
race, ethnicity, sexuality and class, with several also bringing the distinction
between cis-and trans-gendered identity into view. Finally, the book seeks
to retain the political dimension of intersectional knowledge production,
which inheres in the ‘commitment to placing race and women of colour
at the centre of feminist analysis’ (Mügge et al, 2018: 31). If some chapters
remain focused primarily on the experiences and voices of White, western
activists, others offer revisionist accounts of camps with women of colour
front and centre, and the collection as a whole seeks to critically interrogate
White –as well as male –dominance in camps and to bring a wider range of
experiences and voices into view (see also Montoya, 2019; Hurwitz, 2020).
One way we do this is by provincialising the Cold War western women-
only peace camps that have dominated feminist scholarship, and the US and
5
European protest camps that have dominated social movement scholarship

of the ‘global wave’, placing them in a broader international framework
alongside case studies from Taiwan, Turkey and Brazil (see also Brown
et al, 2018). But more than this, the collection also has several chapters
that reckon with the persistence and contemporary realignment of the
colonial matrix of power, along with its racialised underpinnings. Drawing
variously on critical Whiteness theory, Indigenous critiques of settler
colonialism and White feminism, alternative Indigenous cosmologies, and
Afro-Brazilian feminist epistemologies, these chapters draw into view the
colonial construction and racialised dimensions of gender (Lugones, 2007).
These chapters also critically assess the ways in and extent to which gender
and feminism are remade in protest camps that seek Black or Indigenous
sovereignty and decolonisation.
Methodologically speaking, while contributors gather and analyse data
on different camps in a variety of ways, from interviews to ethnography to
reconstructing secondary sources, they all share what we see as a feminist
attentiveness to the experiences and/or representation of women and other
marginalised groups. They look not only for the loud, most heroic and most
well-documented elements of camp life, but also for the silences and the
erasures, what happens offstage and what is left outside of the archive; and for
the humble, ordinary routines and relationships that sustain camp daily life. And
in the spirit of a feminist emphasis on reflexivity (see, for example, Ackerly
and True, 2008), the authors interrogate, to differing degrees, the complexities
of their own personal entanglements in the camps they study and in the
wider movements on which these draw. Some do this by adopting an auto-
ethnographic approach and writing their own camp involvement into their
narratives; others draw on the recent ‘archival turn’ in feminism (Eichhorn,
2013) to interrogate not only the ephemeral, transitive and fragile documentary
traces left by a particular camp, but also their own relationship to those traces.
After all, archives are now widely understood not as repositories of truth but as
actively constructed and read through subjective frames, even when these are
unconscious. The attention in this book to how past protest camp involvement
is told, collected and passed on responds to an increasingly urgent call to create,
interrogate and re-imagine feminist archives (Hemmings, 2011; Eichhorn,
2013; Bartlett and Henderson, 2016). In treating the construction of camp
archives as a form of feminist activism as well as of knowledge production, our
authors ensure that past camps escape their temporal boundaries and continue
to resonate in contemporary feminist theory and practice.
It is our contention that bringing this broadly feminist theoretical and
methodological lens to bear on protest camps casts new light on individual
encampments and their legacies for feminist theory and practice, as well as
on the protest camp form more generally. In the next and final section, we
begin to substantiate this claim by surveying the individual chapters ahead.
6
Introduction
Outline of the book

The rest of the book is divided into four parts, mapping on to the four
questions with which we opened this Introduction. We begin in Part I
by examining how gender shapes protest camps and how camps reshape
gender. The first two chapters focus our attention squarely on the persistence
of gendered violence in camps, a problem that intersects with and is
compounded by other forms of oppression. Charting the complexities
involved in responding to this problem in Occupy camps in the US, Celeste
Montoya argues that sustainable ‘safe spaces’ were created only when they
took on board the intersectional character of oppression and did not seek to
exclude trans women –so often themselves the targets of violence because of
their gender identity –or rely on police intervention, given the history of US
police violence toward African American men. The chapter by Māhealani
Ahia and Kahala Johnson, on the camp set up by Kanaka Maoli (Indigenous
Hawaiians) to protest the expansion of an astronomical installation on the
sacred Mauna Kea mountain, may be read as a detailed accounting of an
attempt to institute the kind of intersectional strategy called for by Montoya.
Ahia and Johnson’s poetic, painstaking account of the creation of what they
prefer to call ‘brave spaces’ within the Mauna Kea camp shows how these
required a careful, ‘trauma-informed’ approach, along with the creative
reinterpretation of sacred stories of the origins of Kanaka Maoli in the light
of diverse progressive discourses from elsewhere. In such ways, the reframing
of gender relations and sexual identity in the camp is positioned by Ahia and
Johnson as crucial to the camp’s promise of a decolonised, healing future.
The next two chapters focus on gender identity and gender inequality.
Finn Mackay’s evocative, personal account of their time in the women’s
peace camp at Menwith Hill in the UK explores, among other things,
how the camp was a space to play with gender expression and roles, as
well as with feminism: to perform gender differently, in ways at odds to
and subversive of the binary gender norms dominant in wider society at
the time. Mackay effectively extends Sasha Roseneil’s analysis of the ‘queer
tendencies’ of Greenham by showing how the activists at ‘Womenwith
Hill’ ‘queer[ed] gender, unstructuring, de-patterning and disorganizing
it’ (Roseneil, 2000: 4). Chia-Ling Yang, in contrast, draws our attention
to entrenched gender hierarchies in mixed camps, showing how what she
calls ‘gendered power’ was deployed to maintain male dominance within
the protest camp set up by the Sunflower or ‘3/18’ movement at the
Taiwanese parliament. Yang analyses how the creation of informal networks
among elite-educated, heterosexual men, along with the prevalence of a
‘postfeminist’ political culture in which feminist identification had become
unfashionable, together ensured that elite, heterosexual men maintained their
presence centre stage while female, LGBTQ and Indigenous protestors were
7
pushed to the margins, forced to resort to individualised strategies that often

involved ritualised gender performances. In sum, these chapters illustrate the
persistence of gender inequality in mixed camps, as well as revealing how
gender identity is reasserted or reshaped within both mixed and women-only
camps. We also begin to glimpse the diversity and complexity of feminist
responses to the gendered dynamics of camping together.
In Part II, the entanglement of feminist mobilisation in protest camps
becomes our primary focus. Three chapters trace the impact of feminism
on camps and vice versa, the reshaping of feminism as it flows through camp
spaces. In this vein, Yeşim Arat’s chapter tells a vivid story of the involvement
of women and feminists in and around the Gezi Park protest camp, and their
success in imprinting the protest with feminist values and language. While
the ‘fugitive democracy’ that took shape in Gezi proved to be short-lived, in
the face of intense state backlash, Arat argues that the women’s movement
in Turkey was irrevocably changed by the experience, particularly in terms
of the connections forged in the protests to a range of other struggles and
between pious and secular women. In contrast, Emma Gómez Nicolau’s
assessment of the relationship of feminism to the camps of the Indignados or
15-M movement in Spain is more circumspect, highlighting as it does the
reluctance that initially greeted feminist demands and the continued struggle
of feminists and their queer allies to be taken seriously in mixed movement
spaces. For Gómez Nicolau, these difficulties are one impetus behind a
general revival of autonomous feminist organising in Spain since the 15-M
movement, as well as the specific endeavour to establish the women-only
or ‘non-mixed’ camp that is the focus of her chapter.
While both Arat and Gómez Nicolau concentrate on social movement
dynamics, the final chapter in this part has a very different approach to the
question of feminist mobilisation in camps, zeroing in on an individual
activist and organiser, the ecofeminist Starhawk. Encountering Starhawk in
the archives of the HoriZone Ecovillage in Stirling, Scotland, Haran spirals
outward to show how ecofeminist and permaculture ideas and practices, as
represented by Starhawk, have threaded through anti-nuclear, ecological and
anti-globalisation mixed-gender camps in many different settings over several
decades. In this way, Haran offers a subversive retelling of the history of both
protest camps and feminism in recent decades in the West, by recovering an
ecofeminist lineage common to both.
The third part of the book elaborates on what feminist theory has to say
about the limitations and possibilities of the protest camp form. To begin
with, Catherine Eschle’s chapter on camps and social reproduction leans on
Marxist and Black/anti-racist feminist literatures on domestic space and the
gendered division of labour to help explain the persistence of inequalities
and violence in protest camps and continuities with the wider neoliberal
capitalist context. Reflecting on case studies of Occupy Glasgow and Faslane
8
Introduction
Peace Camp, Eschle calls for more caution in scholarly claims about protest
camp autonomy from wider society. Anastasia Kavada’s subsequent chapter
on camps and democracy offers what is perhaps a more hopeful reading
through a feminist lens, with reference to interview-based research into the
‘movements of the squares’ across Europe. Kavada argues that the potential
of camps as a site of ‘project democracy’, and the existential challenge this
poses to liberal democracy, can only be fully understood through a feminist
approach that encompasses social reproduction, care ethics and the commons.
This is followed by a chapter by Sara C. Motta, Sandra Maria Gadelha
de Carvalho, Claudiana Nogueira de Alencar and Mila Nayane da Silva,
which centres Afro-Brazilian feminist epistemologies in an effort to think
about the revolutionary and life-affirming potential of Black and Indigenous
women’s resistance. Engaging with the actions of a women’s cooperative
in the landless movement and the words of a radical Black feminist poetry
collective, both in Northeastern Brazil, Motta et al argue for an expansive
understanding of protest as reoccupation not only of physical spaces, but also
of the political itself, and of the emancipatory political subject.
Finally, the chapters in Part IV consider the legacies of past involvement in
encampments for contemporary feminist theory and practice. Troublingly,
these chapters point to some startling silences in and about feminism
in relation to protest camps. Thus Alison Bartlett’s chapter on the Pine
Gap Women’s Peace Camp in Australia in 1983 addresses engagements
between Indigenous and non-Indigenous feminist protestors from the
archives to complicate the popular remembering of second wave feminism
as fundamentally racist; Heather McKee Hurwitz and Anne Kumer’s
chapter hinges on the absence of feminism from dominant narratives of
the Occupy movement in the US; and the chapter by Niamh Moore, on
the one hand, and our conversation with Kate Kerrow, Rebecca Mordan,
Vanessa Pini and Jill (Ray) Raymond, on the other, are both rooted in
what they see as the strange sidelining of Greenham from academic and
popular remembering of feminism in the UK. In response, these chapters
all advocate for contemporary feminists to undertake revisionist archival
readings and/or feminist (re)creations of the archive in order to preserve
or reframe the ephemera, testimonies and experiences that these camps
have left in their wake and thereby amplify and expand collective memory
of feminist involvement. In this vein, Bartlett rereads the Pine Gap protest
through its location on First Nations territory, emphasising the ways place
and language are implicated in the ongoing legacies of colonisation for
feminism –and its archives –in Australia. Moore interprets the creation
of her digital archive of oral history interviews from Clayoquot Sound
ecofeminist peace camp in Canada as a form of feminist counter-memory,
one that enables us to see the persistent influence of marginalised ecofeminist
perspectives within contemporary feminism. Similarly Hurwitz and Kumer
9
maintain that the process of creating an open access, inclusive digital archive
of the Occupy camps is itself a form of feminist activism, one that enables
them to recover and publicise eclipsed feminist voices within a broader
social movement coalition. Their work also shows how Occupy and other
‘big-tent’ movements are an important part of the story of contemporary
US feminism. Finally, the chapter by Kate Kerrow and colleagues reflects on
their project to create a digital archive of interviews with Greenham women
as a way of recentring Greenham in contemporary popular narratives of
British feminism. In effect, these chapters expand the temporal boundaries
of protest camps, insisting on the continued significance of camps as sites
of feminist politics and imagination, and arguing for deeper feminist
engagement with their archival traces and echoes.
We acknowledge that this book has some significant geopolitical and
disciplinary omissions. These are important not only because they remind us
that the empirical story we tell here is incomplete and partial, but also because
their inclusion would bring in different feminist theoretical perspectives –and
perspectives on feminism –that would further nuance the arguments about
both protest camps and feminism outlined here. We return to these points in
the Conclusion. Nonetheless, we submit that the chapters offer a unique and
productive engagement with protest camps, by centring feminist concerns
and perspectives, and by bringing together research into both women-only
peace camps and mixed-gender encampments of the global wave. We hope
that social movement scholars and feminist theorists and activists will find
much to interest them in what follows.
Notes
1
Reprinted with permission. Jane Campbell, under the pen-name Maj Ikle, writes
evocatively about her first trip to the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in
the UK in the 1980s in search of a rumoured ‘hotbed of lesbian sex’. Campbell’s is one
of many written and oral testimonies on the Greenham Women Everywhere website,
discussed in Chapter 15 in this volume by Kate Kerrow et al, see https://greenhamwome
neverywhere.co.uk/pretending-to-protest/.
2
Reprinted with permission. This excerpt is from the poem ‘Gel Gör Beni Aşk Neyledi
[Come See What Love Made Me] #direngezi’, by Andrea Brady, posted on the website
Solidarity Park Poetry at: https://solidaritypark.wordpress.com/2013/08/04/poem-53-
in-solidarity-gel-gor-beni-ask-neyledi-direngezi/. Brady wrote the poem, ‘in solidarity
hope and desire, for the protestors camped at Gezi Park in Istanbul in the summer of
2013, discussed by Yeşim Arat in Chapter 6 of this volume.
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14
PART I
Gendered Power and Identities

in Protest Camps
2
Safe Spaces and Solidarity:

Confronting Gendered Violence in
the US Occupy Encampments
Celeste Montoya
Introduction
In the autumn of 2011, a wave of mobilisation spread across the United
States and beyond to protest growing economic inequality and the loss of
democracy to the economic elite. Occupy Wall Street and its many corollary
mobilisations inspired the imagination of a new generation of activists,
reinvigorated existing activists and networks, and profoundly changed
political discourse. The universalising message ‘We are the 99%’ provided a
wide discursive base for building a movement. Creating a meaningful and
enduring solidarity across social cleavages, however, proved more challenging,
and was wrought with both internal and external obstacles. One test to the
struggle for solidarity came in the form of allegations of sexualised violence
and harassment in the protest camps. Starting in October, the concern was
raised in a number of general assemblies and reports began circulating both
in the news and on social media sites.
Internally groups grappled with how to respond to the allegations of
violence. Some questioned the legitimacy of these claims or dismissed
them as a symptom of larger societal ills and not a specific characteristic of
the encampments. Others, however, committed themselves to addressing
the gendered violence, through direct and indirect action. The varied
strategies to construct ‘safe’ or ‘safer’ spaces, however, demonstrated a varied
understanding of gendered violence, including who it impacts and the way
it might intersect with other forms of oppression.
Complicating this struggle further was the external co-optation of these
allegations to discredit the movement and justify eviction. Conservative
17
media outlets seized on the spectre of sexual assault as a means to delegitimise

the movement. Politicians later used it to justify the eventual evictions,
introducing another form of violence. The co-opting and reframing of
internal calls to address the gendered violence placed the movement in
the difficult position of simultaneously addressing threats (of interpersonal
violence) within the movement while fending off those (including state
violence) from outside of it.
This chapter engages with the challenges and strategies for addressing
gendered violence in protest camps, by examining the US Occupy
encampments. It emphasises the importance of intersectional analysis as a
means for better understanding the spatial politics of protest camps and for
evaluating the efforts to address gender violence. While a failure to address
gender violence poses a threat to movement participation and solidarity, so
too do efforts to address it that fail to consider multiple and interlocking
modes of oppression.
The chapter starts with a discussion of sexual violence within the context
of social movements and protest camps. It then provides an overview of some
of the different narratives about the violence in circulation, both within the
encampments from those participating and from those on the outside. It
includes narratives drawing attention to the violence in an attempt to combat
it and build a stronger and more inclusive movement, as well as narratives
using the spectre of violence to undermine the movement. The chapter then
looks at dismissive responses within the movement as well the complexity
of intersectional considerations and how they were (or were not) addressed.
Theorising sexual violence within the context of social

movements and protest camps
While the social movement literature has addressed various forms of violence
associated with political mobilisation, very little attention has been given to
interpersonal forms of violence occurring within movements. The relative
silence on the issue is probably a characteristic not only of the stigma
associated with gendered violence, but also of movements themselves. Darren
Lenard Hutchinson (1999) describes a political culture among activists and
members of oppressed communities that disfavours open self-criticism or
the ‘airing of dirty laundry’ out of fear that such criticism might reinforce
negative stereotypes about groups or movements; provide oppositional actors
(state and non-state) opportunities to appropriate the criticism as a means
of delegitimising the movement; and dismantle political unity and forestall
social change. While these are all credible concerns, not acknowledging
interpersonal violence (such as sexual violence and harassment) as a form
of oppression serves to marginalise members in a way that also undermines
unity. For progressive movements like Occupy, failure to address internal
18
Safe Spaces and Solidarity
oppression (in any form) also represents an acquiescence to the ideologies

they ostensibly seek to challenge and a violation of the prefigurative model
they try to build (see Chapter 9 by Eschle and Chapter 14 by Hurwitz and
Kumer in this volume).
While gender violence can occur in any type or form of social movement,
understanding the spatial dimensions of the Occupy movement can help
provide insight into the challenges faced by activists. Feminist geographers
have argued that social identity plays an important role in how people
experience and navigate different spatial locations. They argue that place
and space are gendered, raced, classed, aged and otherwise influenced by
structural inequalities in manners that have implications for mobility, liberty
and safety (Durham, 2015). Most encampments (and all of the encampments
examined in this particular study) occurred in urban settings, often in city
parks, and around the clock (with many, but not all, participants sleeping at
the encampment). The use of tents and other temporary shelters blurred the
lines between public and private spaces, and in many cases, the encampments
were sharing spaces with other groups already ‘occupying’ there, including
people experiencing homelessness. This geography is an important aspect of
the spatial politics of protest camps, as is their construction as an ostensibly
progressive political space.
Numerous studies have explored how women’s experiences with or fear
of sexual violence shapes how they navigate public spaces (Valentine, 1989;
Stanko, 1990; Koskella, 1999; Pain, 2001; Meyers, 2004; Starkweather,
2007; Wattis et al, 2011). Particular spaces (geographic and temporal) are
constructed and understood as having more or less risk, whether or not
those assessments of risk are accurate. Although women are more likely to
be sexually assaulted by a known assailant in a familiar private setting than by
a stranger in public urban settings, dominant narratives and/or ‘rape myths’
contribute to perceptions that the former space is safe and the latter space
risky. Part of this perception is tied to other forms of sexualised oppression
that are more prevalent in the public sphere. Sexual harassment and the
appropriation of space can negate women’s relationships with public space
(Kelly and Radford, 1996; Skeggs, 1999; Wattis et al, 2011).
Intersectional analysis complicates understandings of spatial oppression and
exclusions. Rachel Pain (2001) argues that fear of crime can be considered
to create and reinforce exclusions from social life and from particular urban
spaces in a number of ways that demonstrate the complexity of intersecting
social locations, both for those who perceive they are being threatened and for
those who are perceived as a threat. She notes that exclusions occur through
the experience of crime itself, by which violence increases the subordination
of marginalised groups (see also Young, 1990) and as a result of subcriminal
acts, by which racist, sexist, homophobic or ageist harassment and incivilities
remind people of their vulnerability, increase their fear and ultimately affect
19
their social and spatial behaviour (Junger, 1987; Painter, 1992). Exclusion
also occurs when groups are constructed as a threat to community safety
and subjected to formal or informal policing (Garland, 1996).
Studies of gendered violence show similar intersectional patterns. While
gender may render certain groups more vulnerable to violence, so too might
race, class, sexuality, age and other dimensions of structural inequality. Studies
have shown that women of colour and immigrant women are victimised
both for gender as well as race, with race playing a prevalent role in violence
that occurs in public spaces (Crenshaw, 1991). Their social position at
the intersection of multiple marginalities impacts not only the prevalence
of violence, but also the response to it. Social location can determine
perceptions of victims as credible and deserving of sympathy and justice
(Razack, 2002; Haskell, 2003; Phipps, 2009; Randall, 2010). These societal
perceptions are replicated in the legal system (Davis, 1985; Crenshaw, 1991;
Corrigan, 2013; Ritchie, 2017).
Social location is also used to determine who constitutes punishable
perpetrators. Men of colour are significantly more likely to be charged and
prosecuted for sexual violence than White men. These tropes play a role in
shaping anxieties and perpetuating oppression. In her study of an urban area
in California, Kristen Day (1999) found that White women’s perceptions of
vulnerability were constructed partly in relation to the perceived threat of rape
from men of colour, even though studies show that they are more at risk of
violence from White men. There is a long established pattern of using (White)
women’s safety to justify violence, including state violence, against men of colour.
Such co-optations feed into racist and xenophobic oppression in a way that not
only impacts men of colour, but also leaves women of colour more vulnerable to
violence because they feed into the racism and xenophobia that are intersecting
components of the sexual violence and harassment these women face.
These intersectional considerations have important implications for
understanding the impact of gendered violence and how to address it in
progressive social movements and protest camps. First, sexual violence and
harassment may have a direct impact on those who experience it within
social movement spaces, in ways that preclude, limit or otherwise affect their
participation. Given common patterns of sexualised violence, this is more
likely to affect female and/or LGBTQ participants (as well as those at the
intersection of these and other identities). Second, fear of sexual violence
might influence movement participation, something that is also more likely
to impact structurally vulnerable groups. Third, failure to respond to sexual
violence does not alleviate potential exclusions and may indeed confirm
them. Fourth, uncritical movement responses that do not pay attention to
relevant intersections may introduce or reinforce other forms of oppression
and exclusion.
20
This last point is particularly important, and one that invites alternative
consideration of how to address gender violence. Women of colour
feminists have long been critical of traditional legal/carceral approaches
to gender violence (Davis, 1981, 1985; Critical Resistance and INCITE!,
2006; Richie, 2000, 2012; Ritchie, 2017). They instead advocate for
alternative community-based measures that take sexual violence seriously,
but that consider the gendered, racial, sexual and class dimensions of the
violence as well as of the response to it (Critical Resistance and INCITE!,
2006). For example, the restorative justice and transformative justice models
seek to decrease the role of the state and increase the involvement of
personal, familial and community networks, emphasising the repairing of
harms rather than punishing crimes (Frederick and Lizdas, 2010; Ptacek,
2010; Armatta, 2018). Such approaches help to resolve potential tensions
between inaction and harmful action. For example, Common Justice’s
restorative justice programme is based on four principles: survivor-centred
responses, safety-driven responses, accountability and equity (Sered, 2017;
Armatta, 2018).
Data and method

In this chapter, I use discursive analysis to consider perceptions of and
responses to gender violence in the Occupy encampments. My data includes
mainstream and independent news sources, social media and a series of
interviews conducted with Occupy participants. The interview data comes
from interviews conducted after the evictions of the protest camps (with the
first interview in December 2012 and the last in July 2014) with participants
from major mobilisations across the United States (including New York,
Oakland (California), Boston, Baltimore, Los Angeles, Portland (Oregon),
Philadelphia, San Diego and Denver). These participants represent identities
that vary across gender, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation and age, many of
them participating in some form of identity-based organising within the
movement (such as Women Occupy Wall Street, People of Color Caucus,
Queering OWS, Decolonize Wall Street).
This study does not seek to make or challenge any claims regarding the
prevalence of sexual violence or harassment in the encampments. My vantage
point is as an external observer. At the time of these encampments, I was
at home with an infant. A challenge with studying sexual violence and
harassment in any arena is the difficulty of determining, with any degree of
certainty, its prevalence. While systematic efforts have been undertaken at
the national level and within more fixed institutional contexts, the fluidity
of protest camps is less conducive to such an assessment. No such systematic
data collection of the Occupy encampments was undertaken.
21
The Occupy encampments and narratives of sexual

violence
The Occupy mobilisations started in September 2011, with the first
encampment set up in New York City’s financial district, in Zuccotti Park.
A month later, similar encampments had spread across the United States
and globally to more than 1,000 town squares (Hurwitz and Taylor, 2018).
These encampments became a mechanism for participants to pool resources,
create group consciousness, and formulate and debate strategy and tactics: ‘In
conjunction with the consensus process and the general assembly, the decision
to share food, books and blankets … became a prominent public expression
of the movement’s understanding of inclusivity and equality’ (Schein, 2012:
336). As the encampments grew, however, conflict began to emerge along
the lines of gender, race, class and sexuality. Identity-based groups organised
in many of the mobilisations, motivated by perceived exclusions related
to visibility and representation (Montoya, 2019). A prevalent discourse
among these groups was a concern for ‘safe spaces’ as both a physical and
metaphorical concept. While the safe space discourse came to mean a lot of
things, one particular manifestation was in the context of sexual violence.
Some participants, in particular female-identified activists, articulated
concerns they had for their safety in an environment that some characterised
as male-dominated and misogynistic.
Narratives regarding sexual violence in the Occupy protests varied both
within and outside of the encampments. Dominating the external narrative
were mainstream news media reports about a handful of cases where police
were called in to investigate or make an arrest. In New York, a man was
arrested for allegedly groping one woman and later raping another. In Dallas,
police arrested a convicted sex offender for having sex with a 14-year-old
female runaway. In Cleveland, police responded to a report by a 19-year-old
woman that she was raped in a shared tent. In Seattle, police investigated
a possible case of sexual assault, when a woman was found passed out and
naked from the waist down. A man was arrested and later convicted for
a fatal shooting near the Occupy Oakland encampment and for a sexual
assault that occurred five days later, although neither the assailant nor either
victim were associated with Occupy. In Baltimore, a local affiliate news
station reported that a woman was raped and robbed, although police later
concluded that there was no evidence of sexual assault.
Often reported together and in the context of other crimes, these
incidents became part of a larger news narrative portraying the movement
in a negative light, particularly among the more conservative outlets. Fox
News discussed the alleged assaults under the headline ‘Occupy Protests
Plagued by Reports of Sex Attacks, Violent Crime’ (Chiaramonte, 2017).
The New York Post characterised Zuccotti Park as being ‘so overrun by sexual
22
predators attacking the women in the night that organizers felt compelled to
set up a female-only sleeping tent to keep the sickos away’ (Freund, 2011).
Extreme Right website Breitbart kept a running ‘#OccupyWallStreet: The
Rap Sheet, So Far’.
The incidents covered in the news also became a part of movement
discourse, usually in the localities in which they were reported to have
occurred. Concerns of sexual violence were often raised as one part of a
larger discussion of offensive and oppressive gendered behaviour. More
widespread than stories of sexual assault were reports of unwanted touching,
harassment, misogynist language, and male domination of movement
spaces and processes. In some of the encampments, the discussion of sexual
and/or gender violence extended to sexuality and gender identity and
experiences with homophobia and transphobia. A number of working
groups, caucuses and affinity groups formed around concerns with safety.
These concerns often started with a general discomfort with sleeping in the
encampments (an important spatial and temporal aspect of participating in
the movement), but were often amplified by other gendered experiences
within the encampments. While none of the people interviewed, and very
few of the writers of personal accounts, claimed to be sexually assaulted
in the encampment, discussions of safety were almost always raised in
conjunction with other oppressive and gendered behaviour. While these
concerns were sometimes addressed in general assemblies, discussion more
frequently took place in the context of the women-only and/or feminist
spaces that often formed in response.
One of the original participants in Women Occupy Wall Street (a group
originating in New York City, also referred to as WOW) noted how reports
of sexual assaults led to a concern for safety that became a major driving
force in the formation of WOW. Here she recalls the night the group met
as such for the first time:
‘Well the formation of it happened one night, maybe the third week.
One night I stayed there very late, the latest I ever stayed and there
was just this feeling of (sigh) you know. As it started to get crowded,
with more and more people, I think there was just this feeling of an
instability and a lack of safety. And a whole bunch of girls, young girls
actually, got together and wanted to discuss what to do, how to get
a safe space going. And I ended up being a part of that conversation
and we ended up coming up with the Women Occupy Wall Street
working group.’ (M from New York)
By the next week, the handful of women turned into several dozen who were
meeting regularly. Manissa McCleave Maharawal writes about attending an
anti-patriarchy meeting (which would later become the Safe Space working
23
group) after noticing that it seemed to be mostly White men taking charge
of committees and making announcements:
A lot was said at the anti-patriarchy meeting about what was safe and
wasn’t safe in the occupied space. Women talked about not feeling
comfortable in the drum circle because of men dancing up on them
and how to change this, about how to feel safe sleeping out in the open
with a lot of men that they didn’t know. (Maharawal, 2011)
In Boston, similar accounts were given in a joint interview with several of

the founding members of the Occupy Boston Women’s Caucus:
‘We had met some other women and also had been talking with
some other women on Twitter who were also part of the camp and
ended up meeting with them and talking about what would be the
benefits of having a women’s group, and how the need for it was
there and how this particular woman felt physically threatened and
the sexual awareness and sexual violence by this man. From there it
was just a matter of us –we set a date and a sign pointing the way.’
(A from Boston)
One of these participants (M from Boston) recalled “just hear[ing] these

really horrible tales of women who were choosing to stay over at the
encampment and felt physically and sexually threatened”. She, like many
of the older women in the Occupy movement, chose not to stay overnight
in the encampment.
Some, but not all, groups explicitly extended the discourses on safety for
women to include the LGBTQ community. For example, this statement
co-written by the anti-harassment group Hollaback! was released online:
For as long as public space has existed, women and LGBTQ people
have been trying to ‘occupy’ it safely –with distressingly little success.
Harassing comments, groping, flashing and assault are a daily, global
reality for women and LGBTQ individuals. Too often, these injustices
are met with little or no response, simply regarded as ‘the price you
pay’ for being female, trans, or gay in public. As supporters of the
Occupy movement, we believe that a world where everyone has the
right to occupy public space safely is not only possible –it is essential
to building a strong lasting movement. (Occupy Wall Street, 2011a)
Oakland Occupy Patriarchy formed as a feminist/queer bloc with a statement

clarifying that ‘Women, Trans people, Queers, Fags, Dykes, need a space
that is OURS. We are marginalized, harassed, and attacked in other spaces
24
all the time’ (Oakland Occupy Patriarchy, 2012). This group also notably
included a commitment to ‘confront, and attack structural racism and white
supremacy in this city and in our spaces’.
Not all forms of violence or oppression that were understood as gendered
were necessarily sexualised. Feeding into the narrative of male domination
and oppression were the other ways in which male behaviour took on
physical and controlling dimensions. One young woman of colour talked
about oppression in regard to respect for personal autonomy (bodily as well
as cognitively):
‘More often than not I would get pulled back by, lots of times, white
males. Physically, like my arm would be pulled back onto the sidewalk
and reprimanded that I was disobeying the police and I was unsafe
and I was putting other people in jeopardy. And so it was like a pretty
constant awareness that your decisions were being scrutinised, criticised,
and that it was automatically assumed if you were queer, trans, a POC,
or ciswoman that you didn’t know what you were doing and that you
were unknowingly putting yourself in harm’s way. So it was a pretty
oppressive atmosphere.’ (S from New York)
In this setting, the physical oppression took on a somewhat paternalistic form

and was a part of the internal policing of the movement. The participant
was physically restrained in the name of ‘safety’, but in a way that seemed
gendered and raced, disallowing her from exercising autonomy.
Dismissive responses
The internal and external narratives of sexual violence and harassment
received a mixed response from other participants in the movement. While
some responses were positive and affirming, others were dismissive or even
antagonistic, posing significant obstacles for the activists working to address
the issue. A number of respondents talked about some very vocal opponents
to any discussion that extended beyond class, particularly when it addressed
issues of race, sexuality or sexual harassment.
‘Even in a meeting of a hundred and fifty, two hundred people, there

were probably 75 percent to 80 percent of the folks or more that were
happy to entertain any and all discussions that pertained to any kind
of oppressive politics. There were also some very vocal opponents to
talking about race, or sexuality, or sexual harassment or safe spaces.
It was typically older white men that would become irate and would
occasionally start screaming people down saying “we aren’t here to
talk about that stuff ”.’ (M from Baltimore)
25
This type of story was not uncommon, and characterises some of the
contemporary challenges to addressing gendered issues (including sexualised
violence) within the encampments. While efforts were made to address
these types of hostile challenges, others were much more complicated and
less readily dismissed.
Another challenge to addressing violence came from how people
understood it within the movement in relation to society in general, and
what this might mean for how to respond to it. Many participants understood
the violence (as well as the other forms of internal movement oppression)
as a microcosm of the broader society:
‘I was really blown away with the messaging of the movement. To me

it was this incredible opportunity to be part of something that was
important. But then I discovered that essentially the encampment was
kind of a microcosm of the broader society in that all of the ‘isms’ that
exist outside were kind of manifesting as well in the encampment.’ (M
from Boston)
And A from Philadelphia comments: “It’s hard to admit that any of the
encampments aren’t really a utopia just because we are all really excited
about social change, that the Occupy encampments are sort of microcosms
of larger societies … so all of the issues that we face: racisms, classism, and
sexism, etc.”
Understanding the problem in this way was not necessarily a hindrance to
addressing it. These quotes came from activists engaged in efforts to address
the issues of sexual violence and harassment in Boston and Philadelphia.
For them, and those that felt similarly, it was a motivation to do better and
build a stronger movement. For others, however, this characterisation was
used in a manner that seemed to abdicate responsibility. The violence and
harassment, and in particular the failure to respond to it, was seen as a betrayal
from a movement that was supposed to be better, something expressed in
the following excerpts from two published essays:
Some women who stayed with #Occupy (for a limited time –most
left in the months afterward) said, ‘It’s a microcosm of the world at
large. Of course there’s sexism’. They weren’t wrong, but those of us
who were busting our butts for the movement weren’t wrong either
to expect, just this once, in this ‘radical’ setting that we wouldn’t have
to beg to be believed. (Ren-Jender, 2013)
Too often, the Occupy movement has betrayed its own vision
by revealing itself as a sexist microcosm of the society it opposes.
Harassment and assaults required women to define safe sleeping
26
areas –immediate necessities yet questionable strategically, since they

can become ‘ghettos’, while the problem, a male sense of entitlement
goes unchallenged. (Morgan, 2012)
For these activists, sexual violence and harassment were incompatible

with the progressive vision of the movement, a vision that should not
tolerate oppression.
Given the maligning of the movement by the mass media, conservative
outlets in particular, another form of challenging discourse centred around
concern with possible infiltration, false claims and misrepresentation. This
is perhaps best represented by an incident in Baltimore, where movement
participants suspected a set-up by Fox News: “There was one incident of
violence that was reported that I am pretty sure was planted where there was
a woman who supposedly was raped and/or stabbed at the settlement but
I never got verification that that actually indeed occurred” (L from Baltimore).
‘One of the things that was brought up was totally fabricated. There
was what seemed to be a setup from Fox News … an African American
woman that claimed to be homeless that who was sleeping in the
#Occupy Baltimore encampment that claimed that everyone there had
been on drugs and that she had been raped in the encampment. She
came onto the encampment with a camera crew from Fox. But that
accusation had never been brought up within the encampment. It was
only brought up to Fox 45. And nobody even knew who this person
was and no one ever remembered her sleeping there or participating
in a meeting. And the police investigated and found that there was
nothing true to the claim.’ (M from Baltimore)
This case is particularly complicated in that the positionality of the woman

and the tendency to see this claim as false fits within problematic race
scripts which discount the claims of women of colour and poor women.
Yet, the two people interviewed were active in the anti-racist activism of
the Baltimore movement and acknowledged sexual harassment as an issue
in the encampment.
The negative characterisation of the movement by the media in general
raised concerns for protestors, particularly when it was invoked to paint
the movement as a threat to public safety, something that was later used to
justify forcible evictions. This put activists trying to address sexual violence
and harassment in the awkward position of having to defend the movement
at the same time that they were criticising it, sometimes even using the
‘microcosm’ narrative as a defence. The women’s caucus of Occupy Philly
issued the following statement following an attempted rape occurring in
their camp:
27
The recent demonizing and vilifying of the #Occupy movement in

the media is a scape-goating of the problems and violence that plague
our communities and cities daily. Rape happens every day, murder
happens every day and suicide happens every day. These tragedies are
not symptoms or creations of the #Occupy Movement, nor are they
exclusive to the #Occupy Movement; they are realities of our society
and of our everyday lives. (Kacere, 2011)
The members of a sexual assault survivor team at OWS released a similar

statement after the reported assault in their encampment:
We are also concerned that segments of the media have attempted to

use this incident as another way to disingenuously attack and discredit
OWS. It is reprehensible to manipulate and capitalize on a tragedy like
this to discredit a peaceful political movement. OWS exists within a
broader culture where sexual assault is egregiously common. (Occupy
Wall Street, 2011b)
At the same time as they critiqued the media, they maintained the seriousness
of the claims:
We are aware that this is one of several known cases of sexual assault
that have occurred at OWS. We are dismayed by these appalling acts and
distressed by the fear among many Occupiers that they may have caused,
as well as their negative impact on our ability to safely participate in
public protests. We have the right to participate in peaceful protests
without fear or violence. (Occupy Wall Street, 2011b)
Yet this discourse of defence fed into some of the tendencies to dismiss claims
of sexual violence and harassment. In a published essay, another participant
in the Baltimore movement expressed her frustration with this:
Just like the blasé dismissal of media critiques as ‘trolling’, it’s indicative
of the larger dynamic at play in McKeldin Square. Dominant, mostly
male voices are calling constantly for an end to discussion of ‘gender-
specific issues’ in order to focus on the nebulous call for economic
reform, which has defined the Occupy protests across the nation.
Complaints of sexual harassment at the site are belittled as ‘personal
problems’, as though it’s somehow possible to affect change as a divided
and internally oppressive community. (Gaeng, 2011)
While the media portrayals and threat of state repression posed external
threats to the movement, the sexual violence and harassment served as an
28
internal threat that could not be ignored. Some allegations of sexual assault
may have been fabricated or manipulated by external opponents, but this
did not mean that concerns were unfounded. Patterns in gender violence
reporting suggest that it is likely that many more incidents of sexual violence
occurred that were never reported.
Safety for whom? Intersectional considerations

More complicated than the dismissive discourses were the responses from
activists problematising efforts to address sexual violence and assault.
A significant challenge for the movement was how to create ‘safe’ or ‘safer’
spaces, without replicating or introducing new oppressive practices. The term
‘safer space’ originated in women’s and queer movements of the past decades
‘as an identifier of space that is explicitly committed to safety for individuals
or communities that are targets of oppression’ (Newman, 2011: 138). The
feminist and anti-patriarchy groups seeking to address the issue of sexual
violence and harassment engaged in a variety of strategies. The safer spaces
working group in OWS reported working to ‘educate and transform our
community into a culture of consent, safety, and well-being’ using strategies
such as ‘support circles, counselling, consent training, self-defence trainings,
community watch, awareness campaigns, and other evolving community-
based approaches to address harm’ (Occupy Wall Street, 2011b).
The setting up of ‘safe spaces’ might also involve the building and
policing of borders (physically as well as socially), something that can be
in tension with other norms of inclusion. As observed by Amy Schrager
Lang and Daniel Lang/Levitsky (2012: 22–3): ‘One of the most fraught and
contentious debates over inclusion within Occupy concerns “disruptive
behaviour” –what constitutes it, who is understood to engage in it, and
who can be excluded from what because of it’. Here, the complexity of
multiple and sometimes intersecting forms of marginalisation are relevant.
One response to the issue of sexual assaults was to set up women-only
spaces, usually for sleeping but sometimes beyond that. What was meant by
‘women-only’ varied. Some of these spaces were comparatively broad, in
providing space for female and/or queer-identified participants. Some were
more focused on ‘female-identified’ participants, which included those who
were transgender. Oakland Occupy Patriarchy, along with a group called
Safer Spaces, an anti-oppression group formed by a group of self-identified
Queer and Queer allied people, arranged for family-friendly children’s
areas as well as Women and Trans Safer Spaces where men were asked to
refrain from entering. Sometimes the focus was narrower. In New York,
some ‘women-only’ groups and spaces provoked criticism from ‘A Bunch
of Trans Women Occupiers’ (2012: 129) who issued a statement that
‘OWS Must Resist Cis-Supremacy and Trans-Misogyny’: ‘As feminists, we
29
enthusiastically support women’s groups and women-designated safer spaces,

but, as trans women and allies, we oppose (and will categorically block) any
group or space that excludes trans women … as well as any standard that
functionally asserts authority over our self-determined gender identities.’
Another complicated component of creating a safe space was the creation
of policies and norms about who and what would be allowed within the
encampments. Having norms and standards of behaviour is essential in
addressing sexual violence and harassment in a meaningful way that challenges
gendered power asymmetries; however, such norms also served as a form
of displacement to other vulnerable populations. The encampments were
frequently set up in urban parks, spaces that are already used by groups that
are often constructed as threats to community safety. In this regard, Lang
and Lang/Levitsky articulate an important point also raised by others:
From Oakland to London, ‘bad behavior’ is ascribed more often than

not to participants in Occupy/Decolonize encampments who arrived
already ‘homeless’ or impoverished, who are people of color, who are
(or are assumed to be) substance users, who are read as disabled. The
greater the number of these descriptions that can be applied to a given
person, the more likely their actions are to be labeled as ‘disruptive’.
(2012: 23)
While the ‘bad’ or ‘disruptive’ behaviour associated with sexual violence

(harassment in particular) extended well beyond these particular groups,
some of the policies aimed at creating a safer space did (intentionally or not)
target them. This set up a dilemma in regard to addressing the concerns of
participants, who felt threatened by those perceived as threats, some of whom
had been inhabiting locations before protest camps were constructed. Lester
Spence and Mike McGuire (2012: 58) argue that some of the formal and
informal rules served to socially displace and marginalise poor populations
of colour, acting as another form of gentrification.
Even if these norms were set up in a manner that considered some of
these possible exclusions, how they were enforced was another matter of
concern. Some encampments had community security forces (often self-
appointed). Some volunteers had previous experience in law enforcement
and/or the military and might replicate institutional practices critiqued by the
movement. Note the quotation earlier in the chapter of a woman who felt
oppressed by the tactics of these groups. Such controversies were particularly
pronounced regarding the involvement of actual law enforcement. An
ongoing debate within the larger encampments was about whether or not the
police could be a part of ‘the 99%’, and when, if ever, they should be called
into the encampment. Many in the movement were critical of the police as
an arm of the state that they were protesting, including the role the police
30
played in enforcing unequal economic policy. This included critiques now

heard as part of the Black Lives Matter discourse on institutionalised racism.
The debate, especially within the context of addressing sexual violence,
caused some significant conflicts and divisions.
Critiques that focused more on the harm that police might cause to victims
were better received within some feminist spaces. The OWS working group
on safe spaces, in a statement released on the OWS webpage, discussed a
case where the police (at the request of an assault victim) were called in, but
responded in a way the group deemed victim-blaming:
[W]e were troubled at the time of her report that responding police
officers appeared to be more concerned by her political involvement
in OWS than her need for support after a traumatic incident of sexual
violence. A survivor is not at fault for being assaulted while peacefully
participating in a public protest to express their political opinions.
(Occupy Wall Street, 2011b)
This example illustrates why feminists of colour have long been sceptical of the
state as a remedy for gendered violence (Davis, 1981, 1985; Critical Resistance
and INCITE!, 2006; Richie, 2012; Ritchie, 2017). Such arguments were
seen as salient in the context of mobilisations facing antagonistic encounters
with the police (something that seemed to become more apparent even in
more ‘police-friendly’ movements once the evictions started).
Debates arising around the inclusion/exclusion of past assailants, however,
were less well received, particularly in relation to registered sex offenders.
This came up in Boston and ultimately led to some of the women leaving
the movement.
‘I think it’s really complicated. Even people who are supportive

feminists have a lot of negative experiences with the law and see how
the law can be manipulated. But basically it also became clear that
besides those people there were a lot of people who just didn’t care
about preserving the safety or at least the comfortable feeling that
women could have when participating and prioritise like “This is for
everybody, paedophiles and sex-offenders are in the 99%” and I just
kind of got disgusted hearing a lot of the conversation surrounding
it.’ (A from Boston)
In this case, the tensions of inclusion/exclusion surrounding safe spaces

were more difficult to resolve in a way that some feminist groups found
acceptable. They expressed the need for clear norms and accountability.
While some groups started to discuss solutions more embedded in restorative
and transformative justice –approaches that centre survivors and safety, and
31
demand accountability, but that consider community-based and equitable

solutions –the evictions ended the encampments and the discussion.
Conclusion
This study of the Occupy movement demonstrates the importance
of addressing gendered violence in protest camps, as well as in social
movements more broadly. Although internal accounts from within the
movement do not support the conservative narrative of assaults as endemic
to Occupy, incidences of gendered harassment and oppression did have a
detrimental impact on internal perceptions of safety and inclusion within
the encampments. While these issues were not seen as unique to the
movement, neither could they be dismissed as independent from it. The
dismissals of such critiques by some movement participants were seen as
antithetical to (or even as a betrayal of) the goals of liberation and equality
that were ostensibly central to progressive mobilisation. A primary reason
for movement demobilisation is when participants stop believing that the
movement represents them (Polletta and Jasper, 2001: 292). This was seen
when women walked out of general assemblies, and some ultimately out of
the movement, when their concerns were not addressed.
At the same time, this study also emphasises the need for careful
consideration of how best to address these types of concerns. Narratives of
‘safe’ or ‘safer spaces’ are complicated. In an effort to create spaces where
precarious groups felt included, exclusions were often made both in regard
to whom was understood as needing protection and who was perceived
as being a threat (see also Chapter 7 by Gómez Nicolau in this volume).
Groups adopting a more intersectional lens tried to work within these
tensions by minimising unnecessary exclusions (particularly of those in
positions of precarity), but by working to establish clear communal norms
and accountability (where possible) for when oppression occurred. They
were doing this difficult and ongoing work when the threat of state violence
became realised through evictions.
Addressing violence within and outside of a movement requires a model
of organising where all forms of oppression are recognised and addressed,
and where individuals are held accountable but not treated as disposable (see
brown, 2020). Such approaches are intersectional, distinguishing various
overlapping and intersecting forms of violence (interpersonal as well as
state and structural). They emphasise an ethic of care (see Chapter 3 by
Ahia and Johnson, and Chapter 10 by Kavada, in this volume), recognising
the humanity of everyone involved. But they also insist on stopping and
acknowledging the harm, supporting the survivor and actively taking
measures to plan for safety, seeking to prevent future harm (Armatta, 2018).
While the Occupy encampments were short-lived, their prefigurative politics
32
are still alive and present in many contemporary movements. The lessons
learned may chart a path for stronger and more enduring movements.
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36
3
The Puʻu We Planted: (Re)birthing

Refuge at Mauna Kea1
Māhealani Ahia and Kahala Johnson
Introduction
Puʻu are raised grounds where the seeds of our survival are planted; honua is
the unflinching earth beneath us, the enduring Papahānaumoku who outlasts
all upheaval. Puʻuhonua are sanctuaries grown in sheltered enclaves –hills,
cliffs, shorelines –ritually consecrated to protect those within from peril. In
the distant past, Kanaka Maoli fleeing the violence of war or escaping chiefly
punishment could retreat to these places of refuge where they would be safe
from execution. A traditional sanctum of care and security grown by our
ancestors, puʻuhonua provide descendants today with an abiding legacy of
practices for cultivating fortified, flourishing, restorative Hawaiian communities
as we vigilantly confront the abusive colonial invasions of our lands.
Puʻuhonua also recall cyclical conceptions of childbirth, germination
and natality. Our ancestors felt a deep convergence between the growth
of a child in their parent’s body and the rising of the land, unifying each
in metaphorical harmony. Puʻuhonua are thus revered as a metonym for
pregnancy, for lands and bodies protruding with the life teeming within. By
recalling this bonded accord between Hawaiians and the ʻāina, even a person
could be revered as a puʻuhonua and come to embody these sanctified aspects
of care and protection. From Hawaiian ancestral wisdom, we therefore affirm
that puʻuhonua are places of refuge on a continuum from land to bodies,
and bodies to land.
The cultivation of puʻuhonua has never ceased despite the ongoing
colonisation and occupation of Hawaiʻi by the United States today. In
fact, sanctuaries for the protection of land and people continue to be
born in the present, with each (re)birth of the puʻuhonua lengthening the
umbilical connection between our contemporary struggles for Hawaiian
37
Figure 3.1: Puʻuhonua o Puʻuhuluhulu
Source: Authors’ photograph
interdependence and the ancestors of our past. The puʻuhonua grown

at Mākua Valley in 1996 is a well-documented example of this resurgent
legacy where over 300 Kanaka Maoli reunited with the land and each other,
raising a refuge in defiance of US military bombardment of the ʻāina. In
1994, sovereignty activist Bumpy Kanahele built Puʻuhonua o Waimānalo
which has grown into a sustainable village on Oʻahu’s north shore. Likewise,
Puʻuhonua o Waiʻanae on Oʻahu’s west side began with a group of unhoused
Hawaiians who, under the leadership of Aunty Twinkle Borge, self-organised
to create a thriving village.
As one of the youngest siblings nourished by this ancestral tradition, the
emergence of Puʻuhonua o Puʻuhuluhulu on Mauna Kea in 2019 regenerated
and empowered the legacy of Hawaiian sanctuaries born since the late 20th
century (see Figure 3.1). On 12 July 2019, more than a dozen kiaʻi gathered
at Puʻuhuluhulu on Mauna Kea to raise a puʻuhonua for Hawaiians striving
to protect our mountain from desecration by the proposed development of a
Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT). Ritually blessed by members of the Royal
Order of Kamehameha I, the rise of the refuge was followed closely by the
events of 15 July 2019 when eight Kanaka Maoli chained themselves to a
cattle guard for 12 hours at the base of Mauna Kea access road to halt the
advancement of telescope construction vehicles up the mountain. Two days
later, 33 kūpuna elders were arrested in a similar blockade after which over
100 young wāhine and māhū joined arms to brace the frontline resulting in
38
The Pu‘u We Planted
an eight-hour standoff against armed military and police forces. Together,

these unyielding stances to defend Mauna Kea from the occupying settler
state and TMT allowed the emergent puʻuhonua to germinate into an
internationally recognised encampment not only to protect Mauna Kea, but
also to demonstrate the camaraderie, ingenuity and resurgence of Indigenous
peoples as self-determining collectives.
The story of Puʻuhonua o Puʻuhuluhulu is thus more than just an episode
of sustained, adamant, frontline resistance against police, military and
settler state violence: in the shelter of the mauna, we planted the seeds for
(re)growing interdependent, decolonised futures for the lāhui. Grounded in
this genealogy of refuge, we invoke the puʻuhonua as a feminist, abolitionist
space where wāhine and māhū nourished cultures of care at Puʻuhuluhulu,
the piko we collectively birthed to protect Mauna Kea. Significantly, our
chapter explores the wāhine and māhū-led interventions against gendered
and sexual violence at Puʻuhonua o Puʻuhuluhulu that both challenged and
fortified us since the conception of the encampment. Storytelling from the
sheltered spaces of the Hale Mauna Wahine, Hale Mauna Māhū and the ʻAha
Kiaʻi Aloha, we share the joys and pains of sanctuary-birthing in the face
of settler colonial and patriarchal violence on the mountain. We conclude
with love to our future descendants cradled in the aftercare of our liberation,
tenderly promising them that the future we always hoped for is, was, and
shall ever be, a puʻuhonua to come.
Securing the posts to the paia: mana wahine and

mana māhū
Only a minority of publications describing the gendered aspects of
Puʻuhonua o Puʻuhuluhulu have been written since the establishment
of the sanctuary in 2019. In truth, documentation of the encampment
has predominantly focused on the cultural, spiritual and strategic value of
the puʻuhonua in relation to the Mauna Kea movement, Kanaka Maoli
nation-building and Hawaiian sovereignty. When gendered dynamics are
emphasised, they are principally invoked to commemorate the blockades
raised by wahine and māhū protectors on Mauna Kea access road against the
US National Guard and police enforcement following the arrest of frontline
kūpuna. Nevertheless, though the number of available materials focusing on
gender and the puʻuhonua remains modest, they provide critical insights
for us as we reflect upon our own work as protectors. In particular, we are
drawn to how these sources conceive of the encampment as a fecund site
where wāhine and māhū birthed Indigenous futurities beyond the brutality
of the occupying settler state, the violence of the military-police complex
and the martial masculinities of patriarchal leadership.
39
In ‘Decolonize Feminism: Why Feminists Should Care About Mauna

Kea’, transnational women of colour from AF3IRM Hawaiʻi (2019) criticise
the settler state’s reckless deployment of gratuitous force against Hawaiian
wāhine and kūpuna at the frontlines peacefully defending the sanctity of the
mountain. Members of the organisation were among the first to denounce
the criminalisation and arrest of kiaʻi as the vindictive extension of a gendered
state violence aggressively wielded to eliminate wāhine and possess ʻāina.
Acknowledging the AF3IRM Hawaiʻi analysis alongside the cultural, spiritual
and strategic intentions of the encampment, we contend that the birth of
Puʻuhonua o Puʻuhuluhulu be recognised as a defiant intervention against
the invasive, abusive, patriarchal desires at the heart of settler colonialism.
The assertions of AF3IRM Hawaiʻi thus allow us to conceive of Puʻuhonua
o Puʻuhuluhulu as a strategic gendered response to the escalation of state
violence against Hawaiian kiaʻi. The puʻuhonua was a place where Kanaka
Maoli and our allies could refuse the onslaught of military and police brutality
against our land and people by finding refuge in our bodies, in our relations
and in our collective love for the mountain. A resurgence physically grounded
in Hawaiian traditions of anti-violence, the rise of the sanctuary became
a place for growing abolitionist kinships where mutual care could emerge
from beneath the cracks of settler patriarchy.
Cultivating Puʻuhonua o Puʻuhuluhulu as a raised ground to nourish and
propagate such inclusive, loving relations beyond capitalist exploitation,
patriarchal violence and colonial elimination, AF3IRM Hawaiʻi coordinator
Yvonne Mahelona writes:
This moment in history is powerful beyond imagination for our

keiki (children), our ‘āina (land, environment), and our lāhui (people,
nation), because while we resist desecration of Mauna a Wākea we
are not only imagining but creating a new future at Pu‘uhonua o
Pu‘uhuluhulu. Ka wā mamua, ka wā mahope. (The future is found in
the past.) We are living here and now beyond the confines of capitalism
and colonialism, where people of all genders, all ages, all abilities are
loved, included and able to lead. (AF3IRM Hawai’i, 2019)
Invoking Hawaiian temporalities of the past-future and the future-past,

Mahelona reveals a germinal sense of continuity and innovation that
flourished within the space of Puʻuhonua o Puʻuhuluhulu, a rejuvenating
vision that encouraged the lāhui to embody our ancestral love for the
ʻāina as we collectively grew a thriving present for our people. Relations
nourished within the sanctuary prefigured and postfigured cyclical traditions
of aloha ʻāina, where pasts, presents and futures of care and healing could
be (re)planted in revolution according to our needs as survivors of colonial
assault and patriarchal abuse.
40
In her appreciation for the refuge of the puʻuhonua, Mahelona also

suggests how decision-making at the encampment reflected a distinctly
Hawaiian approach to direct action and nation-building that is strongly
intergenerational, poly-gendered and inclusive of the lāhui diverse abilities,
skills and talents. Shortly after the release of ‘Decolonize Feminism’, she
co-wrote an editorial with Dr Noelani Goodyear-Kaʻōpua titled ‘Protecting
Maunakea Is a Mission Grounded in Tradition’ (2019), which names many of
the wāhine and māhū kiaʻi involved in creating and sustaining Puʻuhonua
o Puʻuhuluhulu: Poliʻahu, Līlīnoe, Kahoupokāne, Maxine Kahaulelio,
Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu, Dr Pualani Kanakaole Kanahele, Pua Case,
Kekuhi Kealiikanakaoleohaililani, Ui Chong, Ruth Aloua, Ilima Long, Dr
Marie Alohalani Brown, Presley Ah Mook Sang, Dr Kalama Niheu, Maile
Wong, Noelani Ahia, Makanalani Gomes, Keano Davis and Tia Masaniai.
Noting that wāhine and māhū leadership in the Hawaiian lāhui is traditionally
unexceptional, both authors recall:
What is happening at Maunakea is so much more than a struggle to stop

the Thirty Meter Telescope from being built on our sacred summit.
A non-capitalist community grounded in living Hawaiian cultural
practice is rising, like the kupukupu ferns that grow from cracks in the
black lava rock and unfurl toward the sun. Sure, we still deal with the
heteropatriarchal forces (both internal and external) that US occupation
has solidified in our islands. But, in the beloved community that sits at
the base of Mauna Kea Access Road, wāhine and māhū continue to be
central to the life and leadership of our Hawaiian nation. (Goodyear-
Kaʻōpua and Mahelona, 2019)
For Goodyear-K aʻōpua and Mahelona, the rise of Puʻuhonua o Puʻuhuluhulu

can be attributed to the labour of those wāhine and māhū leaders who
worked to (re)grow a community of care and healing on Mauna Kea despite
the traumatising threats posed by settler state enforcement to our protectors
and our mountain. Both authors allow us to assess our own work as wāhine
and māhū protectors whose hands helped raise the encampment from the
beginning. To the analyses of AF3IRM Hawaiʻi, and Goodyear-Kaʻōpua
and Mahelona, we thus offer our own perspective on gendered dynamics
within Puʻuhonua o Puʻuhuluhulu from the standpoint of kiaʻi who cared
for wāhine and māhū hurt by internalised settler patriarchal violence.
E nānā ʻia mai ka hale o kākou: kiaʻi ʻia, mālama ʻia,

e pale aku
For over eight months, we lived at Puʻuhonua o Puʻuhuluhulu to defend our
mountain and our people from the violence of settler patriarchy. As kiaʻi of
41
Figure 3.2: Hale Wahine and Hale Māhū at Puʻuhonua o Puʻuhuluhulu
both Haleakalā and Mauna Kea, we each contributed an aspect of care culture
to the puʻuhonua, working with other protectors to collectively establish the
Hale Mauna Wahine and Hale Mauna Māhū at Puʻuhuluhulu University as
spaces to empower wāhine and māhū through unapologetic defiance against
cisheteropatriarchy at camp (see Figure 3.2). In companionship with kiaʻi
of the Kapu Aloha crew and Mauna Medics team, we also cultivated a set
of protocols to confront cases of gendered and sexual violence reported in
the puʻuhonua. The protocols became the founding principles for the ʻAha
Kiaʻi Aloha, an organisation tasked with preventing, identifying, addressing
and healing the abuse, harm and trauma faced by survivors in camp.
The ancestral basis for raising the Hale Mauna Wahine, the Hale Mauna
Māhū and the ʻAha Kiaʻi Aloha at Puʻuhonua o Puʻuhuluhulu emerges from
our cosmogonic chant, He Kumulipo (see Liliuokalani, 1978). According to
the chant, the progenitors of humanity were, in birth order: the first wāhine
named Laʻilaʻi, Kiʻi (a māhū) and Kāne (a kāne). Laʻilaʻi takes Kiʻi as her
initial consort, giving rise to the first generation of humans by a wāhine
and māhū pairing. She later partners with Kāne, giving birth to the second
generation of humans whose rank and station became subordinate to the
children of Laʻilaʻi and Kiʻi. The decisions of Laʻilaʻi were by no means
coincidental, for through her actions a state of pono was established between
humans and divinity –and between wahine, māhū and kāne –where relations
between their children and the land, if carefully tended to, could proceed
in balance and prosperity or imbalance and destruction. He Kumulipo thus
42
awakens us to genders, sexualities and relations that have been abundantly non-
binary and polyamorous since the beginning of humanity, urging Hawaiians
to reclaim ourselves from the colonial desolations of cisheteropatriarchy.
The story of our progenitor wahine, māhū and kāne ancestors in He
Kumulipo is remembered through their material inscription in the structure
of the Hawaiian hale which supplies guidance to our practice of relational
camaraderie in the pursuit of:
O mai la o Lailai ka paia

O Kane a ka Pokinikini ka pou
O Kii ka mahu (Kalakaua)
Endure, Laʻilaʻi, the walls of the house
Endure, Kāne of the countless nights, the posts of the house
Endure, Kiʻi, the māhū securing them together
(Authors’ translation; see also Kalakaua, 1972)
Whereas Laʻilaʻi provides the protective walls of the house, and Kāne the
sheltering support of the posts, it is Kiʻi who fastens them together in
solidarity as the ʻaha or sennit cordage of the kiʻihei: the lashings, kinks
and knots that secure the paia to the pou, and the pou to the paia, through
topological mechanics of friction and tension. Together, the structure of the
hale and the function of the ʻaha provided us with an indigenous and material
framework for defending against the gendered and sexual violence at camp.
Placed in the middle of patriarchal insecurity

Having studied various social justice struggles in the past, we realised
that the prevalence of gendered and sexual violence, abuse, harm and re/
traumatisation in activist movements is a harrowing reality, and the struggle
to protect Mauna Kea is no exception. For us, the problem was uniquely
difficult to confront and effectively address at Puʻuhonua o Puʻuhuluhulu
for several complicated reasons, beginning with the amount of labour
needed to oppose external patriarchal violence wielded by the settler state.
The overwhelming presence of militarised police forces armed with the
same anti-r ioting technology used on Standing Rock, Black Lives Matter
and Palestinian activists –sound cannons, pepper spray, rubber bullets, tear
gas, tasers and so on –simply posed too much of an immediate threat, one
that demanded constant attention from kiaʻi and leaders. In this context,
the practice of Kapu Aloha and the rise of Puʻuhonua o Puʻuhuluhulu as
a refuge were largely implemented to dissuade the external use of deadly
settler patriarchal violence against protectors. Supplementing these plans
were the efforts of pro-mauna media to counter negative narratives of kiaʻi
that could be misconstrued in the news and social media to legitimate the
43
escalation of police and military tactics. The strategies decided upon by

kiaʻi and leadership at Puʻuhonua o Puʻuhuluhulu were thus instrumental
in creating an activist security culture at the encampment complete with
anti-surveillance, anti-infiltration and de-escalation measures against the
military and police.
Although necessary, the initial focus of camp security culture on the most
apparent dangers posed by state enforcement would nonetheless produce the
unintended effect of characterising settler patriarchal violence as a primarily
external problem. So when a pattern of internal gendered and sexual violence
against wāhine and māhū began to surface in camp, the reports were initially
met with disbelief and, at times, outright dismissal by leaders. Sadly, this poor
response to gendered and sexual harm in activist organising is much too
common (see Chapter 2 by Montoya in this volume), calling into question
the limitations of security strategies that lack a trauma-informed approach
to the spectrum of settler patriarchal violence that can penetrate even spaces
like Puʻuhonua o Puʻuhuluhulu. Indeed, our reports of the harm happening
in the camp were both minimised as a distraction to the protection of Mauna
Kea and hyperbolised as a threat to the safety of the movement, placing our
attempts to centre survivors and hold perpetrators accountable in tension
with keeping the puʻuhonua and the movement secure from police and
military surveillance.
Our chapter rejects this state of insecurity that arose at Puʻuhonua o
Puʻuhuluhulu, where the anti-violence of the camp security culture became
entangled with patriarchal cultures of silence, creating a dual dilemma in
our struggle to protect Mauna Kea. Breaking the silence of this insecurity,
we chronicle how our experiences in the Hale Mauna Wahine, the Hale
Mauna Māhū and the ʻAha Kiaʻi Aloha struggled with the need to support
wāhine and māhū survivors of patriarchal abuse, hostility and trauma as an
expression of our role to defend our mountain and our people. We hope
that activists reading these accounts will understand the particular harms
of this violence and begin to develop the skills necessary for addressing its
occurrence in our movements for liberation.
As survivors of gendered and sexual violence ourselves, we are familiar
with settler patriarchal trauma and cultures of silence given our personal
experiences and the intergenerational histories of abuse our ancestors have
faced for centuries within our ʻohana and our lāhui. As kiaʻi of Haleakalā and
Mauna Kea, and as survivors of settler patriarchy, we therefore refuse the false
dilemma of choosing between protecting the movement or supporting the
harmed. Instead, we decide to narrate our experiences with gendered and
sexual violence in camp as part of a trauma-informed approach to advise all
future Hawaiian struggles and puʻuhonua to come. While we are aware from
experience that sharing our story is unsettling to our lāhui, we nonetheless
encourage our nation and allies to reflect on how patriarchal cultures of
44
silence recruit us all to interrogate and police the words of survivors and their
supporters rather than surrounding them with a puʻuhonua of committed
care and support. In this spirit, we adamantly argue that telling our stories
of violence at camp is how we create the culture of security and care we
hope to prefigure for our collective liberation.
A trauma-informed approach to activism recognises that harm is both
pervasive and repetitive, a legacy of the violent structures we seek to
dismantle, including within our organising spaces. To identify, break, and
replace these cycles of trauma with cultures of care is to skilfully practise
decolonisation and abolition with our bodies and relations. In doing so, our
trauma transforms into story, stories we repeat to inform our aloha for the
land and each other.
In the following case studies, we share our stories and experiences to
inform future movements of the need to practise a culture of care, consent
and healing at the core of activist security protocols. We begin by recounting
our experiences in the Hale Mauna Wahine, illustrating reactions to classes
taught in the house about Wākea, Hawaiian and Haole patriarchy, and
consent culture, topics that challenged the mainstream narratives of the
Mauna Kea movement. Then, we provide stories from the Hale Mauna
Māhū and the internalisation of anti-māhū and anti-LGBTQIA+hostility
expressed by Hawaiian māhū and kāne towards the house and its members.
Finally, we discuss the creation of the ʻAha Kiaʻi Aloha, a set of protocols
we designed to centre the needs of survivors who experienced gendered
and sexual violence in the puʻuhonua.
He Hale Mauna Wahine: o maila ʻo Laiʻilaʻi ka paia

Hale Mauna Wahine was created as a brave space for woman-identified
kiaʻi to gather and connect through shared experiences, to discuss our
history of colonialism and heteropatriarchal violence, and to imagine
futures of collective care. Built with the helping wāhine hands of Kainani
and Keahinui Johnson, this donated four-pole open tent with mismatched
blue and grey tarp walls held stories of resilience and an unwavering
commitment to the mauna, ʻohana and lāhui. Hale walls covered with
photos donated by kiaʻi honoured our wahine chiefs, leaders, activists,
educators, storytellers and grandmothers, enlivening their names and
storied memories.
Although wahine held many leadership positions, the initial prevalence of
movement male speakers somewhat overshadowed their female counterparts.
A notable pattern of horizontal female labour upholding day-to-day
operations remained unseen when countered with heroic male voices
elevated on cameras, microphones, ritual drums or religious protocols.
Although a balance of front-facing female leadership eventually emerged,
45
the initial impetus for the Hale Wahine was due to this dissonance. As
I documented previously:
The Hale Wāhine was my response to continued male dominance.

As I approached the Ala Hulu Kupuna road, I looked down to find a
chalk drawing: a block figure with names of the four male akua (gods)
Kāne, Kū, Lono, and Kanaloa. Why were the male gods drawn here? The
majority of akua associated with Mauna Kea are female! Although the name
of the mountain is Mauna Kea, the Mauna is in fact the body of Papa
(our Mother Earth). Hawaiʻi island kiaʻi call her ʻMama Mauna’ and
the lava itself is Pele! So why was masculinity marking territory here? (Ahia,
2020: 610, emphasis in original)
Hale Wahine allowed us to openly discuss this visual symbolism. One

wahine generously offered an excuse that perhaps kāne were bringing
power and mana of the four most revered male gods with them to remind
us of their constant protection. Another laughed at the thought that
Pele, the volcanic fire goddess still erupting and creating new land at that
very moment, needed anyone’s help, for she could level us all with one
searing red flow. Still, we were troubled that akuahine from Mauna Kea
such as Poliʻahu, Moʻoinanea, Waiau and Līlīnoe have historically been
comparatively understudied.
Mauna Kea summit is considered Wao Akua, or realm of the gods, and
was not intended for permanent human residence. Kanaka only purposely
visited, without dwelling long due to its sacred value and inaccessible
elevation of 13,800 feet. At 6,600 feet, Hale Wahine became a place of solace
from the elements, including elevation, midday sun and unpredictable rain
showers. Our bodies already carry inherited intergenerational trauma that
is triggered and compounded by the shock, fear and exhaustion induced
by frontline action. So providing a station of rest was crucial to our well-
being: sitting quietly, listening to nēnē birds at dawn or ʻōpeʻapeʻa bats at
dusk, watching Līlīnoe mist encircle the mountain every afternoon, or
admiring flexible ʻaʻaliʻi pink bushes bending in the harsh winds sweeping
the puʻu. Through our plantcestors and animal relations, we learned lessons
of strength, resilience, regularity and rest as a form of resistance in the cycles
of action and recovery.
Puʻuhuluhulu University offered classes on topics pertinent to wahine in
the spirit of collective education and empowerment. Hale Wahine hosted
speakers on mana wahine, women writers, birthing practices, women’s
menstrual rituals, domestic abuse, healing trauma through writing and
women’s circles. Art and activism are often paired, yet art is also a tool for
deep reflection and healing, so Hale Wahine provided workshops, art supplies
and free journals. Storytelling, from formal oratory to casual ‘talk-story’
46
sessions, are integral cultural carriers; ancestral knowledge held within

frames our world views.
To examine gendered abuses of power located within our ancestral
Hawaiian stories, we presented research challenging assumptions that harm
comes primarily from outside our community. While levels of violence from
imperialism, colonialism, heteropatriarchy, military and toxic masculinity are
undeniable, unacknowledged power imbalances within our culture can be
just as insidious. It is certainly easier to see and accept colonial state violence
from foreigners than to admit oppression or imbalances of power exist within
our own community. Therefore, we focused on one of our most cherished
stories of the origins of Kanaka Maoli related to Mauna Kea, a story of
Papahānaumoku or Papa for short (Mother Earth) and Wākea (Sky Father).
The importance of the story of Papa and Wākea as the progenitors of
Kanaka Maoli cannot be overstated in its value to Hawaiian identity. Papa
and Wākea mated and had a daughter Hoʻohōkūkalani, the expanse of
the stars. As Hoʻohōkūkalani matured, Wākea desired her as a mate. But
instead of asking for Papa’s consent, he called upon his priest Komoʻawa
to arrange a way for him to sleep with her. His priest created a new ritual
calendar where during certain nights of the month, men and women
would eat, sleep and worship separately, allowing Wākea private access to
his daughter. This event became the origin of the ‘Ai Kapu state religion.
The story continues as it tells how the first child of Hoʻohōkūkalani and
Wākea named Hāloanakalaukapalili was stillborn and after being planted,
sprouted into the kalo (taro) plant, providing food for the second child,
a male also named Hāloa. As the siblings grew, the younger cared for the
elder in a reciprocal bond, thus ensuring our cultural relational kuleana to
nature as our family elder.
In our class entitled, ‘Papa, Wākea, Consent and Kuleana’, we exposed
a form of native Hawaiian patriarchy engendered when a male ruler and
a male priest conspired to deceive the women of their true intentions.
We read this sacred moʻolelo as a lack of consent and a legacy of non-
accountability. With the rise of the #MeToo movement and calls from kiaʻi
of ‘No Consent!’ to the desecration of Mauna Kea, it resonated when we
demanded the same sacredness be applied to our bodies. We noted how
the TMT builders were re-enacting the desire to gaze at Hoʻohōkūkalani
through their telescope like a voyeur in order to capture her starry mysteries
for themselves and search for life on other planets while destroying sacred
sites on the earth we inhabit. We discussed the meaning of consent as
well as our personal kuleana: our responsibilities, accountability, privileges
and rights depending on our positionality and in relation to our personal
connections to the mauna. We endeavoured to create brave spaces, as I do
not believe a space can be truly safe, especially while under frontline action
surveillance and state violence. We bravely tried to build relational pilina
47
strong enough to hold our vulnerability and truth-telling. Because this

sacred moʻolelo is so often retold and considered untouchable, it can be
unsettling to listeners when we reveal many details overlooked or ignored
by previous generations of storytellers. It required a fierce aloha to hold
this new information.
Responses of listeners varied during our multiple presentations: scepticism,
silent pondering, curiosity and dismay in acknowledging this legacy. Several
wahine apologists tried to defend or excuse Wākea’s behaviour and one tried
to gaslight my answers to her pointed questions. It is difficult for survivors
of sexual violence like ourselves to experience a culture of silence. Wākea
being the ultimate father figure in this extensive mauna family reunion only
served to reveal a history of dysfunction so many native families endure.
#MeToo reminded us not to remain silent.
Dismissal, distraction and misdirection were the most common responses.
One kāne tried to divert attention by centring Wākea and his kahuna and
completely ignoring the wāhine within the story. Some tried to dismiss
the story as simply mythology and not real. Others applied a particular
cultural reading that reduces characters to their elemental natures in
a move to elevate their natural and spiritual value over their symbolic
human persona. While we recognise there are many ways to read a story,
to ignore the fact that sacred narratives transform collectively according to
the historic needs of each generation, is to erase our ancestors’ desires to
pass on this important wisdom. A surprisingly hopeful response to the
story came from a father of a young daughter, who had listened intently
and showed genuine concern as he asked how he could learn more and
support his daughter better. As the class gained word of mouth attention,
we noticed it was also surveilled by those suspicious that we might upset the
status quo. A culture of silence and backlash as evidenced in the #MeToo
movement was readily apparent.
Hale Wahine provided care and conversation surrounding various forms
of trauma experienced within and without the puʻuhonua. We hosted
the Mauna Medics Lokahi Team circle discussions called Hale Kūkākūkā,
which centred talk-story, personal experiences and tools to relieve the
stress of intergenerational cultural trauma in a frontline action context. As
a hale, we collaborated and supported protocols and initiatives to care for
our communities. Through our praxis of care culture, we created brave
spaces to increase the mana of our kiaʻi wāhine. Together, we recognised
the power of our collectivity to dream new ways of being into reality.
We shared an unbreakable resilience like the ʻaʻaliʻi plant bending in the
shifting winds. We danced, sang, made art, wrote journals, told stories,
laughed, cried and joyfully resisted the oppressions intent on silencing
our voices.
48
He Hale Mauna Māhū: heia ka pou, heia ka paia

Like all things Kanaka Maoli, the Hale Mauna Māhū has a polyamorous
parentage. The house was birthed and raised by my sister Dr Kalaniopua
Young, who once resided at Puʻuhonua o Waiʻanae –the houseless and
housefree refuge at West Oʻahu that is our mother sanctuary. While living
there, she worked with community leaders Aunty Twinkle and Aunty Loke
to create a ‘puʻuhonua within a puʻuhonua’ for houseless and housefree māhū,
trans, non-binary and queered residents at the encampment. At Puʻuhonua
o Puʻuhuluhulu, Dr Young applied her experience organising at Puʻuhonua
o Waiʻanae to (re)grow yet another space for māhū and LGBTQIA+as we
protected Mauna Kea.
The care culture of the Hale Mauna Māhū also drew from Hawaiian,
Black and Latinx drag ball genealogies such as those portrayed in Moses
Goods’s Lovey Lee or Janet Mock’s award-winning Netflix series Pose. Like
the alternative ʻohana and support provided by traditional drag houses,
our hale became a puʻuhonua within the puʻuhonua for houseless, māhū,
LGBTQIA+, Black Kanaka and allies who felt marginalised in camp or
who needed a place to stay while protecting the mauna. The hale became
a home where we were able to fall in love with the mountain and each
other, to spill shady-ass tea and hold campy kikis, to teach decolonial sex
education classes on aikāne and punalua relations, to talk about Hawaiian
māhū transcestors and cosmologies, to discuss HIV/AIDS queer history, to
provide PrEP information, to supply contraceptives and lube for folks at
camp, to gossip on Grindr and to witness māhū transition with the change of
seasons during Ke Ala a Kāne me Kanaloa –Hawaiian solstice and equinox
phenomena. For many of us, the hale became the home and nation we
always desired but were constantly thrown out of, a lāhui situated between
Mauna Kea and Puʻuhuluhulu where our relations as Hawaiians, wāhine,
māhū and kāne, could coincide in powerful, pleasurable ways as we stood
together to protect our mountain.
With such a multi-p arent genealogy intersecting across traditions
and activisms from Hawaiian, Indigenous, Oceanic, Black, Latinx and
LGBTQIA+communities of colour, it came as an unexpected and traumatic
disappointment when the construction of the hale was opposed by off-mauna
māhū from our own lāhui, including a Mauna Kea advocate and māhū leader
from Oʻahu whom we respect but who nonetheless demanded that we
deconstruct and deplatform. Accusations against the hale were diverse: we
were told that the house was a distraction from our duties as protectors,
that our space was unnecessary since māhū are already accepted in Hawaiian
society and the Mauna Kea movement, and even that we were colonising
the mountain with White queer ideologies. These off-mauna māhū also
demanded that we remove our LGBTQIA+flags and threatened to invade
49
the puʻuhonua to dismantle the structures themselves if we refused to do

so, seemingly forgetting that Puʻuhuluhulu was a sanctuary protected by the
non-violence of Kapu Aloha.
The criticisms were confusing from our on-mauna perspective. The first
accusation, that we were distracted or distracting, was simply untrue: all
of our house members were volunteering full-time at Hale Hoʻolako,
Puʻuhuluhulu University, Mauna Medics, Kapu Aloha Crew, the camp
kitchen, ritual ceremony, direct-action drills, night watch, waste disposal and
sanitation. Indeed, the hale actually enhanced participation in the sanctuary
precisely because on-mauna māhū and LGBTQIA+kiaʻi were able to create
a communal space to gather after working all day, a place to reaffirm our
relationships with each other and the mountain, a place to just be māhū. No,
we were not distracted, we were planted. If there was any distraction to our
efforts at Puʻuhonua o Puʻuhuluhulu, it was off-mauna māhū attempting to
dictate and challenge our decisions as self-determining organisers.
The second accusation –that māhū and LGBTQIA+kiaʻi do not need a hale
since we are already an accepted part of Kanaka Maoli communities and the
Mauna Kea movement –is an unfortunately common refrain often repeated
in our lāhui to disavow its ongoing complicity with cisheteropatriarchy. The
danger of this mistaken conviction is that it ends up closeting, gaslighting
and silencing māhū experiences of oppression today by appealing to the
supposed purity and diversity of an idyllic Hawaiian past untainted by
colonisation or patriarchy. The belief ends up weaponising native kinship
and time against māhū, alleviating the lāhui of any responsibility to confront
cisheteropatriarchy by offering indigeneity as an alibi.
Sure enough, these romanticised claims of inclusion were refuted outright
when we invited drag queens to the sanctuary to read books to children
at the Hale Mauna Māhū. Our guests were met with hostility from a few
of the Hawaiian brothers in camp who were fearful that the queens would
endanger the youth and upset that we would let queer folx anywhere near
children. Oddly, these same kāne seemed to forget that they themselves
were bringing their own children to a direct-action standoff on Mauna Kea
against armed police and military forces.
Curiously, our brothers were not the only protectors who challenged drag
queen presence at the puʻuhonua. The same off-mauna māhū who told us
that the Hale Mauna Māhū was unnecessary since we were already loved
and accepted by the movement, also opposed the drag queen reading event.
Ostensibly, our māhū siblings were afraid the queens would indecently expose
themselves to Hawaiian children by coming under-dressed to a camp located
in a 30°F alpine desert environment at 13,000-foot elevation in the middle of a
violent standoff against the occupying settler state. Lack of faith in drag queen
fashion sense notwithstanding, none of these off-mauna māhū seemed worried
about children or indecent exposure whenever Hawaiian men frequented the
50
sanctuary wearing nothing but traditional loincloth exposing their buttocks

and bulging crotches to plain view. Nevertheless, the joint opposition from
our kāne brothers and māhū siblings resulted in a self-defeating, unorthodox,
negative solidarity between them that simultaneously invalidated the argument
that māhū are accepted by our lāhui while confirming the need for a space
like the Hale Mauna Māhū at the puʻuhonua.
Setting aside these initial critiques and contradictions, the last accusation –
that on-mauna māhū were colonising the Mauna Kea movement with
haole LGBTQIA+agendas and ideologies –is slightly more worthy of
contemplation. The targets of this criticism were the multiple LGBTQIA+
flags being displayed in the Hale Mauna Māhū as a sign of queer solidarity
with the movement. Our off-mauna siblings claimed that we did not need
LGBTQIA+flags at the puʻuhonua because the Hawaiian flag was already
representative of all māhū. After being warned to take them down, we were
told we were being surveilled, and that if we continued to fly the flags, our
hale would be dismantled to prevent the Mauna Kea movement from being
colonised by White queer politics.
Strangely, the criticism against flying LGBTQIA+flags gifted in solidarity
to the Mauna Kea movement did not seem to apply to the national flags
donated by our allies from the Native and Black Americas, Africa, Oceania,
Palestine and Asia that were publicly displayed along the Ala Kūpuna.
Furthermore, the standard was not adopted toward blatantly imperialist
countries like Britain and France, whose flags were flown at the entrance of
the puʻuhonua as a reminder of Hawaiian Kingdom treaties made with those
countries in the 1840s. For some reason, the LGBTQIA+flag was singled out
by these off-mauna māhū as dangerous and distracting to our stand against
TMT. When we informed camp leadership that the Hale Mauna Māhū was
being targeted for dismantling in a sanctuary where Kapu Aloha was the rule,
we were told that the issue was minor and of brief consequence, that our
conflict was causing distractions for the māhū who were sent to surveil us.
Assessing the situation, the anti-māhū hostility we were confronting
from off-mauna māhū and on-mauna kāne was the result of an internalised
cisheteropatriarchy and military-police state complex that resulted in the
colonial closeting of māhū in the name of safety and indigeneity. Off-mauna
māhū and on-mauna kāne turned the security culture of the puʻuhonua
against us, targeting us as colonial, deviant threats to the camp and the
movement. The counterintuitive, self-defeating, negative solidarity that
arose between off-mauna māhū and on-mauna kāne ended up participating
in the attempted elimination of māhū and LGBTQIA+kanaka from the
space of an indigenous sanctuary, violating the security principles of Kapu
Aloha and Hawaiian puʻuhonua traditions.
At the same time, the expression of this horizontal and internal elimination
varied for the on-mauna kāne and off-mauna māhū according to differential
51
gendered logics that nonetheless converged with settler colonialism and

cisheteropatriarchy. Our on-mauna brothers who wanted to expel the
drag queens away from their children acted according to a māhūphobic
fear of queer transmission that is complicit with the ongoing colonial and
patriarchal expulsion of māhū and LGBTQIA+from Hawaiian land, family,
nation, culture, history and activism. While painful and inexcusable, such
behaviour is unfortunately anticipated given the proximity of Hawaiian cis
men to the gendered hierarchies of colonisation that condition them to
surveil, police and protect the norms of cisheteropatriarchal settler society.
When juxtaposed with the strong representation of Hawaiian kāne in the
militarised state forces sent to remove protectors from the mountain, we
see how patriarchy engenders violent complicity between kāne protectors
and kāne police against their own people.
In comparison, the horizontal hostility stirred by off-mauna māhū
against us, their on-mauna siblings, emerged in response to a perceived
threat that White queer agendas might co-opt the movement. While the
caution was understandable, the actions taken by our siblings to address this
potential problem were ultimately self-defeating: in their attempt to resist
settler colonialism and White queerness, they ended up reinforcing the
cisheteropatriarchal violence that structurally targets all māhū –on-mauna
and off-mauna –for removal from our lands, families and communities.
Moreover, their decisions failed to contemplate the symbiotic relation
between cisheteropatriarchy and settler colonialism, both of which reinforce
ongoing gendered and sexual violence enacted against Hawaiian māhū and
LGBTQIA+communities. Most disappointing was that their obsessive focus
on White queers distracted them from recognising our shared history with
queer Black and Indigenous People of Colour who showed up to protect
Mauna Kea. This recognition might have helped us all grieve, celebrate and
empower our mutual survival, sanctuary and solidarity in ways that decentred
Whiteness as we struggled together to protect the land.
While I mourn this missed opportunity for alliance, I nevertheless affirm
that the Hale Mauna Māhū was a defiant continuation of that solidarity at
Puʻuhonua o Puʻuhuluhulu. By remaining planted in our protection of both
mauna and māhū, we refused the cisheteropatriarchal binaries that would
cleave and closet our movements through a self-defeating politics of rejection.
Furthermore, while the examples of our kāne brothers and māhū siblings’
complicity given earlier were disappointing, I love them nonetheless. Despite
the internal struggles we faced, our difficulties did not eclipse our aloha, nor
did it cause us to ignore all the symbolic and material support we received
from our people both on and off the mauna. We were able to endure the
indignities of our own people turning on us because we felt truly cared for
and deeply cherished by our lāhui.
52
To (re)grow the solidarities we experienced at the Hale Mauna Māhū,

we encourage all future Hawaiian activists –wahine, māhū, kāne –to plant
this culture of care in our movements from the inception by centring māhū
and LGBTQIA+approaches to security in its most abundant sense: the
relational trust that no matter how complex and difficult the problems
may seem, we will not sacrifice either the movement or māhū in the name
of safety and indigeneity. A way to skilfully achieve this goal is to first
recognise that cisheteropatriarchy and settler colonialism are always trying
to remove māhū and LGBTQIA+from the spaces, structures and processes
of Hawaiian movements. A security culture that does not account for these
intersections or that attempts to flatten their complexities by focusing solely
on indigeneity or coloniality will inevitably be co-opted and turned against
itself, forcing organisers into a false binary where we must choose between
either the movement or māhū. Refuse this sacrifice with all your aloha,
bind yourselves around this refusal and trust that our māhū ancestors will
be there to secure us in that place in the middle.
Ka ʻaha kiaʻi aloha: bound in the middle

The Hale Wahine and Hale Māhū provided sanctuary within Puʻuhonua o
Puʻuhuluhulu for wahine, māhū and kāne seeking recognition and belonging
at the encampment. However, none of us could foretell how the birth of the
hale would also prove auspicious for organising against gendered and sexual
harm that would occur at the refuge during the height of the struggle against
TMT and the police state. In this section, we share our story of the ʻAha
Kiaʻi Aloha, a group of protectors who undertook the physical and emotional
labour of protecting the protectors who were harmed by this violence.
Indeed, less than two weeks after we raised the Hale Wahine and Hale
Māhū, we began to receive our first reports of gendered and sexual trauma
at the puʻuhonua from kiaʻi who came to the houses seeking secure places
to disclose their experiences. Complaints ranged from unwanted verbal
attention to stalking, harassment, inappropriate touch, genital exposure and
rape. At the time, there was no official organisation or protocol dedicated
to addressing the specific challenges of this violence, including the multiple
complications posed by a threatening police state, the sensationalism of pro-
TMT settler media, and even negative reactions from camp insecurity culture.
Fortunately, we had allies at the refuge to advise us from other Indigenous
movements like Standing Rock and Ihumatao in Aotearoa. We also referred
to our own activist libraries at the Hale which included Haunani-Kay Trask’s
‘Double Colonization’ (1984), Kalaniopua Young’s ‘From a Native Trans
Daughter’ (2015), Sarah Deer’s The Beginning and End of Rape (2015) and
Elaine Brown’s A Taste of Power (1992).
53
Most importantly, we collaborated with Noelani Ahia –co-founder

with Dr Kalama Niheu of the Mauna Medics –to establish the ʻAha
Kiaʻi Aloha, a set of protocols drafted to centre the safety and needs of
those harmed by gendered and sexual violence in camp. In the ʻAha
Kiaʻi Aloha’s founding document –written by wahine and māhū –we
developed guiding questions and actions to advise us on how we might
approach reports of violence in the sanctuary. We agreed that Mauna
Medics should assume responsibility for initial responses, but that all of
us would centre the harmed kiaʻi needs and consent regarding how to
care for them, their safety and healing. Working with the Medics, we
also assembled a support network of medical doctors, mental health
practitioners, psychologists specialising in sexual abuse, social workers and
healers, all of whom offered their services to the harmed kiaʻi while they
were at the puʻuhonua and when they returned to their communities.
In addition, we gathered a mauna council of wāhine who could offer
advice for the harmed kiaʻi if they desired help determining what they
needed as well as a team of supporting kāne who could help enforce the
latter’s decisions in camp. Lastly, we appointed members of the ʻAha to
educate kāne who came to the puʻuhonua about cisheteropatriarchy so
they could hold each other accountable, not only on the frontlines with
police but also with other kāne protectors.
After following protocol of reporting instances to Mauna Medic and Kiaʻi
Aloha leaders, we asked the following types of questions, as appropriate:Would
you consent to giving your name or prefer to remain anonymous? Do you
need immediate medical care or somewhere safe to sleep tonight? Would
you like to talk directly with a trained professional? Or would you just like
someone here to listen and witness your experience? Would you be more
comfortable talking with someone of a particular gender/sexuality? How
far would you like to pursue this (with our assistance)? Would you like us
to talk with the perpetrator and have them removed, file a police report or
seek a temporary restraining order? Would you like aftercare resources in
your community?
As a whole, the ʻAha protocols attempted to prefigure trauma-informed
cultures of care that would centre those harmed by patriarchal violence in
camp as piko of self-determination. We hoped that such practices would be
adopted in future movements, including nationalist movements for Hawaiian
sovereignty, which often centre patriarchal states over the wahine and māhū
hurt by them.
The implementation of these guiding protocols for the defence of harmed
kiaʻi would always be imperfect, even though ʻAha members performed
their roles above and beyond all expectations. The challenge came from
our being bound in the middle of two discordant struggles: protecting
harmed kiaʻi at the encampment and remaining silent about the occurrence
54
of that harm for the sake of the movement. This ascetic duality meant that
members of the ‘Aha often found ourselves isolated between two parallel
movements –standing to protect the mountain while guarding against our
own people. Bound in the middle of this situation, some of the wāhine and
māhū traumatised by this internal harm would rationalise their silence as
the fulfilment of Kapu Aloha, as a justified and necessary self-sacrifice to
protect Mauna Kea and the lāhui.
As members of the ‘Aha, we often asked ourselves why Kapu Aloha and
camp security culture did not explicitly centre the prevention of gendered and
sexual violence in the puʻuhonua, even when that violence was recognised
as a cause of the TMT proponents’ desire for Mauna Kea and rejected with
collective shouts of ‘No Consent!’ At minimum, our task as an ʻAha might
have been mitigated by a collective effort to confront gendered and sexual
violence from the conception of the camp. Kapu Aloha and Puʻuhonua o
Puʻuhuluhulu might have been offered as responsive practices and spaces
where this oppression could be abolished and replaced with restorative,
transformative, prefigurative cultures of care.
Strategically speaking, a movement’s beliefs can be scattered and seeded
most effectively when it can claim the moral high ground, which might have
been accomplished had we lignified the masses to oppose settler patriarchy
as the reason that Mauna Kea and Hawaiians –especially wāhine and
māhū –were under assault. At the same time, the Wākea-centred narrative
at the heart of the Mauna Kea movement would have made a unified stance
against systemic gendered and sexual violence hypocritical. For many kiaʻi,
the conviction to protect Mauna Kea remains deeply rooted in a reverence
for the moʻolelo of Wākea which uncritically venerates the creation of the
ʻAi Kapu as a Hawaiian institution of patriarchy, even when that moʻolelo
provides Kanaka Maoli nationalists with an origin story to fight the colonial
violence of TMT. Such a tale, with all its complicity and contradiction,
could hardly present the enchanting narrative required to assure the mass
protection of Mauna Kea.
Or could it? As an ʻAha bound in the middle of the struggle to protect
both the mountain and her protectors from gendered and sexual violence,
we were compelled by our experience at camp to restory our reasons
for defending Mauna Kea. Following our ʻAha protocol, we centred
Papahānaumoku and Hoʻohōkūkalani as wāhine who were targeted by
the patriarchal and hierarchical manipulations of Wākea and his priest
Komoʻawa, drawing attention to the ways this control is marginalised in
both the moʻolelo and the mauna movement. We then named Papa and
Hoʻohōkūkalani trauma in the ongoing struggle to protect the mountain,
taking care to illuminate how TMT and its militarised police were willing
to colonise our earth mother (Papa, the mauna in Mauna Kea) in order to
gaze at our sky mother (Hoʻohōkūkalani, the stars). Finally, we extended
55
this continuum of patriarchal violence to the wāhine and māhū harmed at

the refuge, centring and raising them as piko and puʻuhonua.
Fearlessly reckoning with past and present expressions of patriarchy
from Wākea to TMT to Puʻuhuluhulu allowed us to outgrow the duality
binding us in the middle of our fight to care for each other and the
mauna. By shifting our principles for defending the mountain to centre
those most harmed by patriarchal violence, we cradled an umbilical
bond from Papahānaumoku and Hoʻohōkūkalani to the mauna and the
survivors of the puʻuhonua. As ʻAha protectors, we provided evidence
in action that a collective struggle against gendered and sexual violence
in our movement was not only possible but practised. What we needed
as ʻAha survivors was a collective willingness to organise around this
survivor-centred, trauma-informed, restorative, transformative approach
to self-determination and sovereignty, which we insist must always be
at the piko of our movements. We call on all kiaʻi to carry this kuleana
with us into our future movements so that we can end the violence of
settler patriarchy binding us all.
Conclusion
On 12 July 2020, a year after the rise of our beloved puʻuhonua, we finally
ascended the slopes of Puʻuhuluhulu for the first time together with our
hānai, Kanealii Williams, who was part of our hale ʻohana. We had flown back
to Hawaiʻi island after leaving camp in March due to COVID-19, returning
for a few days to visit with Alika Kinimaka, Lena Pahia, Alfonso Kekuku,
Titus Matthews, Uncle Sam and the rest of Nā Kiaʻi Paʻa –the remaining
protectors of Mauna Kea, still standing strong. We were there to celebrate
the rededication of the sanctuary by the Royal Order of Kamehameha I,
who attested that the puʻuhonua has never been closed.
The parking lot and the plateau where Puʻuhuluhulu University, the Hale
Mauna Wahine and the Hale Mauna Māhū once stood were completely vacant,
like the rest of the camp that once grew there. As we exchanged bittersweet
memories, we absorbed the surreal feeling of climbing the puʻu when the
sounds of kūpuna wailing, police shouting orders, celebrities singing, crowds
chanting, drums beating, could no longer be heard. As we reached the top
of Puʻuhuluhulu, the silence we sensed as we ascended was interrupted by a
fluttering in the wind: the Hae Hawaiʻi, still standing strong (see Figure 3.3).
But our attention was elsewhere, somewhere beyond nationalist dreams,
and states, and kingdoms. Deeper. In the soil beneath us, rising. We had
done well in keeping Puʻuhuluhulu safe, protected. For the mound is a seed
bank, a puʻu that will give birth to countless Hawaiian plants, some found
nowhere else in the world. From the seeds of the puʻu, life will one day
(re)grow on the scorched lava surrounding us, restoring and regenerating
56
Figure 3.3: Authors at Puʻuhonua o Puʻuhuluhulu during the 2020 camp reunion
the landscape, the mauna. And in that vision of a world emerging, it is our
hope that the wāhine, māhū and kāne in our lāhui will breathe life into the
relations of care and healing we will collectively need.
Our future is a puʻuhonua: a trauma-informed space-time to come that is
born and raised beneath and beyond settled desires for sovereignty, ownership,
states, markets, prisons and patriarchy. Our future is a puʻuhonua, where the
labour of liberation carried by wāhine and māhū can retire as we engage in
revolutionary rest, where our needs as survivors and visionaries are centred.
Our future is a puʻuhonua: the puʻu we grew, the puʻu we planted.
Glossary
Aikāne Intimate, often sexual and polyamorous relations
between kāne and kāne, wahine and wahine, māhū
and māhū
Akua Deity or god
Akuahine Wahine deity or god
Ala Kupuna The road to Mauna Kea summit reoccupied and
reclaimed by elders during the 2019 direct action to
stop TMT from desecrating our mountain
Aloha ʻĀina The deep love of Hawaiians for our land, people and
nation articulated as an embodied desire for justice
and liberation
57
Hānai To raise, nourish and feed; a foster or adopted child

Hae Hawaiʻi One of the nationalist flags of the Hawaiian Kingdom
Hale House, home, ancestor, person
Kāne Hawaiian non-binary identity and relation that shelters
and houses all men
Kahuna Knowledgeable expert or skilled professional
Kalo The taro plant. Kanaka Maoli trace our ancestry to
Hāloa, a kalo plant born to Papahānaumoku and
Hoʻohōkūkalani who is considered our elder sibling
Kanaka Maoli Hawaiian people descended from Papahānaumoku
through Hoʻohōkūkalani and Hāloa
Kapu Aloha Sacred prohibitions for living at Puʻuhonua o
Puʻuhuluhulu and Mauna Kea that promoted non-
violent direct action. Kapu Aloha was also the name
of an organisation at the sanctuary responsible for
maintaining the prohibition of violence
Kiaʻi A relation of mutual protection established by the
prehuman ancestors of Hawaiians and continued by
their descendants today. The term is the preferred
name for activists protecting Mauna Kea
Kiʻihei X-shaped sennit cord lashing used to secure the walls
and posts of Hawaiian hale together, associated with
the first māhū named Kiʻi
Kūpuna Elder, ancestor
Kuleana Genealogical privilege and responsibility to land
and people
Lāhui Nation, species
Māhū Hawaiian non-binary identity and relation that shelters
and houses intersex, trans, queer folx
Mana Power, the branching and differentiating phenomena
observed in plants, rivers, lightning
Mauna Mountain, mountain regions, adze stone
Moʻolelo Genealogical succession of stories
Paia Wall of a Hawaiian hale, associated with the first
wahine, named Laʻilaʻi
Piko Umbilical cord, navel, fontanel, genitalia, summit
of mountains
Pilina Relations, connections, kinship
Pou Posts of a Hawaiian hale, associated with the first kāne
named Kāne
Punalua Multiple springs of water, polyamorous relations
58
Puʻu Hill, raised ground, pregnancy

Puʻuhonua Refuge, sanctuary, asylum. Puʻuhonua were places of
safety during times of war
Wahine Hawaiian non-binary identity and relation that shelters
and houses all women. The spelling changes in
Hawaiian between ‘wahine’ and ‘wāhine’. The former
is singular, the latter is plural but this grammatical
feature is not usually apparent when the word appears
in English contexts
Wao Akua Sacred regions where deities dwell. Human presence
and habitation is prohibited
ʻĀina Land, that which feeds and is fed, that which is burned
or ignited
ʻAha Sennit cord, a meeting or assembly, a ritual gathering
for recitation of prayers
ʻAi Kapu System of rules and restrictions created by the chief
Wākea and his priest Komoʻawa to deceive and
control Papahānaumoku
ʻOhana Asexually birthed offspring of kalo, a term for family
that shelters and houses all Hawaiian relations
Note
1
This chapter does not italicise Hawaiian language terms due to language revitalisation
protocols. A glossary is provided above.
References
AF3IRM Hawaiʻi (2019) ‘Decolonize Feminism: Why Feminists Should
Care About Mauna Kea’, 22 July. Available from: https://hawaii-78988.
medium.com/decolonize-feminism-why-feminists-should-care-about-
mauna-kea-3e0ff5b5fab4 [Accessed 30 June 2021].
Ahia, M. (2020) ‘Mālama Mauna: An Ethics of Care Culture and Kuleana’,
Biography: An Interdisciplinary Journal –We Are Maunakea, 43(3): 607–12.
Brown, E. (1992) A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story, New York:
Pantheon Books.
Deer, S. (2015) The Beginning and End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence
in Native America, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Goodyear-Kaʻōpua, N. and Mahelona, Y. (2019) ‘Protecting Maunakea
Is a Mission Grounded in Tradition’, Zora, 5 September. Available
from: https://zora.medium.com/protecting-maunak ea-i s-a -m
issi on-g roun
ded-in-tradition-38a62df57086 [Accessed 30 June 2021].
59
Kalakaua (1972) ‘The Kalakaua Text’, in M.W. Beckwith (transl and ed)
The Kumulipo: A Hawaiian Creation Chant, Honolulu: University of
Hawai’i Press.
Liliuokalani (1978) The Kumulipo: An Hawaiian Creation Myth, Kentfield,
CA: Pueo Press.
Trask, H.-K . (1984) Fighting the Battle of Double Colonization: The
View of a Hawaiian Feminist, East Lansing, MI: Office of Women in
International Development.
Young, K. (2015) ‘From a Native Trans Daughter: Carceral Refusal,
Settler Colonialism, Re-routing the Roots of an Indigenous Abolitionist
Imaginary’, in E.A. Stanley and N. Smith (eds) Captive Genders: Trans
Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, 2nd edn, Oakland, CA: AK
Press, pp 83–96.
60
4
‘You Can’t Kill the Spirit’

(But You Can Try): Gendered
Contestations and Contradictions
at Menwith Hill Women’s
Peace Camp
Finn Mackay
Introduction
First beginning operations in the 1960s, Menwith Hill is a satellite
communications listening station run by the US National Security Agency
(NSA). It is situated on the North Yorkshire moors in the UK, approximately
seven miles west of Harrogate, on the A59 Harrogate to Skipton road. The
NSA base is the largest known spy base in the world, consisting of giant white
radomes, which resemble golf balls, covering over 600 acres of countryside (see
Figure 4.1). The first two domes were built in 1974; in 2021, at the time of
writing, they number 37. These radomes are weatherproof, protective covers
for huge satellite dishes beneath, which point this way and that, allegedly
internally and externally; listening in to all telecommunications in the northern
hemisphere (Campbell and Melvern, 1980). The United States has another
corresponding base, although smaller, covering telecommunications in the
southern hemisphere, which is located at Pine Gap in Australia (Bartlett,
2013 –and see Chapter 12 by Bartlett in this volume), and both bases also link
directly with NSA’s US headquarters at Fort Meade in Maryland. The role
of the base is the gathering of military, political and economic information
advantageous to the interests of the United States; it is also part of the US
Ballistic Missile Defence system and is central to US military operations around
the world, providing intelligence for warfare, such as real-time information for
drone operations (Schofield, 2012). The base is effectively foreign soil, using
61
Figure 4.1: Radomes at Menwith Hill, Yorkshire, November 2005
Source: Matt Crypto, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Menwith-hill-radomes.jpg,

Creative Commons
dollars on site, shipping in all supplies and consumer items; drivers drive on the
right-hand side of the roads while inside the base. Despite this, responsibility
for securing the area sits with British Ministry of Defence (MoD) police, who
patrol regularly around the perimeter fences and work from a police station
at the gatehouse of the main entrance.
A women’s peace camp was established outside Menwith Hill from 1993
at weekends, and –following an appeal from prison (for convictions due to
non-violent direct action or NVDA) by founding and influential Greenham
peacewoman, the late, great, Helen John –ran permanently from 1994 for
around five years. (On the enduring influence of John, see the mention of
her in Chapter 15 by Kerrow et al in this volume, and also the documentary
‘Disarming Grandmothers’; Pope, 2012.) The camp was wo-manned from
the start by peace activist and researcher Anne Lee, among many others
over the years (FFVC, 1996). Prior to this there had been temporary mixed
peace camps, regular protests and events organised by groups like the local
Yorkshire Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), national CND and
the Campaign for the Accountability of American Bases or CAAB.1 Women-
only peace camps obviously follow the legacy of the camp at Greenham
Common, though that initially started out as mixed. There are both practical
and feminist political reasons for the prioritising of women; as Helen John
would always say to me, it is not about excluding men, it is about including
62
‘You Can’t Kill The Spirit’ (But You Can Try)
women. Many problems of exclusion and violence towards women can

arise in mixed protest camps, as several chapters in this volume attest. For
example, Chapter 7 by Emma Gómez Nicolau points to issues at a mixed
protest in Spain in 2011, where safety concerns for women, lesbians and
LGBTQ participants became apparent, culminating in an incident where a
banner proclaiming feminist revolution was torn down by a male protestor
to applause from others.
This chapter retells personal stories of my time at Menwith Hill Women’s
Peace Camp in the light of subsequent developments in British feminism
and protest culture, and in feminist and queer theory. I am reflecting here
on events from over 20 years ago now, and weaving my own tales from the
memories I have; always partial, always from my own standpoint on the land.
As Claire Hemmings (2011) insists, feminist storytelling, and storytelling
about feminism, matters –such narratives construct images and imaginaries
at the same time as they seek to describe them. Recounting personal
experiences of cultural and political events that then become the subject
of study as ‘history’, or are analysed and critiqued as institutions –in many
cases by those who were not there –can be a discombobulating process.
A personal experience that was a marginal one, shared only by particular
insiders, becomes known to wider culture and so one’s own memories and
stories are brought to life again, and can be compared to what is presented
in the current discourse.
In this chapter I reflect on experiences related to two topics, both of which
have gone from being arguably niche concerns within feminist activism to
mainstays of public interest and commentary: first, the recently highlighted
scandal of undercover police in protest movements in the UK, including
the peace movement and the camp I lived at myself; and, second, the so-
called ‘gender wars’ and the construction and expression of gender and
gender identities at women’s peace camps. In both these instances, I watch
stories unfolding in mainstream news outlets and political channels in ways
that do not always reflect my own understanding of those sites and events.
This is particularly the case with common misconceptions and framings of
Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, and by implication the whole
of the women’s peace movement, as essentialist, retrograde and transphobic.
This was certainly not my experience, as I shall argue later. I begin with
an account of my journey to Menwith Hill before turning to police efforts
at infiltration.
The road out: my journey to Menwith Hill

I first visited the permanent women’s peace camp in the summer of
1994 when I left school and was waiting to start college later that year.
I was 17 years old and had been inspired by Greenham since the age of
63
seven. Coming from a largely poor, farming community in rural south-

west Scotland I was perhaps not the usual demographic, but had grown
up with political parents who made up for in culture what they missed
economically. Family friends in the next village happened to be two women
who visited Greenham and brought me back bits of snipped fence and
cassette tapes of peace songs. When I finished secondary school at the
local mixed comprehensive in the nearest town, I broke a household rule
by using the phone on my own. Using the phone was not allowed, due
to the cost, as my parents were often unemployed and money was tight.
I waited until my parents were out, and rang the old operator number to
find the contact for national CND based in London. I then rang CND
to ask if there were any women’s peace camps in the country and was
given the name and number of someone called Betty in Otley, who was a
contact for a peace camp at an American base near there. In conversation
with Betty I found out the nearest train station and arranged to visit for
the summer holidays.
I was met at the station by a woman called Jo, who was wearing an LA
Raiders black beanie hat and a silver bomber jacket. Escorted to a little blue
van I met Helen John and her partner at the time. The women had stopped
off to collect some new printed flyers about Menwith Hill and the role of
the base; I was given one to read in the back of the van. This was useful as
I did not know the first thing about the base or what it did. Although much
of my motivation was getting involved in political direct action, perhaps a
stronger motivation was getting away from a difficult home life, and from
the isolated rural location I had felt trapped in for a long time.
After setting up my tent I was shown round Moonbow Corner, which
was, at that time, on the edge of the A59, at the corner of a turnoff down
one of the roads to the base entrance (see Figure 4.2). There was a toilet
tent, a couple of caravans and a firepit area with a tarpaulin roof on a metal
frame. All the food had to be kept in tins or jars because of the rats, and
water was in large plastic containers that had to be driven back and forth
to the small town of Otley a few miles away, where local supporters refilled
them and peacewomen could wash clothes and take showers. Around the
fire on the first night I remember everyone laughing at me because I knew
all the words to Greenham songs, even though I had never been there. As it
happened I had arrived at Menwith just before the start of the Women on
the Road for Peace tour, which was set to go back up towards where I had
just come from, to the nuclear processing plant at Sellafield in Cumbria, and
then from there, down to the Aldermaston Atomic Weapons Establishment,
and then Greenham Common in Newbury, Berkshire, in the south of
England. I was absolutely beside myself that I was finally going to make
it to Greenham, and, when asked by the women in a circle of consensus
decision-making about my view on the best day to head off there, I replied
64
Figure 4.2: Moonbow Corner camp as it was when I first visited
Source: Still from documentary, ‘Don’t Trust Men with Balls’, online at https://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=K2e898z9OGY&t=5s. The documentary was made collectively by and with
camp inhabitants, including the author. The end credits attribute it to ‘Vera and All the Women
at Camp’. It is not copyrighted and can be freely distributed.
that I had been waiting to go to Greenham for ten years, so one more day
wouldn’t make a difference.
That summer I got arrested for the first time, on suspicion of criminal
damage after being found inside the base at Menwith with my friend TJ.
Peacewomen came in a battered old camp car to meet us at the main gate
and brought chocolate and sweets to honour this rite of passage. I got to
Greenham Common at last, staying at Green Gate, while the site was still
being used by NATO forces for training exercises, although the US military
had long gone. Several of us sneaked in, between security patrols, and
explored one of the famous bunkers, almost getting lost in the tunnels on
the way out. A peacewoman called Jane taught me how to cut chain link
fence with bolt cutters and then gathered up the snippings, saying: ‘don’t feel
obliged to keep those’. Of course, I did, and made them into a mobile which
I still have, currently hanging in my kitchen window. It was a truly magical
time and I decided to return to Menwith permanently once I completed
my course at the local agricultural college to which I had applied. I was at
Womenwith Hill, as we called it, for all holidays, including Christmas, and
then moved to live at camp in early 1995, staying for around a year and a
65
half. As a permanent resident I got my own caravan, a tiny one-person van.

I was involved in all parts of camp life: I took part in and organised NVDA,
defended myself in court, wrote newsletters and articles, managed the mailing
list and donations and did media work. It is the definition of empowerment,
not the now overhyped, neoliberal media construct of that word, but that
term in its real sense, to take politics into your own hands. To be in a group
committed to a certain political vision and then taking your struggle to the
very gates of the institution you seek to change, and together starting to
take it apart, literally and metaphorically, is an irreplaceable experience that
I carry with me every day.
Watching the web

My time at peace camp has given me insight into how the state works or,
rather, who it works for and who it works against. The first times I was
arrested on blockades, we were confronted sometimes with armed police,
and once police outriders in militarised black leather and opaque visors on
their helmets. We were thrown into the caged backs of dog-handler vans
while police waited for riot vans to arrive. Sometimes we were left in the
tiny cells in riot vans for several hours while the local police station struggled
to process us all. I can still feel the emotion of sitting in the road with a
handful of protestors, singing peace songs, while being physically dragged
away by police who looked like soldiers; it was overwhelming, the injustice
of it, the upside-down unfairness of mistreating us for protesting against war
and war-making. It was certainly a political education to go through the
criminal justice system, to experience police harassment and violence, to
witness first-hand how the police as an institution can and do use lies and
cover-ups to protect their own and attack others. Long before the current
spycops scandal came to light in the UK around 2011 (COPS, nd), those
of us involved in NVDA knew only too well that undercover police were
possible, present and to be expected and managed. Now it has been publicly
exposed, of course, that undercover police had key roles in many of the
most influential direct-action campaigns in the UK through the 1990s, in
anti-roads occupations, in animal rights groups and the peace movement.
Undercover male officers engaged in non-consensual relationships with
women protestors, even having children with those women, all under false
pretences (Police Spies Out of Lives, nd).
Peacewomen share stories of undercover police at Greenham and other
protests too, including the anti-roads protests of the 1990s and against the
Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994. I see many parallels with such
mobilisations then and the more recent uprisings against the UK Policing,
Sentencing and Courts Bill, even down to the familiar placard slogans such
as ‘Kill The Bill’. I note with despair the lack of political awareness and
66
political history, even among the Left, that leads to common misconceptions
that such phrasing refers to attacking or killing police, as in the English slang
for the police force ‘the Old Bill’ or ‘the Bill’. Being alert to the potential
of undercover police, in my activist experience, peacewomen used to warn
of anyone who went off at the same time every day because they had to
make a call, and to look out for those who were always at the front of
demonstrations urging violent disruption against property or police, but who
then disappeared whenever conflict arose; to notice who always seemed to
just miss a sweep of arrests or who was always conveniently away when there
was an eviction. There are also many insider clichés about shoes –polished
shoes, shoes that are too clean, or police issue safety shoes!
At Menwith we had a police infiltrator who herself was manipulated
by the police. The policy of inclusion at peace camp, common to all as
I understand, was that unless a woman was violent, she would not be denied
entry or inclusion. This meant that while we had our suspicions about this
individual, and raised them with her, we would always conclude that she
was welcome regardless. Our Menwith infiltrator was a young woman who
had desperately wanted to join the police, she had tried to become a special
constable and somewhere along the line had been persuaded that if she
gathered information on us, she would be rewarded by a job in the MoD
police. It later emerged that there was never any intention of giving her such
a job, and her specific vulnerabilities had been exploited. One night while
we were round the fire, an MoD police patrol, who we knew as a regular,
pulled into our lay-by and came over to talk to us. The officer told us that
they had been doing their usual patrols around the roads that surround the
base, and had noticed a young woman sleeping in her car, parked up in a
lay-by further down the main road. We were told that this young woman
had a difficult home life, and we were asked if, for her safety, she would
be welcome to park up in our lay-by and sleep in her car there instead. Of
course, we said yes, and Justine joined our camp.
We became friends with her and she generously used her car to ferry
campers to court visits, or for signing on in the nearest town and for shopping
trips. Justine did not like the camp vegan food, she did not like cold, muddy
tents or communal caravans so she slept in her car in the lay-by, going home
to her parents to shower and for clean clothes. While Justine was with us
we noticed our camp diaries would go missing, then reappear, as did the
camp address book. Many suspected she was working with the police, but
we didn’t realise until it all came out just how used by them she had been.
We were all sorry about the episode, not because we were endangered in
any way by it, or our security invaded –as we were living outside the world’s
largest military spy base we always assumed that everything we said and did
was monitored somehow. We were sorry because Justine then lost a network
and, I think, people who had been real friends to her, and who had included
67
her as an equal, non-judgementally. The police were the ones who emerged
as the worst party in the whole business. Justine broke the story herself in
the end, in the local press, when she realised that the police were never
going to deliver on all the false promises they had made her. We reached
out to her and told her she was still welcome, but we never saw her again.
Pitching up: feminist tendencies at peace camp

As I have always been a queer boi with transgender tendencies, a women’s
peace camp may not seem initially, to the reader, to be my natural home.
Much scholarship has addressed the essentialist assumptions, stereotypes and
activist tropes often attached to Cold War women’s peace movements, not
least to the camp at Greenham Common (Roseneil, 1995; Managhan, 2007).
As Catherine Eschle (2013) notes, discursive constructions of peacewomen
include earth-mothers and Goddess-worshippers. Indeed, these were a focus
of criticism of those protests, at the time, from within the feminist movement.
My own research on UK feminist activism from the second wave to the
resurgence in the 2000s encountered Radical Feminists, lesbian feminists
and revolutionary feminists who reported doubts about the women’s peace
movement (Mackay, 2015). Some had resisted visits to protest at Greenham,
put off by the maternal imagery of baby booties tied to the fence along with
teddy bears or photos of children (Griffiths, 1995), and an uncomfortable
suspicion that women were being called to activism on the grounds of
being natural protectors of human and all life. Many rejected this biological
essentialism (see also Chapter 15 by Kerrow et al in this volume).
These differences speak to broader differences in feminism itself, between
lesbian feminism and other strands (Campbell, 1980), and perhaps particularly
between cultural feminism and Radical Feminism (Banerjea et al, 2019).
Cultural feminism is generally understood as motivated by a belief in a
natural female superiority and naturally superior female values, the aim being
to celebrate and adopt these superior values for all, and for the sake of all
humankind, regardless of sex. These female values emerge from an ability
to create life in pregnancy and motherhood, whether or not an individual
chooses to do so (Alpert, 1973). Radical Feminism, meanwhile, emerged
from the New Left, from anti-war and anti-racist organising. Radical
Feminist theory is characterised by a commitment to anti-essentialism and
a clarity that unjust systems of social organisation under patriarchy can be
changed because women and men are not, in fact, different species, nor
genetically programmed to either make peace or make war (Millett, 1972).
Writing of early second-wave feminism, Alice Echols emphasises that
cultural feminism may have emerged from Radical Feminism, but was not
widely accepted in the feminist movement as a whole. ‘This nascent cultural
feminism within radical feminism, which was sometimes termed “female
68
cultural nationalism” by its critics, was assailed by radical and Left feminists
alike’ (Echols, 1989: 243).
Because feminism as a social movement is simplified and misrepresented,
these two very different schools of feminism –Radical and cultural –are
often conflated. ‘Though cultural feminism came out of the radical feminist
movement, the premises of the two tendencies are antithetical. Yet on the
Left and elsewhere the distinction is rarely made’ (Willis, 1984: 91). It is
often wrongly suggested that Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp
was some sort of essentialist red tent: transphobic, classist, heterosexual and
conservative. For example, writing in the New York Times in 2019, Sophie
Lewis maps the roots of anti-trans feminism as beginning at Greenham. ‘The
movement crossed over to Britain in the 1980s, when cultural feminism
was among the lesbian-separatist elements of antinuclear protest groups
who saw themselves as part of a “feminist resistance” to patriarchal science,
taking a stand against nuclear weapons, test-tube babies and male-to-female
transexual surgery alike’ (Lewis, 2019). This is an outrageous generalisation
and accusation, not least because queer and genderqueer campers were
certainly present at Greenham. For example, overdue attention to the
creative subculture from the Rebel Dykes of London in the 1980s –a
punky, intersectional and inclusive feminism –reveals that many of those
pioneering dyke activists and creatives first met at Greenham (Lloyd, 2017).
In addition, it should be noted that biological essentialism was often ridiculed,
deconstructed, weaponised and rejected by Greenham campers themselves,
as can be seen in the queering of pop songs, hymns and folk music at
Greenham (Feigenbaum, 2010). In the earlier quote from the New York
Times, Lewis argues that Greenham politics were a regressive feminist
resistance to science and technology. Ecofeminism was indeed visible in the
politics of Greenham, but I would argue that ecofeminism is a valid school
of feminism, and should not be used as an insult; it is not against science and
technology but against what humans often choose to do with that knowledge
and potential (Shiva, 1993). Far from being anti-progress, ecofeminism is an
intersectional, multidisciplinary feminist approach which contains pertinent
and arguably increasingly relevant critiques of the deadly legacy of masculinist
Enlightenment theory, or what we could call EnWhitenment theory (see
Chapter 8 by Haran and Chapter 13 by Moore in this volume). This is not
to deny that essentialist or maternalist strands were influential at Greenham,
or at any other women’s peace camp to this day. Arguably, a Daly-esque
(Daly, 1973) version of ecofeminism can be read in the protest throughout,
‘through songs that sang of the spirit and mother earth, poetry and prose
about witches and the Goddess’ (Welch, 2010: 230). Plus, the herstory of the
Greenham camp is that it grew out of a march proudly advertising itself as
made up of mothers for peace. Over the years, however, the camp included
multitudes of motivations and inspirations.
69
Peacewomen were aware of their image in the media and among much
of mainstream society; this image was reclaimed and directed back out.
Mainstream society certainly did not always see Greenham women as
maternal mothers protecting their children from nuclear death, quite the
opposite. Thus the songs and chants often included references to hating
men, abandoning children and practising witchcraft. Tampons were tied
to the fence. Loud and raucous references to lesbianism and lesbian sex
were made at every opportunity, when in courtrooms or on shopping trips
for example, whether or not the women involved were lesbians (see again
Chapter 15 by Kerrow et al, this volume). Goddess images and women’s
symbols became representative of being a ‘Greenham Woman’, rather than
of sign-up to any strand of feminism: ‘ironic, self-mocking gestures –in
songs, on banners, badges and leaflets, spray-painted on road signs and
walls all over Berkshire and beyond –made a clear statement about where
Greenham women were locating themselves in relation to “regimes of the
normal”’ (Roseneil, 2000: 6). Within feminism as a broader movement
at that time, there was also a strong political rejection of maternalism and
cultural feminism, which no doubt influenced Greenham campers too as
the wider Women’s Liberation Movement was in many ways the web that
helped the camp to function, communicate messages, promote events, and
receive practical and financial support.
While the rainbow colour-coded camps at the gates around Greenham
were understood to have different characteristics, from ecofeminist spiritual
to anarchist, all arguably made use of the slogans, chants, symbols and songs
that came to represent Greenham and the women’s peace movement,
whether in an irreverent or more arcane way. Such collective rituals
contribute to collective identity (Taylor, 1989; Reger, 2002). Shared
language and practices can foster solidarity and maintain morale: ‘the daily,
intimate communications that shape (and make possible) activist communities
demand, at least momentarily, a common language’ (Feigenbaum, 2010: 385).
This could be seen as almost spiritual, or ritualistic, or be experienced as
such, in their effect. Used for ‘collective creation’, such practices served to
bring together a diverse community often of differing political standpoints
(Steans, 2013: 218). For example, campers at Greenham and Menwith Hill
frequently took up terms previously used as slurs for independent women,
such as ‘hags’, or ‘witches’. For some this was a significant part of a much
wider aim of changing language and culture to a more woman-centric one,
a commendable aim. For others it was an element of peace camp culture, but
did not come with a requirement of adherence to ecofeminism, women’s
spirituality movements nor cultural feminism. Therefore, the presence of a
shit-pit dug into a crude women’s symbol cannot and should not be taken
as proof of a wedding to biological essentialism, nor does the claiming of
everything as ‘cosmic’ suggest a universal worship of Goddess entities.
70
Camp as a row of tents: gender at peace camp

My memories of living at peace camp are of a period in my life noteworthy
by the absence of gender or, rather, the absence of gendered pressures.
This was partly because we were, practically speaking, living outside of
the scrutinising glare of capitalism’s body beautiful industry (Lury, 1996).
I simply did not see billboard adverts, film trailers or shop window displays.
These images did not assault me on the daily basis they do in mainstream
life. For me, as someone who has identified with masculinity for as long
as I can remember, this meant that I was blissfully free of the mid-1990s
expanding explosion of visibility and use of the male body and hyper-
masculine tropes in media and advertising (Bocock, 1993; Brod and
Kaufman, 1994). In terms of gender presentation, the models I had with
which to compare and contrast my own identity and presentation were
all female-bodied, and ranged from what would stereotypically be seen as
more masculine to more feminine. At peace camp I was able to breathe out
a sigh of tensely held self-consciousness and see and know other female-
bodied masculine people (Halberstam, 1998). I met women who had
spent years living and passing as men in different environments, including
working as men to secure jobs. There were women who flamboyantly
grew full beards or manicured moustaches. I was friends with women who
were expert in men’s fashion and tailoring, women who had not worn
an item of ‘women’s clothing’ for decades. This was not some lesbian
feminist rejection of femininity on political grounds; it was an expression
of gender, be that gender identity or gender preference, and many of us
shared experience of long-held identification with masculinity that we
understood to feel natural (Levitt and Hiestand, 2004), while having an
intellectual and political critique of any born-this-way concept of gender.
While there was obviously a diversity of body shape and size, it was a
relief to shop in clothing stores with people who also had to accommodate
hips in trousers from the men’s department, or who also wore sports tops
to flatten their chests to straighten the appearance of shirts. This became
normal, rather than abnormal and thus I felt normal, rather than abnormal.
In a Butlerian sense, camp was a place where gender, as in masculinity or
femininity, was more easily and seamlessly separated from and independent of
sexed bodies. ‘There is no “proper” gender, a gender proper to one sex rather
than another, which is in some sense that sex’s cultural property’ (Butler,
1993: 312). I was no longer only limited to looking for resonating images
of selfhood in male-bodied people, and therefore was no longer having to
compare my own presentation to bodies with flat chests, narrow hips or
broader shoulders. Gender did not disappear at camp, into some externally
prevalent stereotypical vision of a homogenous wood pallet of women in
unisex dungarees. It was present as an expression, style and preference and
71
definitely visible; but at the same time completely different from gender
‘outside’ in the world.
Most campers wore practical clothes of course, for living outdoors in all
weathers, but this was mainly the case for permanent residents. Hairstyles
varied, buzz cuts were not the norm as these actually require more
maintenance, having to be cut more regularly. Women often cut their own
hair, or shaved the sides to sport a mullet style. Many had long hair, which
they would often say was less labour-intensive as it did not require cutting
as often and could be tied back when it got too long. For some women,
longer hairstyles were an expression of femininity; some more cosmic witchy
campers who identified with the ‘Earth-Mother’ (Eschle, 2013: 721) or
ecofeminist identity wore their hair long as part of that; for others it was not
by design but simply practical. Weekenders and visitors were often in civvies.
I recall 1990s ‘lesbian chic’ styles (Cottingham, 1996), and of course this
overlapped sometimes with the grunge aesthetic of the time, or what Laura
Cottingham critiques as the Tank-Girl effect. This included ‘the donning
of laced boots, including Doc Martens, Timberland work boots and heavy
combats; short and buzzed hair without feminised bangs or feathered fringe;
loose-fitting plaid flannel shirts; and minimal or no jewellery or make-up’
(Cottingham, 1996: 51). There were also the subcultural styles that went
with the New Age Travellers of the time, as well as goths, femme styles and
clubber trends. What was different in the peace camp context, especially for
those living there permanently, was that gender did not have so many rules
or expectations. Styles, cultural codes and expressions could be taken on,
taken off, wilfully ignored, blended and disrupted; or stolen and displayed
on the types of physical bodies they were never intended for.
Making a home in women-only space

It is perhaps counterintuitive that a women-only setting such as a women’s
peace camp could include masculine individuals, but this has always been the
case throughout the whole of the Women’s Liberation Movement (Noble,
2004). It is not always an easy relationship: phenomena such as the so-
called lesbian ‘sex wars’ and the forceful influx of lesbian feminist theory on
femme-butch identities and relationships made many cautious about entering
women-only spaces (Carter and Noble, 1996; Mackay, 2019). Reflecting
on this now bears extra weight, due to the contemporary context of the
manufactured culture-wars in the UK and the rise of trans-exclusionary
campaigns against the increased visibility of the trans rights movement and
the lives of trans individuals themselves (Mackay, 2021; see also Chapter 7
by Gómez Nicolau, this volume). Often called Gender-Critical or GC
activism, such a stance seeks to prevent any expansion of trans inclusion, limit
or even remove legislative gains and protections, limit or remove access to
72
therapeutic and/or medical interventions for trans adults (particularly those

who are young), and secure the borders of any women’s spaces so that they
are closed to trans women (Hines, 2020; Greenesmith and Moore, 2021).
It may seem ironic, perhaps, that my experience of masculine gender
was so expansive at Womenwith, but my point is that irony, contradiction
and juxtaposition were commonplace in the women’s peace movement,
at and since Greenham, and perhaps are a foundational aspect or tactic
of a Greenham-style collective identity. There are parallels here with
understandings of ‘camp’, that is, camp as respectful, immersive parody,
usually from the margins and usually about critiquing mainstream power
relationships. As Esther Newton states in her famous work, camp is
about: ‘incongruity (subject matter), theatricality (style), and humor
(strategy)’ (1972: 107). We all sang Goddess songs at camp, because that
is what we did; we all declared ‘ask and the Goddess sends’ whenever a
visitor dropped by spontaneously with something we desperately needed;
we howled at the full moon and made triangle vagina symbols with our
hands held together; we recited that we were the witches who could not
be burned. It did not mean we actually believed any of that, it meant we
believed in each other, it meant we believed in a shared political purpose
and a necessary shared solidarity, not least because living outdoors is hard,
maintaining a full-time women’s peace camp is hard, NVDA is hard. We
honoured that, and we honoured each other; including nodding our respects
to those who were believers. As Jill Liddington noted of life at Greenham
and the role of ritual and shared traditions: ‘such mumbo-jumbo might
seem irrelevant to stopping Cruise missiles. But extraordinary times call for
extraordinary responses; and ritual, symbol and incantations soon assumed
a vital role in sustaining such an unlikely being as a woman’s peace camp
outside a nuclear base’ (Liddington, 1989: 236). Humour was essential,
therefore, but womanhood of any particular type at all was not.
Conclusion
The title of this chapter is inspired by a friend who was a fabulous singer, and
who would always add cheeky extra verses to peace songs, in a different but
complementary key –particularly with the song ‘You Can’t Kill the Spirit’,
which Anna Feigenbaum (2010) calls a Greenham anthem. Illustrating the
internationalism and diverse spiritual influences of Greenham, this song
comes from a feminist musician, North American Chicana Indian, Naomi
Littlebear Morena. Into this song, my friend would add: ‘but you can try’,
in the pause between the two lines, ‘You can’t kill the spirit’ and ‘She is like
a mountain’ –to much hilarity from all. Being ‘too cosmic’ was a commonly
understood critique of campers who were a bit too witchy. Womenwith
was not a cosmic camp in that sense. In the movement at the time, when
73
it came to our discerning characteristics, we were known as the ‘Menwith

Hill Maddies’: not because we were wild, but because the weather was wild.
We were frequently snowed in, isolated on a high point of the Yorkshire
Dales; all winter everything froze, from kettles to the hot water bottles in
our sleeping bags. The peace campers in the south of England, at places like
Aldermaston, for example, told horror stories of Menwith trips, of gales
stripping away shelters and rocking static caravans.
While I was living there, Anne Lee was the primary person wo-manning
the camp. For much of the time she and I were the only ones there, and
when the weather got bad we would walk down the verge of the A59 to
the nearest pub and play dominoes in the corner by the fire. Anne arguably
did not have much truck with cosmic witchyness, yet joined in, as all of
us did, with songs that would suggest the contrary. It was a soundtrack
to our lives, a cultural reference and insider tradition that brought us all
together. We accepted that some women may hold such references dear,
but that did not stop the overwhelming recitation of such practices being
predominantly humorous, self-deprecating and irreverent. ‘Women sought
to demonstrate that their involvement with Greenham was anything but
self-sacrificial and altruistic. Living at Greenham was, much of the time,
great fun. Humour was an important part of life there and often took the
form of self-mockery, irony and parody’ (Roseneil, 2000: 134). In this vein,
I suggest, why wouldn’t masculinity be present at a women’s peace camp,
why wouldn’t butch lesbians and transmasculine, transgender individuals
flourish there; such contradiction, or queering as Sasha Roseneil would call
it (2000), is what peace camps are made of.
Note
1
A founding member of CAAB, Lindis Percy, is a renowned local peace activist from
Yorkshire who is still very much an active protestor at 80 years old (as at 2022), with a
record of over 30 years of activism so far (Morning Star, 2020).
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5
Women Activists, Gendered Power

and Postfeminism in Taiwan’s
‘Sunflower Movement’
Chia-Ling Yang
Introduction
On 18 March 2014, outraged students, university faculty, and workers from
nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) marched on the Legislative Yuan –
Taiwan’s unicameral parliament –to protest the Cross-Strait Service Trade
Agreement, a free trade pact with China that protesters believed would
harm the economy and leave Taiwan vulnerable to political pressure from
Beijing. Some 300 activists occupied the legislative chamber, while hundreds
more gathered outside. This unprecedented occupation lasted for 24 days
and there was also a demonstration on 30 March when about 500,000
people surrounded parliament. The media dubbed the action the ‘Sunflower
Movement’ when a florist sent bunches of sunflowers to the protesters at
the parliament building, but this name was not accepted by many of the
activists. All of my research participants for this chapter prefer to call it the
‘3/18 Parliament Occupation Movement’, or the 3/18 Movement for short.
This term is used throughout the chapter.
The movement opposing the free trade pact was one of a string of protests
against President Ying-Jeou Ma’s embrace of China since taking office
in 2008. For example, there was an anti–Media Monopoly Campaign in
2012, fuelled by widespread worry that China intended to use the mass
media to spread its political propaganda and control Taiwan. Since 2008,
citizens of Taiwan have formed many NGOs, including Taiwan Democracy
Watch and the Democratic Front Against the Cross-Strait Service Trade
Agreement, to put pressure on Taiwan’s government to sustain democracy
and national sovereignty.
78
Women Activists, Gendered Power and Postfeminism
The 3/18 Movement’s parliamentary occupation was planned secretly by a

small group of activists –students and professionals –in an informal network
based on their cooperation in a series of social movements and protests in
previous years (Hsu et al, 2019). According to my research participants, no
one had expected that the occupation would last for more than three weeks.
After several unsuccessful forced eviction attempts by the police, the activists
occupied several areas: the Main Chamber of the parliament, the yard of the
parliament (separated from the Main Chamber and the yard by some police
officers) and the streets surrounding the parliament building.
The division of labour in the 3/18 Movement saw students in the
Main Chamber divided into various working groups with the decision-
making dominated by a few heterosexual men. Students within the Main
Chamber formed pickets at the two entrances to decide who could enter,
with additional pickets on the streets maintaining order. Outside the Main
Chamber, stages were set up at two crossroads around the parliament building
and NGO staff took turns hosting on the stage. Various groups also formed
their own discussions, on themes including ‘democratic classrooms’, and
there were also Indigenous people’s meetings and tents for parents with
young children. On the street there was a ‘cursing-stage’, where people
expressed negative feelings and critiques, many using sexist curse words;
this phenomenon was criticised by the Awakening Foundation (2014), the
first women’s organisation in Taiwan.1
Every day there were gatherings inside the Main Chamber, including
meetings within the working groups and meetings between working groups
and the decision-makers. Outside the Main Chamber, the NGOs also had daily
assemblies. Additionally, there were meetings between the students inside the
Main Chamber and the NGOs outside the parliament. At a later stage of the
movement, a nine-person decision-making group (comprising key members
from among the students and NGOs) was formed. Nevertheless, many
decisions were made in the Main Chamber by a small set of decision-makers.
In this chapter, I will employ the key concepts of ‘gendered power’
(Bradley, 1999) and ‘informal network’ (Kanter, 1977; Bjarnegård and
Kenny, 2015) to discuss how gender hierarchy was perpetuated in the 3/18
Movement. Moreover, I will refer to elements of postfeminism that highlight
individualism and regard gender equality as already achieved to argue that
specific political and social contexts in Taiwan led young women activists
to respond with postfeminist, individualised strategies. First, however, I will
explain the theory and methodology used to frame my research.
Theoretical framework and research methods

This chapter draws on a long tradition of feminist work on gendered divisions
and hierarchies in organisations (for example, Acker, 1990). One early study
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depicts informal power games in the workplace, such as gendered informal

networks and homosocial reproduction (Kanter, 1977). More recent work
continues to explore gendered power and informal networks in the academy
(Yarrow, 2021) or in politics (McDonald, 2011; Stockemer et al, 2020).
Although most of this research focuses on gendered hierarchy and gendered
power structures in workplaces or in politics, Verta Taylor (1999: 18) asserts
that ‘there is no reason to expect social movements to be any different’.
In addition, the chapter employs the lens of postfeminism to analyse
young women activists’ response to gendered power in the 3/18 Movement.
Although there are different treatments of postfeminism in related studies,
I identify individualism, perfect femininity (McRobbie, 2015; Gill and
Orgad, 2017), dis-identification with the label of feminist (McRobbie,
2004), and the allocation of gender inequalities to the past (Gill et al,
2017) as the key postfeminist elements in my analysis. Although previous
studies into the dynamics of postfeminism emphasise how it discourages
‘a more active form of political participation’ (McRobbie, 2011: 182) and
masks ‘both structural inequalities and cultural influence’ (Gill and Orgad,
2017: 28), my research findings differ in two ways: first, my interviewees
participate actively in various kinds of social movements (excepting the
women’s movement, which they think of as irrelevant to them); second,
they criticise masculine dominance and male power in the 3/18 Movement
and in Taiwan’s social and cultural contexts, and fight for structural
equality (excepting equality between women and men, which they see as
an outdated issue). Examining the views of these politically active young
women can facilitate deeper reflection on postfeminism in Taiwan, and in
other activist contexts.
My previously published study of women in the ‘Sunflower Movement’
centred on the experiences of women new to activism in social
movements (Yang, 2017). For this chapter, I conducted an entirely new
set of interviews. I employed purposive sampling and snowball methods
to interview 19 women who were key activists in the 3/18 Movement,
including students, NGO staff and scholars (who are often also NGO
board members). Among these 19 women, two identify as bisexual and
two as lesbian. I also interviewed a young gay man for an additional
perspective, as sexuality was one of the social differences ignored within
the 3/18 Movement. These interviewees have been given pseudonyms
which identify three groups of research participants as follows: ‘Yong’ as
the first name indicates a student whose age in 2014 was 21–36; ‘Chia’
as the first name indicates NGO staff whose age in 2014 was 28–39; ‘Yi’
as the first name indicates a scholar whose age in 2014 was 42–46 (see
Table 5.1). The interviews lasted from one-and-a-half to four hours, were
conducted in Mandarin Chinese or Taiwanese, and were transcribed in
Chinese. The English translation is mine.
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Table 5.1: Interview participants
Pseudonym Identity Age in 2014

Yi-Chun Scholar, NGO board member, lesbian 46–50
Yi-Fen Scholar; NGO board member 41–45
Yi-Ru Scholar; NGO board member 41–45
Chia-Chi NGO staff 36–40
Chia-Hui NGO staff, bisexual 36–40
Chia-Ping NGO staff, bisexual 36–40
Chia-Ying NGO staff 26–30
Yong-Chun 2008 student movement 36–40
Yong-Fen 2008 student movement 31–35
Yong-Lin 2008 student movement 31–35
Yong-En Student, gay man 26–30
Yong-Hua Student 26–30
Yong-Ru Student 26–30
Yong-Yu Student 26–30
Yong-An Student 21–25
Yong-Chi Student 21–25
Yong-Ching Student 21–25
Yong-Han Student, lesbian 21–25
Yong-Ping Student 21–25
Yong-Yin Student 21–25
The fact that these interviews were conducted six years after the 3/18
Movement enabled interviewees to develop a different attitude to their
activism retrospectively. For example, some of them said that “I should have
taken the power to speak” or “I was like a kid at that time”. The value of
such retrospective interviews became clear as this study created a space for
women to reflect on their experiences of the gendered power imbalances
in the 3/18 Movement in ways that may not have been possible for them
at the time of the protest.
Gendered power in the 3/18 Movement

A single-focus agenda
The Awakening Foundation was the only women’s organisation among the
seven NGOs that first protested the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement
in 2013. The Awakening Foundation asked the government to do a gender
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impact evaluation before signing the Trade Agreement. This request was
ignored, and a gender perspective was also sidelined by the rest of the
movement. Instead, the Trade Agreement and opposition to it focused
overwhelmingly on the relationship between China and Taiwan, which is
the dominant issue in politics in Taiwan.
Gender was not the only neglected dimension. Inequalities caused by free
trade affect women, Indigenous people and LGBTQ groups in different ways.
Interviewee Yong-Yu, a member of one of Taiwan’s Indigenous groups,
left the Main Chamber to join the Indigenous young people’s meetings
on the street every evening. According to Yong-Yu, although there is no
trade agreement between the Indigenous people and the government –
they don’t even have the opportunity to say no –these Indigenous young
people tried to relate their own experiences to the Trade Agreement and to
compare relations between Indigenous tribes and the colonial government
with relations between Taiwan and China. Their postcolonial analysis
demonstrated how their economy is harmed heavily by the government
and by entrepreneurs, but was largely ignored by non-Indigenous groups.
In another example, Yong-En mentioned that on the first evening when
students occupied the Main Chamber, some gay students took out the
rainbow flag in the Main Chamber and posted photos of it on their social
media. However, they were asked to take down the flag since some other
students worried that this would blur the focus of the 3/18 Movement. As
Chia-Hui said, “at such a critical moment, everyone focuses on a single
issue … it seems that all other issues and people’s rights are excluded”.
Other interviewees point out that when the 3/18 Movement came under
media scrutiny, it was even more difficult for activists to engage in nuanced
discussion of the trade pact or to show differences within their movement.
Perspectives informed by non-normative gender, racial/ethnic, and sexual
identities were ignored and these identities erased in order to provide the
movement with a ‘single focus’.
This issue should be situated within specific political contexts in Taiwan.
First, Taiwan’s independence and national security are under continuous
threat from China, and people in Taiwan are divided into two poles defined
by their stance on China. During elections, relations between Taiwan and
China always become the single focus for the Democratic Progressive
Party (DPP) and Conservative Nationalist Party (Kuomintang, or KMT).
Substantive debates about other issues in politics become impossible. In a
similar vein, although it is well known that multiple, intersecting inequalities
are caused by free trade agreements, most people in the 3/18 Movement
focused only on the undemocratic procedures of the KMT intending to sign
the Trade Agreement, or on relations between Taiwan and China.
Second, and relatedly, I would like to underline the ‘single focus’
nature of many social movements in Taiwan –and beyond. On the
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one hand, it is easier to mobilise people with a clear goal and to create
solidarity behind a single identity. On the other hand, a single focus in
social movements is open to criticism for generating serious exclusions.
For example, the de facto assumption in much second wave western
feminism that women were White, heterosexual and middle-class has
been much challenged (Carby, 1982) along with the neglect of gendered
and sexualised racism in the Black liberation movement (Collins, 2004).
In a similar vein, Shu-Chun Li (2013) points out that the discourse in
Taiwan’s democratic movement was masculine, with a focus on the public
sphere. Accordingly, the ‘democratic’ movement ignored both ‘women’s
issues’ and female politicians.
Within such a legacy of debates on differences in feminist theories and
social movements, my research participants indicate the importance of
intersectionality in a complex analysis of social movement issues. In Yong-
Yu’s words:
‘Identity is politics. … The identity of being a woman, LGBT, or an

Indigenous person … there won’t be any moment that we are not
related to our identities. … Therefore, it is important that we remind
ourselves that we are in the struggle not only because of a certain issue,
but also because we are women and Indigenous people, or sometimes
even LGBT. … I think that in the 3/18 Movement we were not
intentionally trying to create inequality, but we gave up striving for
equality unconsciously.’
Yong-Yu’s words demonstrate her intersectional perspective and her emphasis

on positioned knowledge. Although many of the participants intended to
express their postcolonial and intersectional analysis of the Trade Agreement,
the 3/18 Movement as a whole fell back into the ‘single focus’ tradition of
many social movements, which is particularly prevalent in Taiwan.
Informal networks in decision-making

Alongside the fact that the 3/18 Movement ignored gender, race/ethnicity
and sexuality in its analysis of the Trade Agreement, decision-making and
informal networking in the movement also sustained gendered power.
During the 3/18 Movement’s various meetings, members from the
Awakening Foundation asked for a representative gender ratio in terms of
who got to speak. According to Yong-Chun’s observation, women made
up one third of NGO representatives, but less than one third of student
representatives in various meetings. Early on there was an attempt to
implement more gender balance. Experienced student activists assigned a
female as student spokesperson. On the main stage on the evening of the
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30 May demonstration, one male NGO staff and one female student were
assigned as hosts.
However, this attempt to challenge the gender imbalance proved
unsuccessful, for two reasons. One was the media focus on male students.
The media represented the movement as a students’ movement with two male
students as the ‘student leaders’; journalists tended to direct their questions
at these two men while ignoring designated spokespersons (see Figure 5.1).
The second reason was the hierarchical informal network in which decision-
making took place. Yong-Yu mentioned that although there were women
in the meetings, it was usually men who talked –especially those with more
experience or with professional backgrounds, such as the male students and
male scholars. Yong-Yin further pointed out, “When the older women who
are more experienced remained silent, I felt like, can I talk? But they [these
older women] haven’t talked yet”. In other words, women were silent even
when they were older or more experienced, while men with professional
backgrounds who were older or more experienced spoke more often. Young
women with less experience were the most silenced. Moreover, my research
participants complained that most of the important decisions were actually
taken outside of the meetings, when the dominant men in the Main Chamber
gathered to smoke during break times. Consequently, some interviewees
thought it meaningless to attend the meetings, because it was actually these
smokers that had the final word and reported it to the media.
Figure 5.1: Men centre stage in the Main Chamber during the 3/18 Movement
parliamentary occupation
Source: © Chih-Nan Fu, reprinted with permission
84
This informal network should not be interpreted as a deliberate attempt to

exclude women and others from decision-making. Rather, it was established
during participants’ previous work in other social movements, in a context
where participants faced severe repression. Yong-Han mentioned that “in
previous years, we were lifted away by the police and fought against the police
together. That built up mutual trust between us”. And since the parliament
occupation was a secret action, this network functioned similarly to other
informal networks that have been documented in politics, where the need
for trust makes members wary of admitting outsiders who may reveal their
activities to others (Stockemer et al, 2020: 317).
Nevertheless, as studies on informal networks and relationships in the
workplace and politics show, this informal, behind-the-scenes mode of
decision-making often reinforces gendered power and creates exclusion. For
example, many of my research participants regarded a particular older male
scholar as the real force behind the two male students involved in making
decisions. Yong-Han described this relationship between professor and
students as a mentorship that guarantees power is passed on, while Yong-Chi
criticises the dominance of “middle-aged heterosexual men who despise
women”. In her own words:
‘It is difficult for women, they have to survive in the cracks, but this is
not an issue for heterosexual men. … Women get squeezed out easily;
they are just not told about the meeting time. … Accordingly, some
women choose to cooperate with men and others don’t. Still others
just become tough against men.’
The gendered exclusion created by informal networks is further refined by

region, university and students’ clubs. Yong-Hua says, “Unless you could
enter that university [top universities in northern Taiwan], you won’t find a
place in the students’ movement”. In Taiwan, students need to have higher
grades in order to enter the top universities, and most of the top universities
are in northern Taiwan. Many top universities have students’ clubs focusing
on social issues and these clubs hold summer camps together. This creates
opportunities for student activists to build informal relationships, but excludes
those who cannot enter top universities or who do not have these kinds of
students’ clubs to join.
The impact of this informal network in the 3/18 Movement resonates
with previous studies on ‘old boys’ clubs’ in politics (McDonald, 2011).
Daniel Stockemer, Michael Wigginton and Aksel Sundström (2020: 316)
write that ‘ “male-dominated networks” exhibit an in-group bias and limit
the admission of outsiders, such as women … informal rules make personal
connections incredibly important’. Moreover, Elin Bjarnegård and Meryl
Kenny’s (2015) research demonstrates that such informal networks benefit
85
not only older men, but also the ‘favoured sons’, since the inclusion of the
younger men allows these networks to persist and survive, while Judith
G. Oakley (2000: 328) points out that informal networks exclude less
powerful men and all women. Similarly, my study indicates that, although
they help to mobilise people efficiently, such informal personal associations
not only sustain the ‘old boys’ network’ that reinforces normative male
bonding and power, but also exclude women, less powerful men (such
as gay activists) and those who cannot access the centre of the students’
movement circle.
The gendered division of labour

In addition to the undemocratic, male-centred decision-making in the Main
Chamber, there was also a gendered division of labour throughout the 3/18
Movement. As Yong-Ching put it, “Women tend to be set in the mother’s
role, taking meeting notes and doing administrative work, and they must
do everything well and clear up any mistakes the men make” (emphasis
added). For Yong-Ping, “Many women chose the work that ‘took care of
the inside [of the movement]’ kind of like taking care of the family in order to
sustain stability in the Main Chamber so that they [the men] could work
outside” (emphasis added). Moreover, three women older than most of the
students were regarded as ‘three mothers who teach the sons’, which is a
Chinese idiom. Yi-Fen further labelled NGOs as “babysitters” because “the
so-called house chores were done by those who were outside [the Main
Chamber]”. In other words, women (and NGOs) were ‘backstage’ doing
emotional labour to support the male ‘stars’ and taking care of the domestic
chores that sustained the daily function of the movement.
My research participants employed feminist perspectives to explain this
front/backstage division of labour. In regard to media representation of the
male leaders, Yong-Han argued that “people expect … to see … the faces
of these two male leaders. I think it started from the anti–Media Monopoly
Campaign that people expect to see young persons with capabilities.
Somehow in people’s mind, these young persons must be male”. Referring to
a social ideology that means men are more likely than women to be perceived
as leaders, Yong-Ru said, “He [the one who holds the microphone] has the
power to speak and can be heard. … Their way of talking is masculine and
it has passion that can stir people up”. Yong-Yin added:
‘A supposed leader should have charisma and talk fluently with a lot
of powerful nonsense. … Since most men are well valued when they
grow up in Taiwan, they are too self-confident. … But women know
that this is only nonsense and slogans. So before we speak, we already
experience self-censorship and self-critique so that we cannot act
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dramatically. Such dramatic performance is based on a certain kind of

narcissism, which is something that biological women lack.’
Such quotes demonstrate that these young women have a feminist analysis
of how socially constructed gender roles and stereotypes underpin the
prevalence of male political leaders (see also Holmes et al, 2011). A feminist
perspective can also be found in their clear grasp of the kind of work often
allocated to women in social movements. Their use of the terms ‘mother’s
role’, ‘babysitter’ and ‘house chores’ corresponds to previous research on
the gendered division of labour in society, wherein women tend to take on
the jobs widely assumed to be socialised ‘women’s work’ as an extension of
what they do in the private sphere –the unglamorous routine activities that
sustain daily life, and the communicative and emotional labour that sustain
relationships (Kanter, 1977; Hochschild, 1983; see also Chapter 9 by Eschle in
this volume). These women know well that their personal choices in relation
to their activism are not solely based on their own preferences or abilities, but
on how women and men are expected and socialised to behave. Moreover, in
a society that tends to trust men more than women, they may make strategic
choices to help gain public support for a social movement’s action.
In short, agenda-setting, informal networking and the division of labour
in the 3/18 Movement all demonstrate the workings of gendered power.
Such gendered power intersects with age, ethnicity, professional background
and experience in social movements. Accordingly, equitable gender ratios
alone cannot guarantee that women get to participate in meetings and in
decision-making. In the next section, I will explore the different strategies
employed by female activists in the 3/18 Movement when dealing with
these power imbalances.
Strategies responding to gendered hierarchies in the

3/18 Movement
I identify two main strategies that emerged in response to male-centred
decision-making, informal networking and the gendered division of
labour: the employment of ‘masculine’ ways to protest and fight within
the social movement, and the identification of care ethics and feminine
modes of protest in a revaluation of women’s work and re-imagining of
women’s activism.
To begin with the former: during the 3/18 Movement, some women
protested against the homosocial reproduction of the informal network
directly. For example, Yong-Chi, Yong-Ching and Yong-Han quarrelled
with dominant men who took the male-centred, informal decision-
making process for granted, and brought the issue up in meetings. When
this decision-making process continued, however, some of my research
87
participants started smoking just so that they could join the informal network.
This strategy had limited success, since not even those who gained access to
the inner circle were included in its decision-making. According to Yong-
Ching, “Even though I learned to smoke in order to participate at the
decision-making level, I couldn’t influence their decisions”. Yong-Ching’s
experiences resonate with Yong-Chi’s observation that “Those [women] who
can survive at the decision-making level usually depend on their personal
relationship with the men”. When Yong-Ching was unable to maintain a
good relationship with the men, she was excluded from decision-making,
no matter her previous efforts. Nonetheless, Yong-Ching became one of
the few women students who participated in TV programmes during the
3/18 Movement. She described herself as ‘masculine’, and by speaking up
she intended to provide an alternative role model for other women students
who were less experienced.
Other women described how they sought to understand the informal
practices and implicit ‘rules of the game’ in the 3/18 Movement (see also
Yarrow’s 2021 analysis of women in the academy). For example, Yong-
Chun mentioned that “new activists want to get the power to talk and
they are not like the women students in traditional students’ movements
who tend to suppress themselves and fit themselves into a functional role”.
Yong-Han asserted that “women should be more active so that they can be
seen”. Similarly, Yong-Yu said that “we should be more conscious about
[claiming] women’s power to speak”. Many of the younger women activists
were leaders of students’ clubs at their universities. However, when they
cooperated with other male students in the social movement, they often
ended up in functional, ‘backstage’ roles. When the new activists failed to
follow the rules of the game, they were labelled as disobedient, making
‘noise’, and were subtly excluded.
Other women challenged the gendered division of labour where it was
based on ‘paternalist sexism’ –on those occasions when activists confronted
the police, men tended to ask women to step back, but these interviewees
refused. Yong-Ping had tied herself with chains in the 2012 land justice
protests; similarly, when Yong-Hua participated in protests in front of the
President’s House the same year alongside workers affected by factory
closures, she too had experienced the police violence meted out to male
workers. During the first night of the parliament occupation, Yong-Chi,
Yong-Hua and other women were part of the frontline, guarding one of
the doors of the Main Chamber. Using their bodies to fight, these women
broke down the gendered division of labour in social movements.
In contrast to those women who confronted sexism or who took on
supposedly ‘men’s jobs’ in the 3/18 Movement, some women sought
instead to re-evaluate ‘women’s work’. Although “women students were
assigned to do less important things” (Yi-Fen), reassessing those roles
88
and tasks could redefine their value. For example, Yong-Ru mentioned
that women’s jobs in the 3/18 Movement were a “heavy burden”, while
Yong-Ping stated that they sustained “stability in the Main Chamber”.
She further elaborated:
‘[One key male student] said, “Without Yong-Ping, there won’t be a

Sunflower Movement”, but what he continued saying was “without
me, there won’t be a Sunflower Movement, either”. I find that, on
the one hand, he did know the inner/outer division of labour and
recognised the value of work inside … On the other hand, I feel upset
since I didn’t mean to be his assistant or to play the role of taking care
of the family for him.’
Yong-Ping’s words demonstrate that what she criticised was not women
doing the ‘unimportant’ work, but how this work was defined by the
male leader as secondary. The strategy of these women resonates with
Marxist-feminist efforts to highlight the value of reproduction, and with the
development of care ethics that reverse the meanings and values assigned to
women’s caring labour (see, for example, Miller, 1986; see also Chapter 10
by Kavada in this volume).
Moreover, some women overtly embraced femininity in order to challenge
the stereotypical image of the heroic male social movement activist. For
example, in contrast to those women students who imitated a masculine
way of speaking, Yong-Ru insisted, “I don’t want to talk in that way”. For
Yong-Ru, “women are not without agency. If we want to be a leader, we
can do it, but we have to perform as men do … to be masculine”. Yong-
Ru refused to be masculine and saw the rejection of a leadership role as an
alternative way of demonstrating women’s agency.
Others put on a performance of feminine beauty. For example, Yong-
Chi said she would dress up for her involvement in the 3/18 Movement,
while Yong-Ping put on a long skirt for even the toughest protest actions,
since “I could climb up and down with my long skirt. It is not necessary
that everyone should dress in short pants”. In a similar vein, Yong-Han
commented on how a blogger taught “waterproof makeup, so that even if
the police intend to use water jet against you, you can still have makeup
on”. For her, this was indicative of “a paradigm shift, since we begin to
think about how to be ourselves … how to be a woman who knows how
to do makeup and dress beautifully” even when protesting.
With this strategy, activists followed the example of Pin-Yu Lai,2 famous
for participating in social movements in full ‘cosplay’, who was elected
as the youngest member of parliament in 2019 (Wei, 2021). My research
participants reported that when Lai was a new activist in the 2012 land justice
protests, many of the more experienced activists privately criticised her dress
89
and make-up, thus helping to normalise the image of activists in a social

movement as masculine or asexual. Such imagery has also been perpetuated
by the mainstream media in Taiwan. The media treated women and men
very differently in the 3/18 Movement, naming famous male students the
‘Five Tiger Generals’ and famous female students the ‘Five Flowers’. This
cast the men as fighters or warriors and the women as fragile decorations.
Moreover, the media focus on women’s appearance sexualised women
activists and framed them as passive objects for the male gaze. Many of my
research participants pointed out that the media liked to disseminate pictures
of beautiful women activists in the 3/18 Movement, focusing on what they
were wearing instead of listening to what they said or thought. There was
also an incident when a talk show from a pro-China TV channel broadcast
sexualised imagery of women participants who slept on the street surrounding
the parliament. These women were effectively victims of sexual harassment
by the male host.3 My interviewees mentioned earlier sought to challenge
such representations. By combining frontline activism with feminine beauty,
these women offered an alternative to the dominant symbolism of masculine
heroes and their decorative female counterparts in social movements (see
also Chapter 6 by Arat in this volume for a discussion of images of women
in the Gezi Park protest).
Nevertheless, as Rosalind Gill (2008) points out, it is important to pay
careful attention to the postfeminist context in which these constructions
of femininity as powerful and women as confident are circulated and
understood. According to Gill, a postfeminist icon usually conforms to an
upper-class, young, White, heteronormative ideal. Drawing on Gill’s critique,
I would like to point out that the strategy of feminine performance outlined
earlier was only possible for those from the dominant ethnic group and not
for the Indigenous woman in my sample. Moreover, because of its links
to heterosexuality, the strategy was not open to lesbian women, especially
those who present as butch. In the next section, I will discuss further how
the activities of women in the 3/18 Movement were shaped and limited by
the postfeminist context in Taiwan.
Individualised strategy within a postfeminist context

In this section, I argue that most of the women activists in my study
employed individualised tactics against the gendered imbalance in the
3/18 Movement, rather than participating in collective feminist struggle.
This is despite the fact that women’s organisations were involved in the 3/18
Movement. For example, the women subjected to sexualised representation
in the TV programme turned to the Awakening Foundation for help. The
Awakening Foundation and other women’s organisations issued a public
declaration and asked women in society to report this TV programme to
90
the National Communication Committee, since the programme objectified

and sexualised women’s bodies and this is discrimination against women.
A lawyer, who was also an Awakening Foundation board member, joined
the women to sue the TV channel for 460 billion NT dollars (Awakening
Foundation, 2014).4 Furthermore, as previously mentioned, the Awakening
Foundation not only asked the 3/18 Movement to insert a gender perspective
into discussions of the trade pact, but also insisted on an equal gender ratio
in who got to speak at meetings and represent the movement. However,
both requests were neglected in the wider movement.
My interviews indicate that one reason for this is that feminist activists
lack influence, with women’s organisations regarded among young people
as relevant only to a narrow range of ‘women’s issues’. In Yi-Ru’s words,
“it is difficult for feminist activists to be influential in social movements …
Gender issues are taken by gender NGOs. … It’s like it is women’s stuff”.
Or take Yong-Chun as an example, who stated, “I don’t want others to
label me firstly as a feminist. Although I fight for gender equality … but
as a feminist, people will think that what I only care about is women’s
rights” (emphasis interviewee’s own). In parallel, when Yong-Ping faced
violence in her intimate relationship, she didn’t think about searching for
help from women’s organisations. When I asked her why, she answered: “I
felt distant from women’s organisations. Perhaps I felt closer to LGBTQ
organisations. … Somehow I just felt women’s rights were distant from us”.
Similarly, Yong-Ching declared,
‘When we talked about gender issues at university, it was always

LGBTQ. Somehow we just felt that women and men are equal. …
Between 2012 to 2014, all social movements, environment, land,
labour … all social movements have been suppressed. … in comparison,
women’s problems were much smaller. Besides, I also felt that we have
already gained a lot.’
These female students depicted the struggle for women’s rights as narrow
and outdated, belonging to the previous generation. Younger women’s
disconnect from women’s organisations in turn reinforced Yi-Ru’s claim
about the lack of feminist influence on current struggles. These women’s
words correspond to Angela McRobbie’s (2004: 257) claim that young
women feel a distance from feminism and to Sherry B. Ortner’s (2014)
observation about the ambivalence of younger women towards the feminist
label. However, such a phenomenon can only be fully understood if further
situated within the Taiwanese context.
Historically and politically, socialist theories and Left-wing politics were
suppressed in Taiwan, given the Cold War context in which the KMT
fought against the Communist Party in China. Consequently, it is difficult
91
for people in Taiwan with a clear class consciousness to find solidarity. From
the late 1980s into the 1990s, there were thriving workers’, farmers’ and
women’s mobilisations; female university students formed a coalition and
were active in various social movements. They had a strong connection with
the Awakening Foundation and the Taiwan Feminist Scholars Association.
In 1994, a series of sexual harassment cases on various university campuses
led to Taiwan’s first demonstration against sexual harassment. Nevertheless,
solidarity based on class and gender seemed to disappear afterwards,5 and
the coalition of university women students no longer exists.
In the absence of a strong socialist tradition in the political and social
context specific to Taiwan, the women’s movement in Taiwan has focused
on law reform and women’s education. Legal reforms have included the
enhancement of women’s rights in the Civil Codes in the 1990s, the Sexual
Assault Crime Prevention Act and Domestic Violence Prevention Act in
1997, the Sexual Harassment Prevention Act in 1998, the Act of Equality
Between Women and Men in Employment in 2002 and the Gender Equity
Education Act in 2004. It is this long list of reforms that makes young women
like Yong-Ching feel that women have already gained a lot.
Nevertheless, legal revisions and the proposal of new laws rely on a small
group of professional activists in certain women’s organisations (such as the
Awakening Foundation), with a focus on freedom and equality for individuals
that can be protected by the nation/state. The law-reform network often
centres in Taipei, where the parliament is located, while grassroots networks
and connection between the women’s and labour movements, as well as
solidarity among women, are neglected. Accordingly, such liberal feminist
strategies can be criticised, for example, by Indigenous woman writer Liglave
Awu (1997), for prioritising the interests of middle-class and heterosexual
women and the perspectives of those in Taipei. Following Awu’s critique,
I would like to stress that the ideology of individualism in liberal feminism
and postfeminism often reflects the interests of middle-class, heterosexual
women from the majority ethnic group.
Moreover, the legal context has become more complex in the decades
since. In the first place, there has been an increased recognition of differences
among women. This can be seen in the shift from ‘equality between women
and men’ to ‘gender equality’. For example, the Act of Equality Between
Women and Men in Employment later became the Act of Gender Equality
in Employment and previously ‘gender equity education’ was called ‘equality
education between women and men’. The direction of law reform in Taiwan
aims to broaden the concept of gender equality from two sexes to LGBTQ
groups (see also Yang, 2020). In this context the ‘women’s movement’ can
seem old-fashioned since it is seen to care only about equality between women
and men. In addition, 2014 saw heated debates on same-sex marriage, and
in that context many women students equated gender with the LGBTQ
92
movement. In other words, young women regard the LGBTQ movement

as more relevant and more progressive on gender than the single focus on
women in the women’s movement.
I would argue that it is within these specific postfeminist contexts in Taiwan
that the young women I interviewed feel distant from women’s organisations
and the women’s movement. Consequently, the Awakening Foundation
could not create connections with these activists, who instead resorted to
individualised responses to gendered power in the 3/18 Movement.
Conclusion
This chapter has identified gendered power in the 3/18 Movement, not only
in the single-focus agenda that ignored the unequal impacts of the Trade
Agreement on different groups in society, but also in how older, professional
father-figures passed power to selected male students through informal
networks that excluded women from decision-making, and in the relegation
of women to support work. The gendered division of labour in the 3/18
Movement corresponds to previous studies of social movements and other
political organisations, with women tending to work in the background in
ways that functioned as an extension of a mothering role, crucial in sustaining
the protest, while male activists took on the more celebrated leadership
roles. The stereotyped and sexualised representation of female activists in
the mainstream media, and the intimate violence some of them faced in
their daily lives, also demonstrate that equality between women and men
in Taiwan is an ongoing struggle.
In general terms, these findings illustrate the persistence of what Ortner
(2014) has described as patriarchal power in the figure of the authoritative
‘father’, which shapes both relations between men and relations between
women and men. My research corresponds to previous studies that show
gendered power is created through organisational practices, to which social
movements are no exception. More specifically, I show that younger women
activists in the 3/18 Movement employed feminist perspectives to explain
the gendered power they encountered, and pursued a range of strategies in
response, from employing ‘masculine’ modes of protest to embracing and
re-evaluating women’s roles in social movements and developing a more
feminine mode of activist presentation.
Echoing Yeşim Arat’s analysis of the Gezi Park protest and its relation
to the women’s movement in Turkey in Chapter 6 of this volume, I have
discussed the strategies of women’s organisations and of individual female
activists in the 3/18 Movement within the context of Taiwan’s women’s
movement. The achievements of Taiwan’s women’s movement mean that
young women activists are armed with gender consciousness. This can be
found in their acceptance of the need for a more equal ratio of women and
93
men speaking in movement meetings and to the media (even though this is
not always a successful tactic on its own); in their feminist analysis of gendered
phenomena in the movement; and in their embracing of differences among
women, especially in relation to LGBTQ rights.
However, mirroring Ortner’s (2014) argument about feminism in the
neoliberal context of the United States, I have pointed out that Taiwan’s
lack of socialist tradition, and the liberal feminist strategy which this has
encouraged, has meant that debates on differences have led to a premature
turn to postfeminism. This can be seen in the disconnect between women’s
organisations and young women activists in the 3/18 Movement, with
women’s problems dismissed as belonging to the previous generation; in the
misidentification of feminism in terms of a narrow focus only on ‘women’s
issues’; and in an assumption that gender equality between women and men
has been fully achieved. Moreover, women activists’ expressions of individual
autonomous choice, powerful femininity and confident individualism
resonate with postfeminist and neoliberal values that are classed, racialised
and heteronormative. As Deborah Cameron (2020) asserts, while postfeminist
attitudes have prospered since the 1990s, patriarchal social relations remain
deeply embedded in many societies. In a similar vein, I suggest that gendered
power still exists in most social movements, demanding a more careful
reflection on the turn to a postfeminist stance among young female activists.
Young women’s disconnection from the women’s movement presents a
serious challenge for women’s organisations, and for mixed protest camps,
and is in need of further research.
Notes
1
The Awakening Foundation was first founded as the Awakening Publishing House in
1982, the only feminist magazine under martial law. After the lifting of martial law, the
Awakening Foundation was established in 1987. For further information see Awakening
Foundation, 2017.
2
Lai is one of my research participants and her cosplay is well-known in Taiwan society.
I do not use her pseudonym here deliberately, in order to maintain her anonymity in the
rest of this study.
3
This incident is mentioned in Hioe and Liu, 2014. For TV coverage of the subsequent
protest by women’s organisations (in Chinese), see https://www.setn.com/News.
aspx?NewsID=19052 [Accessed 5 November 2021].
4
This case ended in 2015 with the judgement that the TV channel was fined for 500,000
NT dollars, see https://www.setn.com/News.aspx?NewsID=105131 [Accessed 20
April 2021].
5
For discussions of Taiwan’s labour movement, see Ho, 2014; for the relationship between
social movements and Taiwan’s political parties, see Wu, 2002.
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96
PART II
Feminist Politics in and through

Protest Camps
6
The Feminist Movement in Turkey

and the Women of the Gezi
Park Protests
Yeşim Arat
Introduction
Sheldon Wolin defines democracy as a ‘fugitive project’ concerned with the
possibilities for ordinary citizens to ‘becom[e]‌political beings through the
self-discovery of common concerns and of modes of action for realizing
them’ (1994: 11). He reconceives democracy as ‘a mode of being that is
conditioned by bitter experience, doomed to succeed only temporarily,
but is a recurrent possibility as long as the memory of the political survives’
(1994: 23). The Gezi Park protest camp was such an occasion of fugitive
democracy. In this chapter, I shall examine how the women’s movement in
Turkey helped shape this rare occasion of fugitive democracy in the country,
and was in turn reshaped by it.
The Gezi Park protests of 2013, which took place in opposition to the
increasingly authoritarian government of Turkey, were an unprecedented
phenomenon in the country: the largest, most heterogeneous and
spontaneous expression of dissent the country had ever witnessed. The Gezi
graffiti and slogans sparkled with creative energy, wit and humour. The park
in central Istanbul was occupied for two weeks between 1 and 15 June and
the events that began on 27 May lasted until 23 June in and around the park
(Kongar and Küçükkaya, 2013). After the police forcibly evacuated the park,
the protests changed shape and continued through forums in different parks
of Istanbul throughout the summer. According to information provided by
the Ministry of Interior, the protests that began in Gezi Park in Istanbul
spread to 79 of the 81 provinces in the country, and two and a half million
people took part in them (T24, 2013).
99
The protestors in Gezi Park were mostly middle-class youth of different

political persuasions and identities (Konda, 2013). They included
environmentalists, social democrats, Kemalists, socialists, nationalists and
others who identified as Kurdish, Alevi (a religious group of unorthodox
Muslims), LGBTIQ or feminist. Some 94 per cent of those who came to
the park did so as ordinary citizens who represented neither a party nor an
organisation. The average age of the protestors was 28 in a country with
an average age of 30. Six out of ten of those in the park attended or had
graduated from a university, in contrast to only 12 per cent of the wider
Turkish population. Nine out of ten believed that they faced abuses of their
human rights. Of the participants, 50.8 per cent were female and 49.2 per
cent male. In a country where women’s representation in politics had long
remained very low, reaching only 18 per cent in the parliament in 2015, the
high rate of participation by women in the park was striking (Konda, 2013).
The uprising was a costly one. Nearly five thousand people were detained
during demonstrations throughout the country, and more than eight
thousand were wounded (Özkırımlı, 2014: 143–6). Eleven people died.
Threatened by the implications of the protests, the government of the Adalet
ve Kalkınma Partisi (Justice and Development Party, henceforth AKP), in
power since 2002, escalated its illiberal measures against the opposition with
a vengeance after the Gezi Park events subsided.
Journalists and academics inspired by the revolt continue to write on who
the protestors were, why they participated in the protests, how they protested
and what the occupation meant (Aydın, 2013; Bölükbaşı, 2013; Göncü,
2013; Sancar, 2013; Karakayali and Yaka, 2014; Özkırımlı, 2014; Yörük,
2014; Baydar, 2015; Eslen-Ziya and Erhart, 2015; Ertür, 2016; Çıdam, 2017,
2021; Yaka and Karakayali, 2018; Konya, 2021a, 2021b). Yet, despite the
profusion of writing on the subject, there is scant research on the women
who constituted more than half the protestors.
In this chapter, I focus on feminist and other women who took part in
the Gezi Park occupation or joined the protests. I argue that the feminist
values, norms and modes of organising upheld by the women’s movement
in Turkey left their imprint on the Gezi protests. The occupation of the
park and its particular spatiality gave feminists the opportunity to prove that
feminist values cultivated by the women’s movement had resonance among
the protestors and to entrench those values in the fabric of opposition to
authoritarianism. Thus feminists and other women who do not necessarily
call themselves feminists expanded the reach and visibility of women’s values
and empowered themselves in the process of opposition to authoritarianism.
I first briefly contextualise Gezi, then introduce features of the women’s
movement in Turkey that we can trace in the protests and, lastly, discuss
how feminists and other women engaged in the occupation. My chapter is
an interpretive venture based on secondary material, newspapers, journals,
100
THE FEMINIST MOVEMENT IN TURKEY
articles, books, pamphlets and informal talks with students who were
in the park. I visited the park and strolled through the camp only once
during the protests, and did not conduct research there, even though
I followed the unfolding of events breathlessly and with admiration through
the mainstream and social media. As such, I focus on women’s resistance as
reflected in secondary sources, particularly women’s own testimonies about
their Gezi experience.
The Gezi Park protests

The Gezi protests began in response to the unilateral decision of the
government to restructure Gezi Park in Istanbul’s central Taksim Square as
a shopping plaza and a residential complex. The complex would be situated
within a replica of a formerly demolished Ottoman artillery barracks that
had once stood in place of the park. This urban development project would
destroy one of the rare green spaces left in the city centre, privatise a public
good to provide new resources for patronage for the ruling elite and fuel
consumerism. The High Council for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage
had decided against the project and there was also a court order against it.
In outright defiance of these legal constraints, the government and the
Istanbul municipality, both led by the religiously rooted AKP, decided to
proceed with the project. The project would also allow the AKP to leave its
imprint on Taksim Square that the founding elites of the secular Republic
had shaped (Gül et al, 2014).
The goal to protect the park from destruction initiated the protests. On
27 May, the watch to protect the park began when the Taksim Platform,
the civil society organisation of professional architects and environmentalists
that had come together to save the park, called for solidarity to prevent
heavy machinery from tearing down the park walls and trees. A small group
of protestors camped in the park even though it was not fully occupied.
However, when the police tried to clear the protestors using excessive
violence, people mobilised to come out and stay in the park. Thousands
who watched the police spraying thick pepper gas on those in the park,
burning tents and spraying water on those outside, flocked to the scene in
a state of revolt.
Underneath the desire to protect the park was the resentment of the
increasingly authoritarian policies of the AKP. By 2013, the country was
polarised and divided over the 12-year AKP rule. Half the population was
frustrated with the AKP’s majoritarian populism and exclusionary policies
that aimed to transform the existing cultural codes and institutions, to replace
them with religiously inspired conservative authoritarian ones. Women,
LGBTIQ individuals, students, Alevis, Kurds and anti-capitalist Muslims who
came to the park had different grievances but the common denominator was
101
the anti-democratic practices of the government. This opposition constituted

the backbone of the diverse protestors in the park (Yörük, 2014).
In this heterogeneous group of people, symbols of the protests emerged
from the ranks of women who constituted half the protestors. ‘The woman
in red’, a research assistant for the Department of City and Regional
Planning in the Faculty of Architecture, Istanbul Technical University,
was photographed, on 28 May, being sprayed with pepper gas from a very
close distance, her feet solidly on the ground, her red summer dress and
hair undulating under the wind the spray generated (Göncü, 2013: 19).
Peacefully, she resisted. She represented the Gezi spirit where the ordinary
citizen, notably a woman who traditionally belonged to the private realm,
was using her right to protest against the state that encroached on her access
to the city and moreover physically attacked her. Her photograph, which
Reuters distributed, generated immediate solidarity across the globe. On
12 June 2013, eight women parliamentarians from the Italian Left Ecology
and Freedom Party wore red suits in feminist solidarity with ‘the woman
in red’ to attend the session on abortion rights in the Italian Council of
Representatives (Göncü, 2013: 34). Then there was the iconic picture of
‘the woman in black’ standing in front of the police vehicle that was spraying
pressured water towards her. An Australian exchange student, she was defying
the police and the pain of pressured water from close up with open arms
(Hamsici, 2013). Another image of a Gezi woman that circulated widely was
that of the ‘aunt with a slingshot’ where an older woman was responding
to disproportionate violence of the police with a slingshot. She was later
identified as a member of an illegal Leftist organisation (TRT Haber, 2013).
While these images of Gezi women circulated widely, there was more to
women’s resistance than these pictures of protest. The women’s movement in
Turkey had left its imprint on Gezi and the women of Gezi who identified
themselves in various terms, including as feminists, LBGTIQ individuals, sex
workers, ‘pious women’ or mothers, engaged in resistance in diverse ways.
The women’s movement in Turkey and the Gezi

protests
Social scientists have drawn attention to how social movements influence
one another. David S. Meyer and Nancy Whittier, when introducing the
concept of ‘movement spillover’, argue that feminist ideology has had an
impact on the peace movement in the United States, specifically in terms
of feminist egalitarian norms of participation and leadership (1994: 277–
89). They claim that the peace movement also benefited from the ‘tactical
innovations’ of the women’s movement. The women’s movement in Turkey
similarly had repercussions for the Gezi camp and protests. While causality
is difficult to establish, we can observe the resonance of feminist ideology
102
in the Gezi resistance, as evident in egalitarian norms of participation and

leadership, and colourful, witty protest tactics.
A women’s movement emerged in Turkey during the early 1980s and
continues to thrive as it changes shape over the years (Tekeli, 1986, 2010;
Bora and Günal, 2002; Arat, 2008; Çağlayan, 2012; Adak, 2019; Arat and
Pamuk 2019). Feminist women led the women’s movement. In the context
of a predominantly Muslim society with a strong state tradition that upheld
a republican concept of the common good, feminists sought their rights to
self-expression and equality in their struggle to expand their opportunity
space. They introduced the issue of domestic violence to political debate
and prioritised the fight against it. They fought for amendments to the
legal framework pertaining to women’s rights. Women had their civil rights
recognised in 1926 with the Civil Code adopted from the Swiss Code, and
they gained the right to vote and be elected to parliament in 1934. By the
early 2000s, feminists succeeded in extending these legal rights through
amendments of the Civil Code and the Penal Code in line with feminist
priorities. The new Civil Code recognised the right to equal ownership of
property acquired during marriage and thus acknowledged women’s labour
at home. The new penal code recognised sexual crimes under the category
of crimes committed against individual women rather than public morality,
as was the case before. Punishments for gender-based violence increased and
extended in scope. These struggles formed the feminist values and norms
that women brought to Gezi, and which protestors of different persuasions
agreed to act by, as I will shortly discuss (Anıl et al, 2005).
Within the women’s movement, feminists pursued their goals with new
modes of organising and protest tactics that also had repercussions in shaping
the playful, energising Gezi spirit. The esprit de corps of Gezi was quite
unlike the violence-prone ethos of the Leftist and nationalist movements
of the 1970s in Turkey. Feminists of the 1980s and early 1990s took care to
collaborate through horizontal ties working to downplay leadership, which
turned out to be an important aspect of organising in Gezi Park (Eslen-
Ziya and Erhart, 2015). They brought women’s culture in the private realm
out into the public realm with humour and wit, introducing a mode of
protest that first appeared on the public scene in Turkey with the women’s
movement. Different women’s groups organised striking public spectacles
to attract media attention, which resonated in the slogans and clever graffiti
of the Gezi occupation. Feminists had held a colourful open air festival in
1987 in front of a Byzantine church in Istanbul, Kariye, to draw attention to
women’s problems through music, art and food. According to the feminist
Ayşe Düzkan, Gezi was most reminiscent of the Kariye festival (Düzkan,
2013). In 1988, feminists put together a temporary museum to exhibit the
multiple chores women carried out as housewives. This was also a dramatic
exposition of protest.
103
In 1989, feminists organised a purple needle campaign where they sold

needles with purple ribbons for women to protect themselves against sexual
harassment taking place in the streets and public transportation (Arat and
Pamuk, 2019: 233). Needles women use to sew clothes in their traditional
dependent roles as homemakers and housewives thus turned into a weapon
to protect them from sexual harassment and expose its nature publicly.
The tactic of using women’s utensils for purposes of protest had its echo
in women banging pots and pans to support the Gezi resistance from their
balconies during the protests.
In 1990, a group of 30 feminists organised a daring mass divorce of their
husbands to protest the sexist family-oriented policies of the state (Berber,
2019). Individual marriages in the private realm were thus turned into a
spectacle and politicised. The spirit of the mass divorce resonated in Gezi
Park when protestors sleeping in tents on public ground brought the private
act of sleeping to the realm of politics. There were also the evening ‘coffee
shop raids’ where women would go to coffee shops that were customarily
frequented only by men and as such were off-limits for women. These
women thus claimed their right to any public space, including at night
when they could be harassed more easily because the assumption was that
they should not be out. Women out at night were assumed to be sexually
available and thus could be harassed. Occupation of the contested public
space of Gezi Park similarly challenged the prevailing demarcations of public
space and who should be where, when and how.
Last but not least, feminists learned to collaborate with each other and
with other women who thought differently from themselves within a
women’s movement that was very heterogeneous. There were cleavages
among feminists on ideological grounds. Socialist feminists, liberal feminists,
Kemalist feminists1 and radical feminists disagreed with one another on
numerous issues (Yöney, 1995). Then, there were the divisions along
intersectional lines, most notably between pious women –who practised
Islam according to its orthodox interpretations and did not identify themselves
as feminists, but sought to expand their religious freedoms, particularly their
right to attend universities wearing headscarves prescribed by Islam –and
the Kemalist feminists who were against religious headscarves in public
institutions (Eraslan, 2002). Another important intersectional cleavage
was between Turkish feminists who dismissed issues of ethnic identity and
Kurdish feminists who sought to expand their rights as ethnically separate but
feminist women. Not all Kurdish women identified themselves primarily as
feminists. Kurdish mothers politicised their maternal roles to fight for their
rights (Göker, 2016; Karaman, 2016). The Saturday Mothers, on the one
hand, had gathered in silence in Galatasaray Square in Istanbul since 1995
and sought their ‘disappeared’ relatives that were victims of state violence, in
the war against the Kurds. The Peace Mothers, on the other hand, mostly
104
mothers of the Kurdish guerrillas who died in the mountains, organised

for peace. These different groups of women learned to accommodate one
another and forged coalitions to promote their rights. This experience of
standing side by side despite differences was also an important part of the
Gezi spirit where participants bracketed their hostilities for a common cause.
Feminists and women in the Gezi protests

Women, who constituted more than half of the protestors, came to the park
with different reasons. For feminists, the key context was the increasingly
patriarchal discourse of the conservative, religiously rooted AKP leaders, the
familial policies and the traditional roles they promoted, and the feminist
demands they dismissed (Coşar and Yeğenoğlu, 2011; Acar and Altunok,
2013; Güneş-Ayata and Doğangün, 2017). Tayyip Erdoğan, the leader of
the AKP and the prime minister at the time, had declared that he did not
believe in gender equality. He urged women to have at least three children
and claimed that abortion is murder (Korkman, 2016: 112–13). In 2011, he
replaced the Ministry of Women and Family Affairs with the Ministry of
Family and Social Policy. The state ignored the laws and circulars on gender-
based violence as well as the equality article of the constitution. Increased
authoritarianism accompanied neoliberal transformation of the country.
In this section, I examine how the feminists and other women in the park
disseminated feminist values throughout the Gezi protests. These women
promoted egalitarian norms as they took part in all aspects of life in the
protest camp. Meanwhile, they upheld their sexual rights and defended a
feminist concept of honour that was defined independently of control over
their sexuality. Finally, they voiced their anti-militarist and anti-authoritarian
feminist values in collaboration with other groups in the camp.
Even though there were not very many women’s civil society organisations
in the park, the Socialist Feminist Collective, Istanbul Feminist Collective
and Women for Women’s Human Rights, New Ways, were all present.
Feminists from the Socialist Feminist Collective put up their tent with a
purple-on-white banner ‘Air Space Without Harassment, Without Tayyip’
(Çelebi and Kalkan, 2013: 9). Other banners included: ‘AKP take your
hands off my body’, ‘We don’t want a misogynist prime minister’, ‘Budget
for shelters not shopping malls’ (Feminist Politika, 2013: 8, 16) and ‘Tayyip
I do have three children, not because you wanted, but because I had free
sex’ (Aydın, 2013: 54). These banners voiced women’s protests and made
feminist values visible.
Women in the park participated in all activities that defined the Gezi
resistance. Women were in the barricades against the police who fired tear
gas capsules or plastic bullets. They were in front of police vehicles that
sprayed pressured water. They were in the commune formed in the occupied
105
park, organising book-reading sessions, working in the vegetable garden

cultivated in the park territory, collecting rubbish, and taking turns to help
in the makeshift infirmary and the kitchen.
The occupants of the park, male and female, thus mostly shared chores,
even though the egalitarian division of tasks was a contentious issue in the
park, as elsewhere (see Chapter 5 by Yang and Chapter 9 by Eschle in this
volume). However, women refused to abide by a sexist division of labour. As
a participant put it, ‘we did not accept the attempt to assign ladies as cooks
and dishwashers, gentlemen as load carriers and security guards. Women were
in resistance within resistance’ (Çelebi and Kalkan, 2013: 9). Consequently,
feminist norms and modes of organising resonated in the protests as feminists
resisted within resistance. The 28-year-olds in the park had grown up with
the feminist movement and were not deaf to its ideology.
Feminists who were against a sexist distribution of tasks also organised
against the use of sexist language in protests. Commonly used swear words,
such as ‘fuck you’ or ‘child of a whore’ were a testimony to the prevalent
concept of honour based on control of female sexuality by heterosexual men.
The homophobic swear word ‘faggot’ aimed to preserve the supremacy of
heteronormativity. Many men put up graffiti or banners to protest Erdoğan
and those in power, using these swear words. This profane language
denigrated women, men, sex and sexuality. Women organised a campaign to
oppose homophobic and sexist language in the park. The Istanbul Feminist
Collective invited the protestors to ‘fetch their paint box and come’ to erase
or cover up the sexist and homophobic slogans on the walls (Rahte and
Tokdoğan, 2014: 76). While women painted over the sexist language, they
shouted their own slogans such as ‘resist with persistence not with swear
words’, ‘swearing is harassment, resist with persistence’, and ‘Tayyip run run
run, women are coming’.
After the campaign to erase sexist swear words on walls or posters, feminists
organised a workshop on swear words. They problematised how sexuality
that everybody enjoyed could be turned into a means of degradation (Özkul,
2013: 65). Mehtap Doğan, a member of the Socialist Feminist Collective
and the Istanbul Feminist Collective, explained in an interview that they
debated how they could alter the relationship between women’s bodies,
sexuality and swear words, whether or not there could be non-sexist swear
words, and how one could respond to offense without swear words (Rahte
and Tokdoğan, 2014: 76). They created new slogans such as, ‘We are at the
barricades, resisting’, ‘There is no place for harassment in Gezi’ and ‘Do not
swear at women, sex workers and gays’.
While some men reacted badly to these attempts, arguing that feminists
were bossy and that young people had a right to express their anger as they
wished, others were more responsive. As Buket Türkmen relates, a young man
could be heard urging others that the prostitutes were resisting with them
106
and that they should not be humiliating prostitutes with their swear words;
another one called his friends who used sexist swear words homophobic;
someone else inquired if it was all right to use the adjective ‘dishonourable’ –
şerefsiz –because honour was so intimately linked with female virginity and
sexual prudence in Turkey (Türkmen, 2014: 26). A feminist protestor argued
that whenever someone swore at gays and she responded that gays were with
them, the response was always ‘apologies, you are right’.
In solidarity with feminists and LGBTIQ individuals, and in reaction to
slogans which referred to Erdoğan as son of a whore, sex workers put up
their witty banner which read, ‘We, as sex workers, are quite certain that
Erdoğan is not our son’. The feminist understanding of sexuality, which
was not linked to the honour or disrepute of themselves or their families
who were expected to control their sexuality, was thus articulated on the
camp grounds. Because of the wit and starkness of the sex workers’ claim,
it travelled beyond the park through various media, broadcasting a feminist
conception of honour. Although we do not know how widely or deeply it
was internalised by men who engaged with the feminists, the articulation
of the sexist meaning of swear words provided an opportunity to raise the
consciousness of those who used them without thinking about sexism. It
reaffirmed women’s cause and left a feminist imprint on the Gezi protests.
Anti-militarist feminist language also resonated in the Gezi protests. The
nationalists in the park shouted slogans that they were the soldiers of Mustafa
Kemal, the founder of the Republic who had led the war of independence
and initiated westernising reforms. The Kemalist legacy was contested by
Islamists for its strict secularism and by Kurds for its exclusionary ethnic
Turkish nationalism. The slogan suggested that those who used it were ready
to kill or die as soldiers did for the strict secularist and ethnic nationalists
aspirations of the Kemalists. Feminists in the park responded with a counter-
slogan: ‘We will not kill, we will not die; we will not be anybody’s soldier’
(Kavaklı, 2013: 296). Feminists were able to raise their voices and make
them heard among the diverse voices present.
The feminist presence was also critical in generating solidarity with
different groups of women in the Gezi Park. Prime Minister Erdoğan, angry
with the protestors that he mostly referred to as terrorists, insisted that a group
of Gezi participants who happened to be at Kabataş (a district by the shore,
down from Taksim Square on the hill) had harassed a headscarved Muslim
woman with a child in a pushchair. Even though the claim was proven to
be false months later, it became a hotly divisive issue at the time, especially
considering there were some pious women among the Gezi protesters. When
the Muslims Against Violence Towards Women Initiative organised a walk
to protest the incident and any type of harassment towards any women, the
feminists and women of the park walked with them (Kavaklı, 2013: 296).
They prepared a press release underlying the solidarity of pious and secular
107
women against gender-based harassment –even when staged to divide them

through the intervention of the ruling elite.
Women who identified themselves as mothers also came to Gezi in
solidarity with the protestors. The governor of Istanbul, an AKP appointee,
invited mothers of the protestors to come and get their children out of Gezi
to ensure their security. The state, although responsible for the safety of
its citizens, expected mothers to share responsibility for the physical safety
of their children. The underlying assumption was that women reared and
cared for their children, tended the elderly and the sick with no need for
kindergartens or social welfare rights provided by the state. Mothers did
come to the park. However, rather than take their children away, about a
hundred mothers built a circular chain, joining hands with one another,
symbolically protecting their children in the camp from the police. They
shouted ‘Everywhere are mothers, everywhere resistance’, ‘Abdulllah
Cömert (a 22-year-old who died because of head injuries after he was hit
with a tear gas canister during the protests in Antakya province) is our son’,
‘resist my child, your mother is here’, ‘mothers are proud of you’ (Rahte
and Tokdoğan, 2014: 83; see also Tarihi, 2013).
Like the Saturday Mothers and Peace Mothers that preceded them,
Gezi mothers politicised their traditional roles in order to seek rights and
justice both for their children and themselves. Unlike the Saturday Mothers
and Peace Mothers, the Gezi mothers swiftly became material for Gezi
humour. Jokes were made about mothers urging their sons to wake up
not to be late to protests, alluding to the traditional roles of mothers who
wake up their children, urging them to be on time to school, where they
are disciplined and socialised to conform. Gezi mothers were portrayed as
urging their sons not to conform (Aydın, 2013: 129). Another aphorism
was a son asking his mother where his gas mask was and the mother
retorting ‘you are not the only one protesting’ (Aydın, 2013: 129). Mothers
who protested rather than conformed were not what the state or even
their sons expected them to be.
After the evacuation of Gezi Park on 15 June, which terminated the
protest camp, the Gezi feminists and women continued their protests
through other means. They gave support to the so-called ‘standing man’,
when a performance artist began his protest of the government and the
eviction from the park by standing still (Seymour, 2013). More than 50
feminists participated in the passive resistance act of the standing man,
wearing different t-shirts protesting Erdoğan in front of the steps of the
Gezi Park (Yur, 2013). In response to Erdoğan’s advocacy that women
have at least three children, the t-shirts women wore on the occasion of
their silent solidarity with the standing man read, ‘at least three trees’, ‘at
least three tweets’, ‘at least three penguins’. The last one was intended to
protest the CNN Türk television channel, which, fearing Erdoğan’s wrath,
108
self-censored and chose to show a documentary on penguins rather than

the Gezi protests as the police were invading the park using tear gas and
plastic bullets. While women protested, many men joined the women by
standing still alongside them.
Outside the Gezi Park area, protestors organised forums in different parks,
to examine their Gezi experience and analyse the increasing government
repression in the country. Yoğurtçu Park forum on the Anatolian side of
the Bosphorus and Abbasağa on the European side were the most attended.
Women who participated in these forums criticised men’s monopoly over
speech both in the forums and in general. They insisted on limiting everyone’s
talk in the public forum to three minutes, because men kept on talking and
interrupted when others spoke (Türkmen, 2014: 27). This was a speech act
reflecting the unequal power relations feminists had long protested and the
problem persisted. In response, some women formed their own women’s
forums to create an opportunity to discuss and empower themselves without
the intervention of men. The forums did not merely allow women to
critically evaluate the Gezi Park protests and the various experiences they
had there, including issues of police harassment and the limits of egalitarian
division of labour in the park (Bakırezer and Berber, 2013: 15). They also
provided an opportunity to other women who had not been in Gezi but
could attend the forums, to share a part of the Gezi experience and the Gezi
spirit. Thus women’s voices in Gezi could reach a wider circle of women
and relatively more apolitical women could find a means to engage with
the women of Gezi Park.
Conclusion
If Gezi was an instance of democracy as Wolin defined it, that is a ‘fugitive
project’, feminists took part in this project ‘conditioned by bitter experience’
of state violence and sexism (Wolin, 1994: 23). They discovered common
concerns beyond those that shaped their gender identity and they left their
imprint both on what those common concerns were to be and on ‘modes
of action for realizing them’ (Wolin, 1994: 11). By protesting against the
increasingly authoritarian state that intervened in their lives and rejected
their insistence for an egalitarian, non-sexist community in the park, they
recreated a democratic vision and modes of action for realising it, even
though they succeeded only temporarily.
Indeed, from a narrow perspective, the Gezi protests were a pyrrhic
victory. The protestors were exposed to excessive police violence in and
around the park and physically hurt. Women who were detained suffered
further violence and harassment under police custody (Çelebi and Kalkan,
2013). They became victims of the sexism they were successfully fighting
against in the occupation.
109
The park was not demolished to be rebuilt for commercial use. However,
on the eighth anniversary of the protests, Erdoğan built a huge and
controversial mosque in Taksim Square –a project that secular groups
had long opposed (McKernan, 2021). The Taksim Mosque was Erdoğan’s
attempt to rewrite the secular heritage of the site. Meanwhile, instead of
reconciling the various grievances protestors brought to Gezi, Erdoğan
turned increasingly more authoritarian towards any kind of opposition. He
prosecuted the Gezi protestors. A group of 16 were charged with organising
the Gezi Park protests in order to overthrow the government, and brought to
court in 2019 with an indictment that asked for life sentences without parole.
In 2022 when judicial independence had eroded, one of the defendants in
the case was sentenced to aggravated life imprisonment and seven others
were given 18 years in prison (Adal and Durmaz, 2022). On the ninth
anniversary of the protests, Erdoğan, filled with vengeance, called the Gezi
protestors ‘sluts’ in a speech he made in parliament.
So it may be true that the fugitive democracy the Gezi protests made
possible was doomed to succeed only briefly. However, Erdoğan is still
threatened by its memory and many women and men duly initiated law suits
against him for denigrating female citizens in the country with the sexual
insult ‘sluts’ (Duvar English, 2022). The memory of the occasion still thrives
and its recurrence is still a possibility. It is a memory wrought with a feminist
voice, and shared by a larger group of men and women beyond Gezi.
The memory of Gezi gives the women’s movement in Turkey self-
confidence. Gezi allowed the women’s movement to become more visible
and reach more women and men. Women collaborated not only with other
women, but with a plurality of men and women as they inscribed feminist
values on the Gezi protests. They built barricades and shared domestic tasks
in public space with men who believed in a traditional division of labour.
Together with sex workers and LGBTIQ individuals, they fought against
sexist language in the park and values shaped by that sexist language, such as
honour. They protested nationalistic men with their anti-militarist feminist
slogans. Secular women walked in solidarity with pious women in defence
of women’s religious rights and in defiance of the authorities who sought
to drive a wedge between them.
After Gezi, the women’s movement became larger than itself. It is now
part of a political coalition opposed to authoritarianism in the country that
includes political parties and many civil society associations that rush to
contest any encroachment of women’s rights. Çiğdem Çıdam argues that
Gezi demonstrated ‘another way of living and relating to others was possible’
(Çıdam, 2021: 185). Feminists and the women’s movement are now an
intrinsic and indelible part of that alternative life and challenge. The feminist
movement has thus been rearticulated through the language, organisation
and spirit of the Gezi protests.
110
Note
1
‘Kemalist feminist’ refers to egalitarian feminists who argue that the reforms undertaken
by the founding fathers of the Turkish Republic, led by Mustafa Kemal, provide the
necessary framework for women’s rights and freedoms.
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7

in Spain: From the Indignados to
Feminist Encampments
Emma Gómez Nicolau
Introduction
As a form of protest, encampments are places both where participants strive
for horizontal organising and a different way of living outside the neoliberal
order, and where the hierarchies, violence and inequalities of wider society
are reproduced on a small scale. In my chapter, I focus on this tension as
it was made visible in the anti-austerity movement in May 2011 in Spain,
when thousands of people took to the streets and camped in the squares of
the country’s main cities, and when feminists and queer movements were
also vocal critics of the encampments’ structure. In addition, I examine the
phenomenon of no mixto [non-mixed] protest camps from which men are
excluded in order to build an alternative organisation governed by the logic
of recognition of subaltern identities. Specifically, I analyse the feminist
encampment organised in Valencia on 8 March 2020 as part of the activities
commemorating International Women’s Day. The chapter aims thus to
contribute to a better understanding of the boundaries of protest camps as
sites of resistance and, at the same time, to explore the possibilities of ‘non-
mixed’ camps as sites of recognition.
To do so, I use Judith Butler’s work (Butler, 2009, 2011) in which
recognition is seen as ambivalent. On the one hand, recognition is understood
as a human need; therefore the lack of it generates violence and exclusion.
On the other hand, recognition is experienced as constraining or oppressive
by those recognised because it assumes a hierarchy in which one (inferior)
group requires the recognition of another that, in addition, sets rigid
specific parameters for the recognition to happen. In that sense, for Butler,
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the process of intelligibility is infused with practices of violence, including

ethical violence, inasmuch as the frames of understanding are imposed on
others. Butler insists on the inability to offer a complete narrative about
oneself. However, the recognition process is generally spurred by asking
who you are. When the answer to this is not closed, when it is unfinished,
contradictory or does not fit in the dominant narrative, we find a lack of
recognition or of understanding of another’s point of view. In this chapter,
I analyse non-mixed protest camps as sites in which recognition is discussed
collectively. Gender is not understood as some inner truth but discussed
through an intersectional lens, favouring an articulation of identity that is not
fixed. Non-mixed spaces are thus positioned as potential sites to engender
alliances through the recognition of differences.
The chapter is structured as follows: first, I will give some background
on the participation of women in different camps in Spain to indicate the
relationship between the composition of the camp and the goals pursued.
Second, I will explore the theoretical literature on the 2011–14 surge of
protest camps. Third, I will focus on the movement of Indignados [the
outraged] in May 2011 across Spain and the key elements of the protest
camps to which this gave rise: the dissolving of the border between public
and private; the sexual division of labour; and the persistence of sexual
harassment and sexual violence. Finally, I will approach the emergence
of non-mixed protest camps through the case study of the International
Women’s Day encampment in Valencia on 8 March 2020.
The reflections collected here are part of a broader analysis of feminist
activism in contemporary Spain.1 My review of the intersections between
the 15-M and the feminist movement in Spain, and the challenges that result,
is built primarily from secondary literature on the Indignados camps. I was
not directly involved in the 15-M encampments, though I visited the one
established in Valencia a couple of times. As for the International Women’s
Day Camp, I was more deeply involved as a participant, and I thus draw
here on my observation data, together with informal interviews I carried
out at the time. During 2021, I also conducted more formal retrospective
interviews with six women members of the Valencia Feminist Assembly,
which organised the camp, and some others who attended. My interest in
understanding the logics of inclusion and exclusion in feminist activism is
shaped by my involvement in feminist organisations and activities for the
past decade.
From absence to centre stage: three scenarios for

feminism in contemporary protest camps
In 2001, for 187 days, workers at Sintel –a subsidiary of Telefónica, the main
telecom company in Spain –occupied Paseo de la Castellana, the central
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Feminism and Protest Camps in Spain
avenue of Madrid’s financial district. The Sintel protest camp was an example
of union struggle that dug in to the streets until the government found a
solution for workers who had been living for six months without being
paid. The Employment Regulation Order was declared by the company in
illegal conditions and heavily contested by unions. The Sintel protest is a
paradigmatic example of a camp dominated by institutionalised organisations
such as unions and political parties. More than a thousand workers built
the Campamento de la Esperanza or Hope Encampment: all male. Women
stayed at home and only took part in the weekly support demonstrations
held every Friday during the six months the camp lasted. For a short while,
a group of women also camped at Almudena Cathedral.
In May 2011, the 15-M movement occupied the largest squares of every
main city in Spain and remained there until midsummer. Feminist and
queer people’s critiques of these camps focused on how insecure they felt
as women, lesbians and trans participants, as well as on the sexual division
of labour and a tangible atmosphere of sexism that reached its peak when a
banner reading the slogan ‘The revolution will be feminist or it won’t be at
all’ was torn down by a man and the audience applauded him in response.
There was obvious conflict in the squares between participants, and feminists
and queer groups had to work hard to make themselves visible and to ensure
their voices were heard.
In 2020, the Valencia Feminist Assembly organised a no mixto / non-mixed
protest camp, from which men were excluded, at the very heart of Valencia,
next to the Cathedral, as part of repertoires of action for International
Women’s Day on 8 March. Almost a hundred people overnighted in the
camp and many more were involved in associated activities in the square.
The camp had three main objectives: give women, trans and non-binary
people their fair share of the streets and squares; condemn the sexual and
gender aggressions that still happen so often in public spaces; and create a
bond of sisterhood between diverse feminist collectives and individualities.
Protesters would march together to the yearly demonstration called on the
occasion of International Women’s Day. The air at the protest camp was
festive and there were several artistic performances open to the general public.
By picking these three remarkably different scenarios, I aim to highlight
some core aspects of protest camps in Spain. First, we can see a shift from a
repertoire of action focused on achieving specific, material, political goals,
with deep roots in traditional Marxist and union movements and set within
a collective bargaining process, to a repertoire of action used mainly to
channel symbolic struggles. It seems that the more defined the goals of an
encampment are, the less attention will be given to inequalities and exclusions
within it. As goals become more diffused and symbolic, the focus shifts to
the camp organisation itself. Indeed, feminist and queer groups became
involved in the 15-M protest camps because they were conceived as sites
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of prefigurative politics, ‘where micro-societies in city squares comprising

complex divisions of labour and consensus-based participation “prefigured”
the alternatives sought’ (Yates, 2021: 1034). For feminist and queer activists,
horizontality, or participatory forms of democratic organisation, and
the recognition of differences, were key to this prefigurative potential of
the camps.
Second, we can see how the dynamics of exclusions and inclusions differ in
each case. At the 2001 Sintel camp, women were not deliberately excluded.
The issue was rather that Sintel’s workers were male, mostly White and
working class. Women played a caring role –a wife role, indeed, supporting
the encampment from the outside. At the 15-M protests in 2011, the
political subject was not as monolithic: multiple and diverse subjectivities
and experiences of inequality were gathered in the squares, but not all of
them had the same visibility, and the fact that the movement did not face up
to inequalities within it –and indeed obscured them, within the indistinct
category of ‘the 99%’ –resulted inevitably in exclusions and violence. On
International Women’s Day in 2020, a non-mixed camp was established in
which the exclusion was a point of principle (cis and heterosexual men were
not permitted to stay overnight at the premises), in order to facilitate the
inclusion of others by means of engaging substantial forms of recognition.
Gendered bodies and subjectivities were discussed collectively, complicating
notions of gender and the various oppressions associated with it and avoiding
an essentialist understanding.
Butler’s (2009) conceptualisation of recognition as a process by which
the self encounters the subjectivity of another –the Other –only to find
it shaped by language and normative structures beyond the self ’s control,
shows us the difficulties we face in fully recognising others. Dialoguing
with Butler’s approach, Kelly Oliver (2001, 2004) questions the epistemic
position from which we articulate recognition. For Oliver, the dichotomy
between self and Other and between subject and object is, in itself, a
pathology of oppression, since it enables the dehumanisation inherent in
oppression and domination (Oliver, 2001: 3). A more meaningful process of
recognition implies, therefore, allowing space for the articulation of subjective
experiences of violence, harm, pain and injury. In the last part of the chapter,
we will discuss how non-mixed spaces may function as a starting point for
these more substantive and meaningful recognition processes.
The protest camp spring

Protest camps were at the core of the 2011–14 global wave of protests. The
so-called Arab Spring uprisings and the anti-austerity movement in Europe
and America crystallised in the Occupy movement, and the importance
of camps across the board led commentators to talk of the ‘movements of
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the squares’ (for example, Flesher Fominaya, 2017: 2). The encampment
is not a new form of protest but has a rich history internationally, from
anti-apartheid to peace and anti-war movements (McCurdy et al, 2016). In
Spain, camps have been linked historically to labour struggles and their social
demands. As in the Sintel example, and at many other social justice events,
camps crystallised core aspects of the protest such as the symbolism of the
place, the community created or reinforced by sharing space together, and
everyday politics. What was new with the movements of the squares was
the simultaneity of protest camps and its global form in the period 2011–14,
a fact that awoke interest in camps not only as a mode of protest, but also
as ‘the focal point of a movement both organizationally and symbolically’
(Frenzel et al, 2014: 458; see also della Porta, 2015: 21).
The moment a camp is set up, a new social organisation is temporarily
constructed. This means that camps are especially useful as sites to experiment
with prefigurative politics, as already mentioned. The political practices
that a movement develops within camps are often part and parcel of its
aims for change in the wider society (Maeckelbergh, 2012: 211; see also
Maeckelbergh, 2011). Camps can be spaces of social innovation, where
imaginative responses are developed in response to conflict and where
non-hierarchical or horizontal relationships are tested. To be sure, such an
undertaking is never without difficulties, particularly in terms of the full
inclusion of different subjectivities. As Butler explains, there is a ‘differential
distribution of recognizability’ (cited in Willig, 2012: 140) and horizontal
decision-making structures do not in themselves ensure recognition.
Some other key aspects of protest camps have been highlighted in the
literature, chiefly the importance of the spatial, affective and autonomous
dimensions of camps (Frenzel et al, 2014). Donatella della Porta points out
the shift that camps represent compared to other forms of global justice
protests like forums. She gives prominence to the site (an open space) and
to the emphasis on direct democracy, in which every single person can
participate (rather than a representative form based on spokespersons), as
well as to the preoccupation with prefigurative politics and the construction
of the commons (della Porta, 2015: 22). In addition, the affective aspects
of protest, as explored in James M. Jasper’s work (1998, 2011), provide a
rich area of study that can be applied to protest camps (see also Benski and
Langman, 2013; Perugorría and Tejerina, 2013). Being present at the same
time in a square and sharing that moment generates a social bond and a
sense of belonging generated by and channelled through emotions. The
interconnection between cognitive and affective mechanisms shapes social
relationships in the camps. However, it is important to be attentive to the
differential distribution of affects. The concept of ‘affective injustice’ (Kay
and Banet-Weiser, 2019: 605) helps us to understand ambivalences in the
legitimation of affects. Rage and outrage have long been proscribed for
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women and its expression can have serious consequences: women may be
discredited and denigrated, pathologised as hysterical or paranoid, ridiculed
or simply ignored (Orgad and Gill, 2019). The activist articulation of
emotions in encampments is also shaped by the intersection of gender with
class and ethnicity.
Outraged feminists and queers in the 15-M camps

In Spain, the movement of the Indignados [‘the outraged’] took to the squares
on 15 May 2011, after an enormous demonstration against new austerity
measures. Although it was an intergenerational protest, the slogan ‘We aren’t
leaving, we’re being ejected’ condensed the feelings of a generation that
was paying for the effects of the crisis: the youth unemployment rate (of
those under 25 years) in the second quarter of 2011 was 45.7 per cent and
it would continue to grow until reaching 56.92 per cent during the first
quarter of 2013. The background to the 15-M movement was a society in
turmoil: a great many groups and initiatives –like Juventud Sin Futuro [Youth
Without a Future], Democracia Real ¡Ya! [Real Democracy, Now!], or No
les Votes [Don’t Vote for Them] –were reacting against social cutbacks,
labour reform, unemployment and a general loss of quality of life (Subirats,
2011). There was a widespread feeling of malaise tightly connected to the
way governments were tackling the financial crisis. The camps were often
huge, and always settled in the main squares of a town or city. The leading
examples were at the Puerta del Sol in Madrid followed by the Acampada
Barcelona, but these were not alone. The 15-M movement was reticular,
and as it was promoted and disseminated thanks to social networks, it would
materialise in many squares around the country: Seville, Bilbao, Valencia …
almost every major city had its own camp.
I will not delve here into the nature and composition of the 15-M
protest camps, but focus rather on the intersections and tensions between
15-M and the feminist movement in Spain. By 2011, feminist and queer
initiatives were diverse and growing in legitimacy in the Spanish context
and it is no surprise they also found expression in the camps. According to
activists and scholars (Various Authors, 2012; Cruells and Ezquerra, 2015;
Gámez Fuentes, 2015; Galdón Corbella, 2018), feminist proposals were
initially rejected by people gathered in camp assemblies. On one occasion,
for example, one man’s veto was enough to overturn a proposal for free
and universal abortion (Galdón Corbella, 2018). Feminist and queer groups
had to make an extra effort if they wanted their voices to be heard. They
were also faced with a sexual division of labour in the camps: women,
trans and queer participants were more likely to be entrusted with care-
related tasks, such as cleaning, while men occupied the deliberative and
policy space, making interventions and proposals. And, of course, women
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and other minoritised identities experienced episodes of gender violence,

humiliation and disrespect. According to Gámez Fuentes, there were two
key incidences in this regard:
The first episode occurred on May 20th, 2011, when a banner bearing
the slogan ‘The revolution will be feminist or it won’t be at all’ was
torn down by a man in front of the enthusiastic clapping of the rest of
the people witnessing. The second event was a reading by the Feminist
Committee, in the General Assembly, of a statement announcing they
would no longer spend the night in the camp after having suffered and
been informed of ‘sexual, sexist and homophobic aggression’. (Gámez
Fuentes, 2015: 360)
The insecurity felt by feminist and queer protesters in a gender-mixed

square was not exclusive to the 15-M movement. In Tahrir Square, in Cairo,
gang rapes were reported (Langohr, 2013) as they were also in relation
to several Occupy camps: feminist participants in Occupy Glasgow, for
example, confronted problems like the ‘privileging of white, male voices
and experiences in camps and online … the platform given to openly sexist
and racist discourses, … and incidents of harassment and sexual violence’
(Eschle, 2018: 525; see also Chapter 2 by Montoya and Chapter 9 by Eschle
in this volume). Camps are often far from being a utopian, horizontal and
democratic space. If they have an uncomfortable atmosphere for feminist and
queer people, and are sites of sexist, racist and homophobic violence, then they
reproduce the violence prevailing in the external society and fail to live up
to their potential to prefigure an alternative politics. In the 15-M movement,
feminist and queer groups worked a double shift: one against austerity
measures, against evictions and in defence of public education, health and
social services; and the other inside the movement, playing a pedagogical role
and encouraging different (more inclusive) languages –in short, implementing
new repertoires of action and new forms of politics (Trujillo, 2016; see also
Chapter 5 by Yang and Chapter 6 by Arat in this volume).
To sum up, the 15-M experience crystallises two realities for contemporary
feminists. First, feminist demands continue to be met with reluctance within
mixed social movements, treated as reflecting special interests rather than
as universal, and as secondary, divisive and unreasonable. At the General
Assembly of the Sol encampment in Madrid, there was even a proposal for
the Sol Feminist Commission to eliminate the adjective ‘feminist’ from its
name and put the word ‘equality’ instead (Galdón Corbella, 2018: 232), a
sign of the degree of hostility the F-word still provokes. In such a context,
mixed protest camps will not be safe places for cis and heterosexual women,
lesbians and trans people, and supposedly prefigurative practices will retain
an androcentric bias.
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Second, and connected, feminist and queer activists have to continue to

work hard to integrate feminism into the practices and discourses of mixed
movements. The 15-M had been widely deemed an opportunity to reactivate
feminist struggle (Gámez Fuentes, 2015) and a suitable place for interaction
(Galdón Corbella, 2018) between feminisms and other social movements.
Feminism in Spain is strongly intersectional and has a rich and diverse strand
of transfeminism (Solá and Urko, 2013: 21). Indeed, in Spanish and Latin
American contexts, the prefix trans-includes transsexual and transgender
subjects and the incorporation of intersectionality into analysis of oppression
and vulnerabilities (Valencia, 2018). Feminist and queer ‘commissions’ set
up within the 15-M camps incorporated a gender perspective into their
economic analysis –what was dubbed the ‘she-austerity approach’ (Alcañiz
and Monteiro, 2016) –and paid attention to specific intersectional issues
such as migration, care work, gender violence and sexual and reproductive
rights, among others. And despite its initial hostility to this approach, the
15-M movement gradually included the feminist cognitive frames of ‘life’ and
‘precarity’ as it matured (Cruells and Ezquerra, 2015). Gracia Trujillo (2016)
has assessed the capacity of the Asamblea Transmaricabollo2 Sol to ‘queerise’
the wider movement, in terms of how queer/cuir3 demands and repertoires
of action were disseminated years after its creation (Trujillo, 2016: 4). Such
accounts characterise the 15-M camps as sites of movement convergence
(Frenzel et al, 2014: 462). However, there are also more cautious scholars
who warn of the ‘patriarchal drift’ in some local assemblies, defined by a
masculinisation of deliberation and of militant action, a persistent sexual
division of labour, and the over-representation of ‘warrior capital’ (which
involves a fascination with military feats and an effort to end the logic of care
inside the assemblies) (Razquin, 2019: 83). Such analyses warns feminist and
queer activists against complacency when working with other movements.
Feminist movements are not spontaneous, but slow-cooked. The presence
of feminist and queer people in the movements of the squares was a
consequence of the history of the feminist movement in Spain, stemming
back to the fight against Francoism in the late 1960s and early 1970s and
subsequently to the transition to democracy. In the 1980s, Spanish feminism
underwent a period of institutionalisation, and correspondingly of ‘latency’
and low profile on the streets, until the appearance of the so-called new
feminism in the 1990s (Gill and Scharff, 2011). This has been characterised
as emphasising recognition over redistribution and thus as a form of
identity politics (Fraser, 2005). The global wave of protest from 2011 to
2014 revitalised social movements in general, with feminism in Spain no
exception. Moreover, since that time there has been a well-documented
popularisation of feminism in the international arena (Banet-Weiser, 2018)
that has increased its attractiveness to the wider population, alongside the
risk of neoliberal co-optation (Medina-Vicent, 2020).
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It is thus unsurprising that Spanish feminists have continued to mobilise

in the aftermath of the 15-M movement. In 2014, the feminist movement
hosted a huge demonstration called El tren de la libertad [the train of
freedom] calling for the withdrawal of a preliminary draft of the new
abortion law presented by the conservative People’s Party, which would
replace the current model of access limited by gestational period with
the more restricted model in place prior to 2010, in which abortion was
legal only in cases of rape, and genetic and other medical problems. On 6
November 2016, the feminist movement called for the Marcha estatal contra
las Violencias Machistas [State March Against Sexist Violence]. The first
#HuelgaFeminista [#FeministStrike] –encompassing paid labour, education
and informal care work –took place on 8 March 2018, and was very well
received. On 26 April that same year, the streets were once again flooded
with a feminist tide enraged by the relatively soft sentence passed against
La Manada [The Wolfpack], found guilty of sexual abuse rather than gang
rape during the festival of San Fermín in 2016. On 8 March 2019, a second
#HuelgaFeminista was called, although some participants faced reprisals.
This has all taken place alongside the proliferation of feminist and queer
assemblies in neighbourhoods and medium-sized cities across Spain. In sum,
there is no doubt that Spanish feminism is alive and well since 15-M. It is in
this context that activists have adopted the tactic of establishing non-mixed
protest camps, such as the one discussed in the next section.
#OrditFeminista: the International Women’s Day

feminist camp in Valencia
After the historic demonstrations and strikes to commemorate International
Women’s Day on 8 March 2018 and 2019, Spanish feminists decided to
change tack in 2020. There was reasonable doubt that a third feminist strike
would be effective, partly because that is what happens with recurrent
acts: they become institutionalised and progressively decrease in impact.
Further, striking had some negative consequences for workers losing that
day’s wages. Another reason was that a labour strike was only possible for
women holding regulated jobs and with some kind of job security; women
working in the informal economy, with unregulated or precarious jobs,
could not afford to go on strike. In the Valencian context, there was an
additional and powerful disincentive, in that picketers and strikers had faced
legal reprisals, some being heavily fined for their activities (at the time of
writing, legal proceedings are still ongoing).
With this in mind, the Valencia Feminist Assembly agreed not to go on strike
and instead to hold a 24-hour feminist protest camp as a part of the repertoire
of action planned for International Women’s Day (see Figures 7.1 and 7.2).
They nicknamed themselves the #OrditFeminista [#FeministPlot].4 In Catalan,
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Figure 7.1: The #OrditFeminista encampment, Valencia, 8 March 2020
Source: Author’s photograph
the vernacular language spoken in the Valencian countryside –an area with a
long-standing tradition in silk weaving that can be traced back to the Middle
Ages – ordit refers to the set of long threads held in tension on a frame or
loom. Ordit feminista means ‘a set of diverse women that constitute the basis for
building a feminist, anti-capitalist and anti-racist world’.5 And certainly lesbians,
trans women and non-binary people were included in this understanding of
the feminist subject. Preparation for the event was delicate because diverse
subjectivities were looking for recognition, but the effort made by organisers
undoubtedly had visible effects. The encampment achieved its symbolic
objectives, in recognising the intersections and diversities among women.
Intersectionality and inclusivity in a ‘non-mixed’ protest camp

The theory and practice of women-only spaces established by radical
feminists in the 1970s has long faced criticism. Most recently, queer critiques
of the overly tight delimitation of the subject of feminism and of separatist
practice argue for the creation of spaces that include marginal, borderline
and excluded points of view and amplify their voices and demands (Gámez
Fuentes et al, 2016). As Pablo Pérez Navarro explains (2019: 156), the
concept of ‘non-mixed’ spaces allows feminists to do this. As ‘bodies in
alliance’ (Butler, 2011), certain vulnerabilities based on the contemporary
sex-gender order can be given prominence when cis and heterosexual
masculinities in particular are excluded. Such spaces are sometimes called
safe spaces, because they are free from sexist, homophobic and transphobic
violence. In such a context, participants feel safe to ‘engage in dialogue,
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Figure 7.2: ‘Free abortion’ demand poster on a tent
debate, disagree, challenge, learn, safe to express, to emote, safe to develop

one’s consciousness, to demonstrate one’s creative talent, to fulfil one’s
potential’ (Lewis et al, 2015: 108). Participants can express themselves more
fully and thus encounter differences within the group.
The truth is that eliminating cis-male and hetero-male subjectivities from a
protest does not guarantee safety. Violence and inequalities can still occur in
non-mixed spaces along other axes of oppression, such as racism, fatphobia,
ableism or ageism. The ‘safety’ discourse has also been criticised because
of its neoliberal connotations regarding security and surveillance (Quinan,
2016), and for treating all women as victims and all men as perpetrators,
with every identity at risk of being questioned or policed (Robles, 2018).
However, in practice non-mixed spaces do not treat participants as victims.
Rather, they reinforce agency and responsiveness to vulnerabilities and
intersected oppressions. Non-mixed spaces have the potential to become
sites for recognition provided that feminist strategies are developed: active
listening, respectful and affirming exchanges, and honesty. Such spaces may
be considered prefigurative, foreshadowing a ‘free, “safe” and alternative’
future (Yates, 2021: 1034; see also the discussions of ‘safer’ or ‘brave’ spaces in
Chapter 2 by Montoya and Chapter 3 by Ahia and Johnson in this volume).
At the #OrditFeminista protest camp, the organisers adopted an
intersectional approach to contemplate every exclusion the camp might
generate. Migrant members, for instance, drew to other participants’
attention that occupying a public space meant to them assuming a higher risk
because of their often irregular and undocumented situation. Migrants thus
highlighted how disobedience was a privilege for people with citizenship
125
rights. If the police intervened, migrants would be exposed to an extra risk.

As interviewee Sara explained, “getting our colleagues to see that we are not
in an equal situation when occupying a space was super important. We are
at a disadvantage. ... If the other participants do not engage with this, then
they are not taking enough care”. The fact that sleeping in a camp is not the
most comfortable overnight experience and thus not inclusive for elderly
activists and for those with physical and health problems was also discussed,
and ways devised to make sure older participants would not feel left out.
Generally speaking, the non-mixed paradigm means working actively to
ensure the recognition of otherness, as another interviewee insisted:
‘As long as you don’t speak with a colleague and put yourself in her
shoes, and empathise with other realities, you can’t see it. And you
can’t see that there is a lot of work to do ahead of us. ... As feminists,
we can get very exclusionary because we want to defend positions that
we believe to be true … instead of starting to open up to diversity
and saying that we are here for everyone, we also end up putting up a
fence and repeating the attitudes of an established system.’ (Carmen)
Excluding men was a decision widely supported by the assembly. However,

there was also a strategy for inclusion, and a significant role given to
‘male feminist allies’ of the camp: groups of men transported the required
infrastructure to the square –tables, sound equipment and an electricity
generator –and then dismantled the camp in order to allow feminists to
go to the subsequent demonstration. Men also carried out surveillance,
maintenance and took good care of the accessible toilets provided by an
alternative theatre and located 350 metres from the campsite. It should also
be noted that the non-mixed requirement was in force exclusively for staying
overnight, decision-making and taking leading roles in artistic, cultural and
recreational activities. Male spectators were welcomed (see Figure 7.3).
It can be seen that dynamics of exclusion and inclusion in non-mixed spaces
depend on the specific context where they take place and the decisions taken
about how they are to be run. Organisers of every non-mixed event must
not only define the exclusions that are required, but also work out how to
make the event inclusive for participants if they do not want the space to
become monolithic and homogeneous.
Space as an object of social, political and affective struggle

One of the main reasons to occupy public squares is to regain space for the
people. In the case of the #OrditFeminista camp, the occupied square was
Plaza de la Virgen, next to the Cathedral and the Valencian Government
headquarters: a symbol of both religious and political power from old,
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Figure 7.3: Open activities in the camp
progressively turned into a symbol of the thriving economy of the city as the
zone has become a major tourist hub. Migrant, poor and racialised people
do not normally walk through this area. Occupation asserts the right of
participants to access the city and to live free of violence.
Staying overnight at a square, with its specific temporal focus on the night,
can be linked to other feminist struggles. The Valencia Feminist Assembly
called for a non-mixed march on 23 November 2019 –following the Take
Back the Night and SlutWalk global experiences (Kretschmer and Barber,
2016) –to vindicate the freedom of women in public and private leisure
spaces and condemn sexist aggressions perpetrated in recreational and festive
contexts. In Valencia particularly, from 2010 up until the time of writing,
there have been numerous marches to ‘Prenem la Nit’ [Take Back the Night]
(García Saiz, 2021). In the Spanish context, La Manada and other gang-
rape cases have generated a growing concern over sexual aggression and the
social tendency to blame the victims. Popular responses to sexual violence
and harassment in public spaces favour a patriarchal strategy that revictimise
women, a perfect excuse to control their movements by means of reinforcing
domesticated femininities. Sexual terror thus operates as a surveillance device
(Barjola, 2018). Thanks to the Take Back the Night protests and marches,
women and dissident sex-gender identities assert their agency, escaping from
victimhood through the exercise of body autonomy and through taking
responsibility for the vulnerability of others.
In Valencia, this sense of responsibility (Butler, 2014) fell partly on a
security committee whose mission was to prevent the camp from suffering
any type of external aggression, whether from the police, individuals or
organised groups. The committee was especially concerned that Vox, the
127
far-Right party, would show up to try and attack the camp. The deployment
of bodies to face physical threats, linked by the symbolism of purple bracelets
or violet spots (Blanco-Fuente et al, 2018), is also a display of self-defence
and collective resistance –an expression of empowerment which is not
co-opted by neoliberalism. A camper explained that “we were occupying
a passageway where people pass through, drunk people … a space where
we are often violated. And we were in the Plaza de la Virgen and nothing
happened … we are super powerful” (Laura). Moreover, the work of the camp
included care and reproductive labour to supply food and drinks for campers,
as well as keeping the site clean, thus providing a ‘home place’ for protesters
in which new social relationships could be created (Frenzel et al, 2014; see
also Chapter 9 by Eschle in this volume). As another interviewee, Isabel, put
it, “[camps] are spaces that mobilise a lot of things and build activist bonds.
You share how you smell, I’m on my period, I can’t sleep, my back aches,
you thrill, you cry … you organise your tent as a small house to be nice”.
The camp was a context of shared intimacy and emotion, with affects
created by staying, sleeping, eating and having fun together. As Isabel
makes clear, affects are a bodily sensation that flows the moment perceptual
interaction occurs. Following Butler (2011), ‘for politics to take place, the
body must appear. I appear to others, and they appear to me, which means
that some space between us allows each to appear’. Or as Jasper (2011: 286)
puts it, ‘emotions can be means, they can be ends, and sometimes they can
fuse the two. Emotion is in every part of the protest and collaborates in the
maintenance of protests. And not just emotions as anger or fear, but others
like friendship, belonging, joy and love’. In María Martínez’s (2019) analysis
of the feminist movement, affects catalogued as positive have been crucial to
develop and preserve mobilisation. However, other scholars (Jaggar, 1989)
highlight that supposedly negative emotions like rage and anger may also be
important in provoking and sustaining feminist struggle. In the case of the
Valencia camp, the anger of migrant women was indeed very productive,
ensuring the encampment was not uncritically (re)producing the violence
of the dominant social structure:
‘It is true migrant women almost always act out of anger, which is a
very important driving force for us. Because when you arrive in this
territory you suffer violence that leaves a mark on you in such a way
that your first mobilising step will be through anger and pain … I want
you to understand. And if you don’t understand, ask me who I am,
where I come from.’ (Carmen)
All this indicates that the sharing of space is a necessary step to develop
recognition strategies but that it is not by itself enough. The self and ‘the
Other’ must be present, along with the difference between them (Butler,
128
2009; Gómez Nicolau, 2016), and to bridge that difference both must dig
into the experiences that have caused pain, fear and rage in order to make
it possible for new connections and for other emotions to surface.
Conclusion
The global wave of uprisings that took place in the period 2011–14 shed
new light on the protest camp tactic as a key element in the repertoire of
action of contemporary social movements. Protest camps have been linked
historically to the achievement of specific political objectives, as was the
case of the Sintel camp in 2001, which sought to negotiate a solution for
affected workers through an exhibition of collective strength in the streets.
The 15-M movement of Indignados in 2011 did not have the same specific
goal. Camps were established to express the enormous public unrest and
frustration caused by the economic crisis and the failure of the democratic
system. The means and aims of protest were given equal importance. In the
struggle to intensify democratic processes within the camps, feminist and
queer groups worked hard to integrate their demands for recognition and
redistribution, reshaped through the lens of intersectionality. Their demands
found their way into the everyday politics of the protests: in how democracy
was performed in the assemblies, in how demonstrations were organised,
and in the camps themselves. Yet feminists often came up against structural
barriers to full acceptance and sometimes open hostility.
The non-mixed protest camp experience addressed in this chapter
illustrates how prefigurative politics is possible when a space is simultaneously
made both exclusive and inclusive in order that subordinated subjectivities
may become ‘bodies in alliance’. The symbolic aspects of the protest take
centre stage, meaning that being together becomes the main purpose of
the camp. In this way, feminist mobilisation is strengthened and many
other things happen too –like sharing points of view and getting to know
each other. Camps are symbolically resonant spaces; they make it easier to
prefigure alternative ways of living and certainly feminist groups are going
to take advantage of this capacity. However, successful prefiguration of other
possible futures will only occur if an intersectional lens is fully embraced and
the diverse inequalities among activists collectively addressed. This means
taking shared responsibility for the precarity, insecurity, pain, fear and rage
of all participants in the camp.
The theoretical literature on protest camps that emerged after the global
wave of protest between 2011 and 2014 is significantly more optimistic
than the feminist critique of the 15-M movement. More than this, as
Catherine Eschle makes clear in Chapter 9 in this volume, the literature
has overstated the extent to which protest camps are spaces of autonomy
from or resistance to neoliberal capitalism. In my view, there is a lack
129
of reflection among social movement scholars regarding the ‘differential

distribution of recognizability’ that makes it so difficult for marginalised
subjects to fully participate in horizontal structures. Sexist, racist,
homophobic, fatphobic, ableist structures are still operating at encampments
and assemblies. In addition, the ‘affective injustice’ paradigm has not yet
been incorporated into research on protest camps. Taking into account
the importance given to the affective turn in social theory in general, and
the prodigious and productive work on emotions in social movements in
particular, the expression and legitimation of diverse emotions in camps
definitely requires further attention.
The case of the Valencia Feminist Assembly protest camp is useful when
rethinking the role of women-only spaces as sites in which a deeper process
of recognition may emerge. When redefined as non-mixed, these spaces can
be as narrow or as expansive as is desired and their boundaries, far from being
well-defined and predetermined, are instead adjustable in accordance with
the specific needs of their participants. In the Spanish context, then, women-
only spaces are reconfigured by transfeminism as places where diversity and
intersectionality can be addressed, mainly because trying to build a safe space
obliges us to consider the whole range of oppressions that shape our lives
and, what is more difficult, to identify and accept the privileges we hold.
This strategy of inclusion across inevitable differences offers an important
example of how we might together expand the subject of feminism and, in
doing so, help to contest transphobic violence.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Catherine Eschle and Alison Bartlett for putting this volume
together and guiding me to improve the content of this chapter. I am
extremely grateful to Catherine for her wonderful job making the chapter
intelligible in English.
Notes
1
‘Youth Resistances to Gender Order’ from the ‘Feminisms: Discourses and Practices’
project (UJI-A2020-13) financed by Universitat Jaume I; and ‘Mediatization of
Women’s Rage: Intelligibility Frameworks and Communication Strategies of Politicizing
Transformation’ project (PID2020-113054GB-I00) financed by the Spanish Government.
2
Transmaricabollo is the most accurate translation of queer in Spanish as the word incorporates
insults and offences such as marica (poofy) and bollo (dyke).
3
The combined terminology ‘queer/cuir’ is a Latin/Southern re-appropriation of the
queer concept.
4
Information available from: https://www.feministas.org/8-de-marzo-de-2020-valen
cia.html
5
A poster with this phrasing is available from: https://www.feministas.org/8-de-marzo-
de-2020-valencia.html
130
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8
‘Why the Compost Toilets?’:

Ecofeminist (Re)Generations at the
HoriZone Ecovillage
Joan Haran
Introduction
The HoriZone Ecovillage was a camp in place 1–9 July 2005, to support
protest actions at the G8 Summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, that ran 6–8
July that year. This rural convergence site occupied two fields, totalling
approximately 30 acres, behind the football stadium on the outskirts of
Stirling. In this chapter I situate the creation of the Ecovillage in the context
of a much longer history of social movement activism, as represented by
the participant action and writing of Starhawk, the US ecofeminist1 activist
and non-violent direct action (NVDA) trainer. In an open letter to the
people of Stirling, in part an apology for damage caused by other protesters
associated with the camp, residents of the HoriZone Ecovillage (with
Starhawk as their contact person) laid out the prefigurative dimensions of
their contribution:
We created and maintained the HoriZone Eco-Village to demonstrate

what we are working and struggling for, not just what we are against.
We wanted to put our ideals into practice and live for even a short
time in a space that was run by direct democracy, in which everyone
could participate in the decisions that affect them. We wanted to
demonstrate ecological solutions for many of our basic problems. And
we wanted to provide shelter, food, health care, legal services, local
transportation, and an organizing committee for people coming to
protest the Gleneagles meetings. (Highlands/Healing Barrio, 2005)
135
Participating in HoriZone was not Starhawk’s first experience of protest

camps. She has written repeatedly about the transformative impact of her
participation in the Abalone Alliance, whose 1981 encampment and blockade
of Diablo Canyon, California, aimed to prevent the commissioning of the
nuclear power plant sited there. According to Barbara Epstein: ‘The Abalone’s
most important contribution to the direct action movement was the internal
culture it created –a commitment to non-violence combined with a utopian
vision of a radically democratic society in which everyone’s views would
have equal weight and all relationships would be strictly egalitarian’. She calls
this culture ‘the politics of prefigurative revolution’ (Epstein, 1991: 91–3).
According to Starhawk (2003: 13): ‘For everyone who took part, the blockade
became a life-changing event. Three weeks of collective decision-making and
shared leadership gave us a strong sense of our own personal and collective
power’ (see also Starhawk, 1997: 112–13; Starhawk and Valentine, 2000: xvii).
Common to both these camps was a practice of daily living that was both
critical of the status quo, and prefigurative in the sense that inhabitants
attempted to live as if the other world they dreamed was possible had
already arrived. In the earlier camp, this was largely limited to interpersonal
relationships and political decision-making, but in the later camp it also
included modelling more environmentally friendly ways to deal with water
and waste management.2 Starhawk’s ecofeminism –expressed through her
activist spirituality –predated her involvement with the Diablo Canyon
blockade, but she honed and developed skills at that action which she
has continued to apply in the many groups and actions in which she has
participated, adding and integrating further skills as her expertise expands.
Almost a quarter of a century, and continual involvement in ecofeminist
activism, separates these two camps. Starhawk’s writing career has paralleled
her activism, making it possible to trace links through and across movements
and elapsed time. When I was working on this chapter in 2021, Starhawk
informed me that my correspondence with her about her article on
permaculture at the G8 Summit had prompted her to forward the article
to the camps in Minnesota that were protesting the Line 3 pipeline, as she
had been advising them on some of the same issues.3 This reinforces my
argument in this chapter that the trans-spatial and trans-temporal links
between protest camps are material, not simply conceptual. Starhawk is not
unique in the longevity of her commitment to social and environmental
justice, but her publishing, pedagogical and archival activities make her
contribution particularly accessible to interested outsiders. I trace a history
of activism through Starhawk’s actions and writing, while recognising that
social movement activism is much broader than one person, as Starhawk
herself points out (for example, 1997: xxiii).
In writing this chapter I was provoked by a remark made to Starhawk by
a Stirling councillor, in planning meetings ahead of the 2005 summit: ‘I
136
ECOFEMINIST (RE)GENERATIONS
understand why you’d be involved in the political aspects of this. But what
I don’t understand is, why the compost toilets?’ (Starhawk, 2008b).4 The short
answer to this query is that the compost toilets are the political aspects of this,
while the longer answer requires a little more unpacking. In what follows
I tease out the assumptions that underpin the Stirling councillor’s attempt
to make sense of Starhawk’s role in this encampment. I do so in part by
exploring what is invisible(ised) and what is taken for granted about politics
and toilets. Why focus on what is being refused or protested against –or
indeed the act of protesting –and not on what is being affirmed or created?
My exploration of these questions emerges from my own engagement
with Starhawk’s work, initially as a reader and latterly as an ethnographer
and archival researcher. My overarching interest has been in the multiple
ways in which she works to bring a socially and environmentally just world
into being. In the next section I trace some of the routes through which our
work has come into contact and detail how my focus on the infrastructure
of protest camps came about. An exploration of politics as action and
infrastructure follows.
Background and approach

This chapter emerges from a larger project in which I explore the entanglement
of fictional cultural production with social justice activism. I am curious about
how this entanglement contributes to the dissemination and endurance of
commitments to social transformation. I coined the term ‘imaginactivism’ to
name these processes of collectively imagining and working towards a longed-
for future. I wanted to investigate the ways in which particular works of fiction
might encourage their readers to become social justice activists, or sustain them
in that activity. However, it became apparent in the course of my research
that the texts I had selected in fact emerged from social movement contexts.
The linear trajectory I was hoping to map from inspirational imaginative text
to activist engagement revealed itself as a much more complex spiralling and
iterative process in which the authors or editors of creative cultural production
took inspiration from their engagement in direct action, as well as from the
work of earlier writers. Instead of simply interviewing the readers of fictions
such as Starhawk’s The Fifth Sacred Thing (1993) or Walidah Imarisha and
adrienne maree brown’s Octavia’s Brood (2015), I have therefore been tracing
the involvement of the authors and editors of those texts in social justice
activism and other practices intended to refashion the world.
In this chapter, I work with documents that I consulted in the material
archive of Starhawk’s papers held at the Graduate Theological Union in
Berkeley, California, as well as the digital archive of contemporaneous
accounts of Starhawk’s involvement with protests, particularly those at
the 2005 G8 Summit in Gleneagles. I also trace references to her activism
137
through her books about feminist spirituality and politics published since
1979. I did not interview Starhawk about her participation in the protest
camp, choosing instead to work with both the archives mentioned above, as
well as another digital archive provided to support an Earth Activist Training
(EAT) course in which I participated in January 2016. My interpretation
of these materials is informed by my participation in EAT as well as my
engagement with Starhawk as part of the larger Imaginactivism project.5
My account of Starhawk’s life and writing – focused through her
involvement with the design and implementation of the HoriZone
Ecovillage –offers a way to think about how the lived experience of
activism is passed on, and the ways that it emerges from and contributes to
the practices of daily life. Both Jake Hodder (2017) and Rachel Corbman
(2020) have written recently about the use of biography as method when
working with social movement histories. Hodder suggests that following
one figure across multiple geographically disparate archives provides some
manageability in telling movement stories across space and time: ‘a life
can be used “strategically, like a levee, to direct a story that might spill
sideways into other areas, to direct it forward and more forcefully along
the transnational course” … as well as through the archive’ (Gurterl cited
in Hodder, 2017: 455–6). Corbman’s challenge is slightly different as she
deals with more limited references to a single activist, Seamoon House, but
she also stresses the value of centring ‘the life of a minor movement figure
as one strategy for following the transit of people and ideas between radical
social movements in the late twentieth century’ (Corbman, 2020: 399).
Arguably, Starhawk is a major rather than a minor movement figure,
with her expertise as a veteran activist being sought out by global justice
and environmental campaigners on several continents over decades, but
like Seamoon House she has been involved with and translated ideas and
practices across multiple radical social movements, both in the late 20th
century and the early 21st. Following Starhawk through the archive, as well
as ethnographically, allows us to consider HoriZone Ecovillage, not only as
a discrete, time-limited encampment, but also as an exemplar of the radical
democratic culture envisioned in the late 1970s and early 1980s by eco/
feminists and anti-nuclear activists in both the United States and Europe.
My engagement with Starhawk’s work began with my reading of her
speculative fiction The Fifth Sacred Thing (1993). This book imagines a
future –albeit limited to the environs of San Francisco and the Bay Area –in
which nobody goes hungry or thirsty, everybody’s work is equally valued,
everybody works to regenerate the damaged and polluted soil and water,
and everybody participates in the governance of their city. In this imagined
future, NVDA is celebrated as the foundation of this liberated city. Although
Starhawk represents a society that is built explicitly on a philosophy –and
when called for –a practice of non-violence in this novel, it was not
138
the first time that she had given narrative attention to the elimination of
violence. I first read Starhawk’s book on Goddess religion, The Spiral Dance
(1999, first published in 1979) –some time after I had read The Fifth Sacred
Thing –and was surprised to discover a chapter section, parenthesised as
‘snatches of visions’ or ‘memories of future lives’ that is a clear precursor of
the later novel. The chapter focuses on how a future Goddess religion might
transform culture for the better and envisages changes to the infrastructure
of an imagined future San Francisco; an embedded thanksgiving prayer
alludes to the social and economic changes that (will) have taken place. In
just two pages, aside from descriptions of public ritual, Starhawk envisions
liberatory pedagogy that encompasses deep experiential knowledge of the
natural world; sabbaticals for all workers; a no-waste society; sun-and wind-
based energy systems; clean air and water; food and water for all; work for
all and the elimination of interpersonal and military violence (1999: 227).
In 1989, Starhawk wrote that in the ten years since the publication of
its first edition she had moved from seeing ‘The Spiral Dance as a political
book in the sense that it brought into question the underlying assumptions
on which systems of domination were based’, to recognising that: ‘a more
active political engagement seemed called for’ owing to the prevailing
economic, social and environmental conditions (1999 [from 1989 tenth
anniversary edition]: 18). With others in the Goddess community, she
therefore participated in multiple NVDAs which were anti-nuclear, anti-
militarist and protective of the environment. These are the social movement
contexts from which The Fifth Sacred Thing emerged and Starhawk’s other
writing demonstrates that she had been enrolled in their shared vision since
before the publication of her first book. In what follows, I draw out the ways
in which Starhawk is an exemplar of a network of agents and movements
whose participation in protest camps is just one expression of a commitment
to living otherwise.
Earth Activist Training

In 2016, as part of the participant observation element of the Imaginactivism
project, I took part in an EAT course, with a cohort of about 30 people.
I have been aware of these courses for many years, as my fascination with
the imagined future of The Fifth Sacred Thing led me to research its author.
I first read this novel in the late 1990s, when it was loaned to me by Niamh
Moore who informed me that Starhawk had attended the Clayoquot
Sound peace camp (for more on this camp see Chapter 13 by Moore in this
volume). Subsequently l learnt about the Reclaiming tradition of activist
witchcraft, co-founded by Starhawk.6 The spiritual practices of this tradition
included clearing the litter from the northern California beaches where
the Reclaiming Collective was based and I was moved and inspired by this
139
concrete dedication to repair of the world. During these earlier periods,

Starhawk’s face-to-face teaching and training –beyond her participation
in direct action –took place at Reclaiming WitchCamps. According to
its current website, Reclaiming WitchCamps are ‘intensive retreats for the
study of magic and ritual, usually held in a campground setting’ (Reclaiming,
2016). They are held in North America, Europe and Australia and although
diversity of practice is encouraged, all Reclaiming WitchCamps must adhere
to ‘Principles of Unity’, which include the following: ‘We strive to teach
and practice in ways that foster personal and collective empowerment, to
model shared power and to open leadership roles to all. We make decisions
by consensus, and balance individual autonomy with social responsibility’
(Reclaiming, 2021). I lack the space in this chapter to detail the commitment
to healing the earth and creating a genuinely liberatory culture that underpins
Reclaiming spiritual practice, but I want to draw attention to the models of
pedagogy and leadership espoused that are the shared legacy of eco/feminist
social movements centred on spirituality and NVDA. Further, there is a
lineage here of making camp together.
Since 2001, Starhawk has co-taught iterations of EAT –developed to
pass on the experience and expertise she had gathered over decades of
activism, spirituality and care for the earth –with a number of partners.
The curriculum satisfies the required elements and contact hours for a
Permaculture Design Course, but is delivered distinctively with a focus on
spirituality and political organising. Permaculture is a practice, philosophy
and methodology of regenerative ecological design which has also been
applied to social relationships. Its three core ethics are care for the earth,
care for the people and care for the future.7 These ethics resonate strongly
with Starhawk’s ecofeminism/feminist earth-based spirituality and with the
collective politics worked out in the NVDA movement, which was strongly
grounded in feminism. It is an ongoing challenge to write about Starhawk
in an academic language that generally understands identity practices as
discrete, or additive; Starhawk’s ecofeminism is her earth-based spirituality
is her permaculture practice.
In 2016 the EAT format was a two-week residential course combining
classroom sessions and hands-on experiential learning through which the
principles of permaculture design, ritual and political organising were taught
(see Figures 8.1 and 8.2). As course participants we shared bunk-rooms and
worked together to prepare and clean up after meals, practising the hands-
on skills of living in community, including non-violent communication.
We were given access to the EAT Reader on completion of the residential
course; an extensive pack of electronic resources which comprised, among
(many) other things, designs for compost toilets and greywater systems, and
plans for and reviews of lessons learnt from the design and maintenance of
eco-camps at a range of protests. The Reader included an article written
140
Figure 8.1: Learning circle at the EAT residential course, 2016
Source: © Brooke Porter, reprinted with permission
Figure 8.2: Starhawk teaching at the EAT residential course, 2016
Source: © Brooke Porter, reprinted with permission
by Starhawk on HoriZone Ecovillage that details the ongoing process of

international and local collaboration that brought this temporary zone of
possibility into being. EAT’s mission – ‘To cross-pollinate the political,
environmental, and spiritual movements that seek peace, justice, and
141
resilience’ (Earth Activist Training, 2021) – was given practical expression in

the work of Starhawk and other activists at HoriZone Ecovillage. The vision,
design, building and experience of this camp were prefigured in previous
peace camps, WitchCamps, direct actions and protest events, iterated and
reiterated as political process throughout a history of eco/feminist activism.
Passing on movement lessons

The electronic resources we received following our participation in EAT
were a living archive of the permacultural training that Starhawk has led
since 2001, and the political work in which she has engaged all her adult
life. I was fascinated by documents related to the infrastructural work with
which Starhawk was involved at the 2005 G8 protest camp, because they
provided a remarkably clear example of the ways in which she was drawing
together and disseminating the learning of multiple social movements. I later
consulted material documents at the archive in Berkeley which included
flyers from the UK-based Dissent! Network of Resistance against the G8
and from Cre8 Summit, ‘a group of people from Glasgow and beyond’
(Cre8 Summit, 2005) who planned to build a community garden and social
space in an impoverished part of Glasgow as a positive alternative to the
G8 Summit. Starhawk was an active participant in both Dissent! and Cre8.
These flyers and the activism they describe and call for may be read as
descendants of another publication from Starhawk’s archive: The Diablo
Canyon Blockade/Encampment Handbook. This richly detailed handbook
combines action-specific chapters including scenario pages and legal strategies
for those camping at and blockading Diablo Canyon, and more historical
and philosophical chapters about, for example, non-violence, feminism and
group process. Like the EAT Reader, The Diablo Canyon Handbook referenced
print material produced for earlier actions, including the Seabrook May 24,
1980, Occupation/Blockade Handbook from which it reproduced a fragment
of its feminist systems critique. More detail was available in the original
pamphlet, as well as embodied in the activists who drew on it:
As we act against the nuclear establishment, we are invariably struck by

the common principles inherent in both feminism and direct action.
The political and social reality of direct action extends far beyond
specifically-defined events –it encompasses everything we do every day
of our lives. It demands the liberation of all women and men through
processes which encourage personal autonomy and freedom within the
context of collective living and working. It is through feminism and direct
action that we maintain the hope of destroying the social and economic
inequalities rooted in the authoritarian power-based relationships which
foster sexism, nukes, etc. (Coalition of Direct Action, 1980: 8)
142
This demonstrates definitively that peace, justice and resilience were already
on the agenda for feminists –like Starhawk –taking part in direct action
in the 1980s. Both the Diablo Canyon and Seabrook actions shared with
the permaculture and global justice movements a systems-based critique,
and the claim above that the ‘political and social reality of direct action
extends far beyond specifically-defined events –it encompasses everything
we do every day of our lives’ can certainly be observed in the material
practices of Starhawk’s life as well as in her visionary writing. She is diligent
in acknowledging her debts to all of the activist groups in which she has
participated; the material traces contained in the Berkeley archive further
demonstrate that she is one node in a global, cross-temporal iterative
network. Indeed The Diablo Canyon Handbook suggested that its readers seek
inspiration from Starhawk’s The Spiral Dance, as well as other feminist texts
including Women and Nature, by Susan Griffin, another notable ecofeminist
(Handbook Collective, 1980: 44). When I first read The Fifth Sacred Thing
over 20 years ago, I was unaware that the compelling future Starhawk
imagined was inspired in large part by her participation and leadership in
NVDA like the Diablo Canyon blockade/encampment. I (re)turn continually
to these biographical elements to draw attention to the temporally and
spatially extended reach of protest camps and other temporary cohabitations
organised around living otherwise.
‘Movements are like waves, you have to catch them

when they are rolling in’
Writing about her personal journey through ‘Earth Activism’, Starhawk
began by discussing the month8 that she spent in Scotland 2005 doing
preparatory work for the G8 Summit, explicitly linking her activism with
her spirituality and a commitment to seizing opportunities for intervention:
I’ve always been an activist –for me, the understanding that the Goddess
is immanent in nature and human beings means you can’t just sit back
and let idiots destroy her without trying to do something about it. After
the successful blockade of the World Trade Organization in Seattle
in 1999, I dove into a period of frenetic activism as the global justice
movement grew –in part because I had lived long enough to know
that movements are like waves, you have to catch them when they are
rolling in, and know that they don’t last forever. (Starhawk, 2008b)
From this article, it is clear that Starhawk views the global justice movement
as another opportunity to harness collective power to pursue social and
environmental justice through ecofeminist NVDA, while permaculture
provides ‘a helpful framework for learning the practical skills of earth healing
143
and for developing and implementing real solutions to our environmental

problems’ (Starhawk, 2008b).
Erik Ohlsen, Starhawk’s ‘permaculture teaching buddy’, who travelled to
Scotland with Starhawk to work on both the Cre8 Summit and the design
of the HoriZone Ecovillage, also contributed a primer on eco base-camps
to the EAT Reader.9 His definition of an eco base-camp includes elements
of both prefiguration and regeneration:
An Eco base camp can be temporary or permanent. It provides

ecological infrastructure for people to organize campaigns, actions,
festivals, events, and healing centers or for practically any sort of
camp. The goals of an eco base camp are to have a positive impact
on the land while providing the needs of the people staying there.
(Ohlsen, nd)
The needs that Ohlsen identifies are: ‘clean water, food, wash water, heating
and cooling, systems for defecation and urination, shelter, cooking, good
access, sanitizing systems and social spaces’. He adds: ‘Working eco base
camps also rely on effective decision-making, and social organizing of tasks,
communication, maintenance, and contingency plans’ (Ohlsen, nd). This
reference to both material and social technologies draws attention to the
ways that toilets are politics. Organising their construction and maintenance,
and ensuring that the wastes are treated so that they can be understood as
resources rather than something toxic to be disposed of, requires negotiating
with multiple actors. As some of the residents of the G8 camp came to
learn, the process of building an eco-camp draws attention to the politics
of infrastructure and public health that simply fade into the background
for many inhabitants of G8 countries. Working as part of a collective that
designs and maintains the compost loos and ensures the safe and secure
treatment of humanure so that it can regenerate the land –in the case of
HoriZone, taking it off-site to an organic farm –empowers participants to
prefigure social organisation that is socially and ecologically just, as well as
to regenerate themselves and their surroundings.
‘We dreamed of doing a whole encampment’

The article included in the EAT Reader (Starhawk, 2005a) is substantially
identical to an earlier one available on Starhawk’s website (2005b), but it
provides additional context and notes that lessons learnt at HoriZone will
be used in encampments of activists supporting the rebuilding efforts in
New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. This is pertinent to the way
that Starhawk reiterates and repurposes learnings for different moments and
different audiences. The longer version recounts several earlier attempts by
144
a Green Bloc –‘a group of enthusiastic young activist designers’ formed

through EAT –to use permaculture at other peace camps or protests
in Canada, Mexico and the United States, where they could not apply
permaculture principles to the entirety of the camps’ infrastructure, but
were able to offer workshops or provide some resources. These resources
included a prototype bicycle-driven portable composting toilet at the protests
against the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas agreement in Miami
in November 2003. Starhawk writes that ever since delivering workshops
at the 2002 meeting of the G8 in Calgary:
we had dreamed of doing a whole encampment, an Eco-village where

we could demonstrate a whole range of ecological solutions. … Our
chance came when local Scottish and British activists, through the
Dissent! Network, decided to set up an encampment for the Gleneagles
protests. A group of us came over to support their efforts and help
create the HoriZone Eco-village. (2005a)
Alex Trocchi et al (2005) suggest that there were both principled and
pragmatic reasons for the creation of the encampment. The Dissent! Network
was formed ‘to loosely unite the various strands of British anti-capitalism in
the run-up to the G8, a grab bag of everything from ecology and insurrection’
(Trocchi et al, 2005) and as such had to work hard to achieve consensus on
any of its plans. Concerns for the vulnerability of organisers to prosecution
led to Dissent! taking ‘as its prime duty the organising of infrastructure for
protests and remain[ing] absolutely neutral towards action, except insofar as
it would publicise them’ (2005). In addition, Trocchi et al note: ‘Tired of
being seen as merely destructive, anarchists saw it as crucial to demonstrate
how direct action was also ‘positive’ and constructive. It became a clear
agenda for many anarchists not only to attack the existing system, but to
begin to construct and demonstrate what the better world would look like’
(Trocchi et al, 2005).
In Scotland for over a month before the actual summit, together with Erik
Ohlsen, Starhawk offered a free training in ‘ “temporary permaculture” –
setting up systems for encampments of all kind’ (Permaculture Association,
2005), as the central plank of a three-part ten-day training in Lanarkshire
in late May 2005. The plan for this training had been hatched the previous
year at an EAT course in Gloucestershire. She then stayed on to support
local activist groups. In a webpost dated 8 June 2005, Starhawk reported
that the rural convergence site the network had planned to rent from a local
farmer –and on which students from the permaculture training had based
their analysis and design –had fallen through with less than a month to go
to the gathering and that they were waiting to hear if Stirling Council was
able to provide an alternative. She wrote:
145
The Council, executive body of the nearest town, has become very
supportive of our efforts. They can see the public health and safety
advantages of having one campsite, with sanitary facilities certified
and provided, instead of roving bands of protestors depositing their
potential resource material willy nilly throughout the hills. I spoke to
one of the Council members who sounded quite genuinely interested
in all the features of greywater and especially the compost toilets.
(Starhawk, 2005d: 2)
Perhaps this was the same council member who asked the question that
provoked this chapter. If so, it is ironic that he could not see the connection
between what he called ‘the political aspects of this’ and the compost
toilets, because, as Starhawk points out, gaining access to the campsite and
developing a support infrastructure was a highly political issue, with pressure
being brought to bear on individuals who proposed to make their land
available to the protest network. In any event, the council did make a site
available and Starhawk and Green Bloc activists, working with the Scottish
and British activists who had been planning and training for the G8 Summit
for over a year, adapted their plans for this new site.
Starhawk (2005a) outlines the planning and labour that went into creating
safe access routes to and through the site, laying out the site in ‘barrios’,
and, of course designing the greywater system and compost toilets. Nine
compost toilets were used in conjunction with pit toilets, ‘“pee stations”
(basically privacy screens over straw bales)’ and chemical toilets that the
Council required to be emptied and cleaned each day. The article also
notes that the burden of execution fell on a limited number of volunteers,
including one, ‘Eileen from Aberdeen’, who in addition to transporting ‘the
kitchen compost from thousands of people up to an allotment in Dunblane,
the first all-organic allotment in Scotland’, ‘rented and drove the truck that
brought all the barrels of humanure up to the place where they will be used
and stored’ (Starhawk, 2005a). This unequal labour and planning burden
points to the challenges of empowering people to take responsibility for
matters that they are content to delegate to institutional powers they might
otherwise contest.
Permaculture at the G8 Summit

Reflecting on her role at the G8 three years later, Starhawk teases out
the threads of spirituality and activism from her entanglement with
compost toilets:
From trancing with the faeries to shoveling shit –that sort of describes
the trajectory of my life and work over the last few years. Why, indeed,
146
would anyone take that path? For me, it’s a direct outgrowth of my
deepest understanding of the Goddess –that she is life itself, and that
connection with the Goddess means embracing the sacredness of all
of life. Moreover, that this world itself is the terrain of our spiritual
journey, the place where our growth and development is enacted,
where our challenges are faced and our truths are lived. (2008b)
Although Starhawk goes on to discuss the ‘new kind of permaculture

course’ (that is, Earth Activist Training) that she began to teach in 2001,
while stepping back from teaching at WitchCamps, it is evident from both
her publications and the materials in her archive that this trajectory is not a
change in direction but rather a change in emphasis. As she says,
From that point of view, taking responsibility for our own shit, on
every level, is a spiritual necessity. There is no myth more fascinating,
no realm of spirit or faerie more strange, exotic and entrancing, than
the amazing creatures of the microbial world whose birth, growth,
death and decay makes compost out of waste. For gardeners, soil
builders and earth healers, there is no greater treasure than compost,
with its recycled nutrients and complex colonies of microbial
life. (2008b)
Starhawk’s ecofeminism and her material(ist) spirituality are both expressed

through a deep engagement with the cyclical and interconnected processes of
all living systems. The construction and maintenance of toilets that minimise
the wasteful use of clean water and repurpose human excrement to improve
soil health is for her a spiritual practice as well as a practical expression of a
commitment to social and ecological justice. It is literally and metaphorically
regenerative. Working on such a project is also an opportunity to pass on the
skills necessary to empower others to live out these commitments. Reflecting
on the pitfalls and successes of this approach at the HoriZone Ecovillage,
Starhawk identifies her most fulfilling moment:
I was meeting with representatives for different barrios, explaining

how to maintain their greywater systems and care for the composting
toilets. Two young women were a little alarmed at the idea that they’d
have to recruit their friends to change wheely-bins or deal with shit.
‘We can’t get enough people to help in the kitchen’, they admitted. …
But as we went on to talk about the greywater, one looked up at me.
‘I never really thought about where the water goes’. she said. ‘I guess
we’re really privileged, most of the time, that we don’t have to think
about it, or deal with our shit.’ And at that moment, I realized that
with all its flaws, our project was a success. (2005b)
147
Starhawk was not alone in this assessment. Trocchi et al (2005) claim

that: ‘In the Eco-village, we came to understand that another world is not
only possible, it can exist right now: thousands of people can organise their
own lives, cook food for each other, and even literally handle their own shit
without a single boss or policeman’.
In Truth or Dare Starhawk reflected that newcomers to activism involved in
direct action against nuclear weapons production at the Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory in 1985 had a less empowering experience than those
initiated at the 1981 Diablo Canyon blockade because of the way that
experience and expertise had become embodied in returning protesters.
She notes that: ‘We most successfully planned for succession by setting up
trainings in skills we had learned and teaching strategies we had developed’
(Starhawk, 1990 [1987]: 225). This commitment to passing on skills and
strategies is common to NVDA, the Reclaiming tradition of witchcraft
and the permaculture community. Working at the intersections of these
communities, Starhawk has had countless opportunities for learning and
teaching over the decades. So compost toilets are ‘the politics’ in that they
demonstrate a political philosophy of empowerment, skills-building and
the avoidance of the concentration of power in a select few or in black-
boxed institutions. Not to mention that access to public toilet facilities has
been used strategically to limit the occupation of public space by protesters,
providing yet another opportunity to demonstrate the capacity of compost
toilets to empower protest.
Furthermore, Starhawk argues that permaculture has much to contribute
to the common ground of an ideal society and economy while recognising
that no one form of economy or social organisation could suit all situations.
In Webs of Power she referred to permaculture design principles to argue
for a diversity of immediate small-scale experiments that could evolve
and develop to shift global culture to a ‘life-sustaining system of true
freedom and abundance’ (Starhawk, 2008a: 256) and noted that such
experimentation had already been going on for decades. The HoriZone
Ecovillage was one attempt to model this life-sustaining system of true
freedom and abundance at the same time as its inhabitants protested the
oil dependency and top-down control of the G8. Starhawk is explicit
about why this matters:
Protest movements are often very clear about what’s wrong with the
world, but not always as clear about their visions of what could be
right. Permaculture offers visionary solutions, but the current power
structure often stands in the way of putting them into place. When
protest and permie practice meet, however, they create a dynamic
ecozone, a fertile and creative place of change. (2005a)
148
Mycelial networks, spiral dancing and cat’s cradle

In this section, I lift my gaze from compost toilets to consider the wider
influence of eco/feminism in the spatial and temporal extension of anti-
oppressive activism through protest camps. I search for a way to think through
the complex trans-spatial and trans-temporal threads that crossed each other
at the HoriZone Ecovillage. For example, Trocchi et al’s (2005) description
of the Dissent! Network, formed ‘nearly two years before the G8 summit’
is of a coalition of anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian activists whose
emphasis on consensus and working groups and of flexible and informal
leadership demonstrates that Dissent! embodied the same kind of feminist
process as modelled at the Diablo Canyon Encampment and Blockade; the
same governance model that Starhawk projected into her imagined future
San Francisco in The Fifth Sacred Thing.
The permaculture activists whose solutions were implemented at
HoriZone are committed to learning from close observation of the patterns
of the natural world, and mimicking them in their designs where appropriate.
It is difficult to resist thinking about the global reach of eco/feminism and
permaculture as a mycelial network –the fungal threads that ‘run through
the top few inches of virtually all landmasses that support life’ (Stamets,
2005: 10), with protest camps representing their fruiting bodies that erupt
through the soil. This is a metaphor –or analogy –that could probably be
pushed even further, thinking about the ways that fungi decompose and
recycle, remediate and regenerate, as activists like Starhawk and all her
partners in the covens and affinity groups she has moved through take lessons
about what was or was not effective in particular actions and group process
and apply them in new times and spaces.
The spiral dance is a ritual that has moved beyond its origin in feminist
activist spirituality to be taken up more widely in social movements. In ‘A
Cyborg Manifesto’, Donna Haraway brings her most famous figure, the
cyborg, into conversation with Starhawk’s spiral dance in her speculation
that: ‘it might be the unnatural cyborg women making chips in Asia and
spiral dancing in Santa Rita jail whose constructed unities will guide
effective oppositional strategies’ (1991: 154). In Dreaming the Dark, first
published in 1982, Starhawk theorises about group structures and the ways
that function follows form: ‘In the circle, we all face each other. No one
is exalted; no one’s face is hidden. No one is above –no one is below.
We are all equal in the circle’ (1997: 114). The spiral dance is a technique
for raising energy in a large group, for coming together to commit that
energy to a goal, but is also a way to ensure that everyone in a gathering
that is too large to create a single circle can face everybody else during the
movement of the dance, reinforcing this sense of equality and common
149
purpose.10 I am not claiming that spiral dances ensured the effectiveness

of the compost toilets at or the actions emerging from HoriZone. Rather
I want to draw attention to the cooperation, commitment and embodied
action that is required to create this radical equality and to suggest that
the skills necessary are embodied in and passed between activists of
varying levels or experience in a way that cannot be reduced to sharing
a political ideology.
To conceptualise the ways in which eco/feminist and permaculture
pedagogy have travelled through time and across borders, I turn to Haraway’s
‘Cat’s Cradle’ figure, one of the many string figures with which she thinks,
because it captures the ways in which activists who develop their practice
in one moment or location offer what they learnt to other activists, who
go on to do something similar. Haraway initially introduced the figure to
help make sense of the knowledge production practices of a range of critical
academic projects, but has since suggested that it is a way to think of a mode
of engagement with the world (see also Chapter 13 by Moore, this volume).
In an interview, Haraway (2013: 109) speaks about an artist whose paintings
work with the figure of cat’s cradle: ‘as provocations to, not just connecting,
but how to connect; how to relay patterns’. According to Isabelle Stengers,
‘[t]‌o do string figures, you have to somehow pass on patterns, take the risk
of letting go, take the risk of your hands to be passive to receive a pattern.
As well as to pass on some kind of knot or line that was not there before’
(quoted in Haraway, 2013: 109).
Movement pedagogy is not a reproduction of the same. Becoming
an activist requires an openness to learning how to be otherwise, in
community, and passing on the lessons of activism in anti-oppressive, anti-
authoritarian movements is about empowering others through a sharing
of embodied skills and practices, but accepting that they may be taken up
in surprising ways.
Haraway links the ‘witch-weavings of the displaced and so unnatural
women of the antinuclear Greenham Women’s Peace Camp’ (1991: 153)
with the anti-nuclear activists with whom Starhawk danced a spiral dance
in Santa Rita jail following their arrest. Writing in 1991, Barbara Epstein
describes what we might understand as a cat’s cradle of knowledge and
practices being relayed among these feminist witches of the Matrix affinity
group, other members of the Abalone Alliance who participated in the
encampment and blockade of Diablo Canyon, and the Livermore Action
Group (1991: 136-38). She suggests that, by creating and leading group
rituals, Matrix contributed greatly to movement cohesion. Like the
building and maintenance of compost toilets at HoriZone, rituals are a
kind of infrastructural labour that empowers their participants. Both types
of infrastructure are political in their egalitarian practice and in that they
make the ongoing labour of resisting oppression possible.
150
Conclusion
I could have focused on one of the other infrastructural elements on which
Starhawk and the Green Bloc collaborated in Stirling, to demonstrate
the ways that they had harnessed permaculture to a political project, but
Starhawk herself saw the compost toilets as an earthy metaphor for her
ecofeminist–spiritual–political praxis. The account of compost toilets
as politics that I present in this chapter arises both from the provocative
question of the councillor in 2005, that I encountered in 2016, and my
reading of Starhawk’s novel about a quarter of a century before that.
Although the novel follows the travails of a trio of protagonists, what
fascinated me when I read it was the material and social infrastructure of
the future world that she had built. I have followed this fascination through
Starhawk’s non-fiction books, EAT and her online accounts of participation
in a wide range of direct actions, as well as the Berkeley archive that contains
the traces of the many social movements in which she has participated.
Starhawk’s communicative practices –in addition to the hands-on training in
permaculture and NVDA she delivers –empower others to build alternatives
to the status quo, as she herself was empowered by feminism, the Goddess
movement and anti-nuclear NVDA. I have tried to demonstrate the ways
in which her writing and practice are both prefigurative and (re)generative,
showing both that another world is possible and that we can make it now.
In so doing, I have also written an alternative account of the HoriZone
Ecovillage, focused on its position in a trans-temporal and trans-spatial
web of eco/feminist activism rather than on its effectiveness as a launchpad
for one particular attempt to disrupt global capitalism. There are many
other threads that could be drawn from this web than the one attached to
Starhawk, but I hope this chapter demonstrates that a single protest camp
is never simply a single protest camp. Even this limited focus on Starhawk’s
biography demonstrates the ways that a camp can be connected across time
and space to multiple activist projects.
Acknowledgements
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020
research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Grant Agreement No. 661561. Revisions to the chapter were completed at
the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh.
Notes
1
Although Starhawk calls herself an ecofeminist, not all of the feminists with whom she has
collaborated would claim that identity. However, their activism would be recognised in
those terms by those, like Starhawk, who do. Elsewhere in the chapter, when referring to
a larger constituency than Starhawk alone, I use eco/feminism to indicate this ambiguity.
151
See Moore, 2015, particularly p.4, for her introduction of the use of eco/feminism: ‘Eco/
feminism is both “of feminism” and simultaneously offers a critique of it’.
2
Although I focus on the latter, the open letter points to the much more expansive nature
of the infrastructural vision of HoriZone envisioned by its participants.
3
The Minnesota camps to which Starhawk refers were part of resistance to the building of
one of the largest crude oil pipelines in the world, posing enormous environmental risks.
4
In a diary written while in residence in Scotland, the encounter is narrated slightly
differently with the question framed less directly, but this version of the story makes the
point more succinctly (Starhawk, 2005c).
5
I have interviewed Starhawk several times, and I have also participated alongside her in two
of the Reclaiming Spiral Dances held annually; in a Day of the Dead Procession; and in
a San Francisco march against the Keystone XL Pipeline. In addition I have collaborated
with her in several academic panel discussions about her activism and the ways in which
she uses fiction to examine questions about non-violence and social transformation.
6
Reclaiming was originally based in San Francisco, but has spread across North America,
Europe and Australia.
7
The third ethic is expressed differently at different moments and in different accounts of
permaculture –other expressions include ‘return of the surplus’ or ‘fair share’, making it
explicit that care for the future requires using resources wisely and equitably. I use ‘care
for the future’ in this chapter, because it was the way that the third ethic was introduced
to me and because it resonates with the future orientation of the speculative fictions
I explore.
8
Although Starhawk was only in Scotland for a month, she was involved in other preparatory
work in the UK prior to this.
9
It is undated, so it is unclear whether he wrote it prior to or following his participation
in HoriZone.
10
See ‘Bound in the Spiral Dance’ (Haran, 2019) for a more detailed description of the
choreography of this.
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PART III
Feminist Theorising and

Protest Camps
9
Protest Camps as ‘Homeplace’?

Social Reproduction in and against
Neoliberal Capitalism
Catherine Eschle
Introduction
From a feminist perspective, one of the most striking aspects of the protest
camp as a political form is how it combines protest acts with the creation
of activist living space. In this chapter, I shine a light on this distinctive
dimension of camps. I am responding primarily to the magisterial overview
of protest camps published in 2013 by Anna Feigenbaum, Fabian Frenzel and
Patrick McCurdy. Feigenbaum and her colleagues broke new ground in their
theorisation of camps as a social movement tactic, in part by underscoring
how protest camps are ‘at once protest spaces and homeplaces’ (2013: 42,
emphasis added), an evocative concept they take from Black feminist bell
hooks (2001).1 Concerned more particularly with the work of African
American women ‘to construct domestic households as spaces of care and
nurturance in the face of the brutal harsh reality of racist oppression, of
sexist domination’ (hooks, 2001: 384), hooks’s original reflection underlines
how homeplace has enabled healing and renewal among Black communities
while simultaneously fostering resistance to hegemonic norms. Feigenbaum
et al use this as an analogy for how protest camps too can be nurturing
communities of resistance, in which activists together engage in radical
‘acts of social reproduction’ in ways that subvert neoliberal capitalism (2013,
12: emphasis in original).
I find Feigenbaum et al’s approach to be highly suggestive but frustratingly
incomplete, because it largely sidesteps a rich and diverse feminist literature
on social reproduction and ultimately underplays the implications of hooks’s
claims. In the first part of this chapter, I explore Feigenbaum et al’s analysis
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in more depth, before bringing Marxist and Black/anti-racist feminist

literature on social reproduction to centre stage. This literature informs the
case study I develop in the second part of the chapter of two protest camps
in my locality, Occupy Glasgow and Faslane Peace Camp, in which I draw
out the differing strategies for social reproduction in the camps and their
impacts. I conclude by returning to hooks’s argument about homeplace
and its implications for the theorisation of protest camps. In effect, I argue
that a critical feminist lens on social reproduction draws attention to the
persistence of gendered, racialised and capitalist hierarchies within protest
camps, and thus illuminates the structural limitations of the protest camp
form in patriarchal, White-dominated, neoliberal contexts.
Theorising protest camps as sites of social

reproduction
Feigenbaum et al’s insistence on the interconnection between acts of protest
and acts of social reproduction as characteristic of protest camps is a key
analytical insight. It is embedded in their very definition of encampment as
a ‘place-based social movement strategy that involves both acts of ongoing protest and
acts of social reproduction needed to sustain daily life’ (Feigenbaum et al, 2013: 12,
emphasis in original). As they write,
Whether in the forests of Tasmania or the crowded streets of Thailand,

to function at the most basic level as sites of ongoing protest and daily
living, camps need to figure out how people will sleep, what they will
eat, and where they will go to the bathroom. … Additionally, many
protest camps contain spaces for well-being. To create these spaces,
protest campers bring together and develop particular infrastructures
and practices. As campers build communal kitchens, libraries,
education spaces and solar powered showers, they become entangled
in experiments in alternative ways of living together. … This is perhaps
what most makes protest camps distinct from other overt forms of
protest. … They are at once protest spaces and homeplaces. (2013: 41–2)
The construction of an encampment in which people make their home,

however temporarily, functions to provide support for political action, in
the sense of allowing space for activists to plan and recover from action. But
more than this, it ‘allow[s]‌for social reproduction and the re-creation of
everyday life in ways that contest the status quo’ (Feigenbaum et al, 2013: 10),
exposing the shortcomings in social provision and democratic inclusion in
wider society (2013: 44–6, 184), and instantiating, however fleetingly, an
alternative vision of how daily life might be led. Thus social reproduction
in camps should be understood as intrinsic to their political aims and effects:
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‘More than a mere backdrop or accessory to action, the people, objects and
operations required to keep camps running are essential to the political life
of the camp’ (2013: 58).
To make sense of all this, Feigenbaum et al develop what they call
an ‘infrastructural analysis’ that unpacks ‘how protest campers build
interrelated, operational structures for daily living’ (2013: 27–8; see also
Frenzel et al, 2014). They identify several key protest camp infrastructures,
centring on media and communication, governance, political action and,
lastly, ‘re-creation’, which includes ‘tents, mobile kitchens, toilets, border
markers or defences, as well as childcare, facilities that cater for the disabled
and other spaces and structures for well-being’ (2013: 182). It is the re-
creational infrastructures that are of particular concern to this chapter. For
Feigenbaum et al, their political significance lies partly in their ‘bordering’
function, marking the camp as a space of ‘exception’ in which campers
seek to carve out autonomy from mainstream society (2013: 187–206),
and partly in their facilitation of social reproduction (2013: 206–7).
In relation to the latter, re-creational infrastructures allow for care and
domestic-related tasks in camps to be socialised and collectivised, in
contrast to how these are ‘strongly gendered and rendered private’ in
mainstream society (2013: 206). At this point of their analysis, however,
a puzzle arises: Feigenbaum et al document how camps in fact often fail
to provide adequate care for people with mental health difficulties, note
widespread incidences of sexual violence in Occupy camps (2013: 207–
17), and conclude that questions of ‘safety’ remain acute for ‘women and
minority groups’ on site, often becoming ‘the cause of tensions within
camps’ (Frenzel et al, 2018: 281–2).
Why might this be? It seems to me that the framework developed by
Feigenbaum et al does not give us the answers. Not only are the problems
above characterised as failures of society at large rather than of camps per se,
but there is little practical detail of what it looks like to remake the kitchen, the
toilet and the crèche in transformative ways, and how or why this remaking
might fail. I suggest this is in part a result of the displacement of feminist
analysis in Feigenbaum et al’s account by gender-blind conceptualisations.
Their framework is drawn mostly from Marxist autonomism, a variant of
Marxism that emerged in Europe in the 1970s and 1980s, which developed
a concept of ‘capitalism as a totalizing system that organizes all members
of society (housewives, students, and the unemployed along with waged
workers) in the production of wealth that it then appropriates’ (Ferguson,
2020: 122). Autonomy as an organisational strategy on this approach was
conceived not as separation (as in the liberal tradition), but as collective
‘self-determination and self-management within capitalism, thus taking the
form of a counterpower or “exodus”’ (Cuninghame, 2010: 454). While
Feigenbaum et al namecheck autonomist ‘Marxist feminist work on the
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reproductive labour of homemaking and biopolitics’ (Feigenbaum et al,

2013: 42), they do not follow this feminist trail in their analysis, instead
relying on degendered and relatively abstract concepts from Agamben (on
exceptionality) and Foucault (on biopolitics) to supplement their formulation
of camps as ‘spaces of exception’ (Feigenbaum et al, 2013: 189–208).
This theoretical direction is reinforced by a repudiation of the terminology
of the ‘domestic’. As Feigenbaum et al explain, the ‘domestic sphere and
its infrastructures are read as concerning women and as being private (and
hence non-political)’, whereas ‘in the case of protest camps, re-creational
infrastructures are employed in ways that signify a break from the norms
of the everyday. … [T]‌hey are established and enacted explicitly as politics’
(2013: 183–4). This implies that the historic association between women’s
labour and the re-creation infrastructures and activities necessary to daily
life is dissolved in protest camps. But as Feigenbaum et al themselves
acknowledge, activist practices in camps often disrupt or belie this putative
transformation of the domestic:
Whether intentionally or not, the re-creation infrastructures protesters

build together are frequently regarded as being outside the public
sphere; they are seen as add-ons to the real business of meetings and
direct action. Sometimes coded as ‘women’s work’, the physical and
affective or emotional labour –as well as the material and spaces –that
go into caring for our bodies are often overlooked and undervalued.
(Feigenbaum et al, 2013: 58)
Empirically, this is an admission that social reproduction is often undertaken

by activists in protest camps in line with dominant social norms of the
‘domestic’ –and gendered accordingly. Conceptually, there is also a problem
here. After all, hooks’s lyrical evocation of homeplace on which Feigenbaum
et al draw meditates precisely on the ‘the primacy of domesticity as a site
of subversion and resistance’ for African Americans (hooks, 2001: 389,
emphasis added). In this context, the domestic (and women’s work within
it) is both private and a site of political transformation. Moreover, it is a sine
qua non of feminism more generally that all domestic relations are necessarily
political, whether or not they take the consciously resistant form found in
some African American homes, because they are shaped by structural power
relations and by state policy. Feminists have exposed how the notion that
the home is outside of the political is a foundational liberal fiction, one that
historically justified the exclusion of women as citizens from the public
sphere and continues to naturalise the gendered division of labour and mask
the expropriation of domestic and care work on which capitalism depends.
Feigenbaum et al’s theoretical framework seems in danger of reproducing
this fiction, and of assuming what, from a feminist perspective, needs to
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be investigated: to what degree and in what circumstances are camps able

to become ‘spaces of exception’ from liberal norms about domesticity and
associated gendered and racialised processes of social reproduction?
To answer that question, I return to feminist scholarship –particularly
Marxist and Black/anti-racist feminist work –on the domestic sphere and
social reproduction. Cindy Katz defines social reproduction as ‘the fleshy,
messy, and indeterminate stuff of everyday life. It is also a set of structured
practices that unfold in dialectical relation with production, with which
it is mutually constitutive and in tension’ (2001: 710). Less abstractly, we
can conceive of these practices as ‘directly involved in maintaining life,
on a daily basis and intergenerationally. … Among other things, social
reproduction includes how food, clothing and shelter are made available for
immediate consumption, how the maintenance and socialization of children
is accomplished, how care of the elderly and infirm is provided’ (Brenner
and Laslett cited in Bhattacharaya, 2017: 6–7). In this way, the myriad forms
of labour that go into producing the workforce are brought to light. As
Barbara Laslett and Johanna Brenner argue, ‘feminists who use the concept
of social reproduction do so in order to understand the perpetuation and
reproduction of systems of gender inequality, in relation to but different from
the reproduction of systems of class inequality’ (1989: 383). Increasingly
influenced by Black feminists, theories of social reproduction ‘address the
relationship between exploitation (normally tethered to class) and oppression
(normally understood through gender, race etc.)’ (Bhattacharaya, 2017: 3,
emphasis in original; see also Ferguson, 2020: 107–11).
For my purposes, this literature is helpful in introducing four key points.
First, it draws attention to the spatial dimensions of social reproduction, and
specifically the mutual co-constitution of the ‘private’ domestic sphere with
the realms of production and exchange, and of the state. I acknowledge that
research on social reproduction covers a wide range of institutions, from
education to pensions. Yet I think it fair to say that feminist work has focused
primarily ‘on the emergence, institutionalization, and reorganization of
the male breadwinner/female housewife family’ under industrial capitalism
(Laslett and Brenner, 1989: 385), and the persistent association of the
domestic sphere with feminised, affective, and unpaid or low-paid labour.
Notably, feminist historians have charted how liberal ideology relied on a
doctrine of separate spheres, in which a feminised domestic realm would be
a sanctuary for White bourgeois families from the predations of capitalism
and the state (for example, Steinbach, 2012). For women of colour and
working-class women, the boundaries between the home and work were
always much more porous (for example, Davis, 1982: Chs 9 and 13; Collins,
2009: Ch. 3).
The second critical point is the emphasis in feminist writing on the
gendered division of labour and the persistent association of the responsibility
161
for social reproduction with women and particularly with women of colour.
Feminist scholarship pays attention to both domestic (Teeple Hopkins, 2017)
and affective labour (Fraser, 2017): in other words, it encompasses both the
banal everyday toil of ‘housework’ –cleaning the floor, washing the dishes,
preparing food and so on –and the care and emotional sustenance provided
to family members (or the families of others), particularly the young and
elderly. Feminists argue that such labour is essential to the reproduction
of the workforce but has been systematically undervalued, privatised and
feminised within capitalism (for example, Davis, 1982: Ch. 13). It is assumed
to be the unpaid responsibility of women within their own homes and is
allocated disproportionately to women of colour for low wages in other
people’s houses (for example, Davis, 1982: 230–2, 237–8).
Third, feminists argue that the association of women with domestic space
and its accompanying labours has been violently enforced and continues to
create substantial insecurity. With its roots stretching back to the murderous
witch-hunts of early modern Europe (Federici, 2014), as well as to the
genocidal, sexualised abuses of slavery and the authority granted to male
heads of household under capitalism, the continued vulnerability of women
to violence in the home within a wider context of gendered subordination
is well documented. Taking White supremacism into account, much Black
and anti-racist feminist work has insisted that women of colour face a more
substantial risk of violence in the domestic spaces in which they undertake
paid work, and in other White-dominated spaces, than in their own homes
(as documented in Ferguson 2020: 72–3). Correspondingly, the smaller
body of scholarship on gendered violence in Black homes underlines
the compounding difficulties of wider violence: punitive state and police
surveillance of communities of colour, endemic economic insecurity or
poverty, the criminalisation of Black men, and insecurity of migration and
citizenship status (Crenshaw, 1991; Collins, 1998) – Carrie Freshour (2017)
calls ‘precarious work and life’.
Finally, this literature shows how both domestic space and domestic/
affective labour, along with their violent constraints and penalties, have
been restructured in the neoliberal era, ‘as states withdraw from public
provisioning, with the result that capitalist market relations increasingly
infiltrate social reproduction’ (Bakker, 2007: 541). This restructuring has
produced new and intensified forms of gendered and racialised violence,
insecurity and exploitation within the labour market, as domestic and
care labour have been increasingly commodified and women of colour in
particular have become its global providers (for example, Parreñas, 2015;
Teeple Hopkins, 2017). The associated ‘enclosures’ of land and privatisation
of public amenities in the Global South (Federici, 2014: 9–10, 236–9), and
the more recent austerity programmes in the Global North (Bassel and
Emejulu, 2017: Ch. 3) have intensified these domestic and care burdens on
162
women and particularly women of colour (for example, Freshour, 2017;

Rai, Hoskyns and Thomas, 2004).
As Feigenbaum et al make clear, the contemporary protest camp is
often a form of resistance to such dynamics, a conscious effort to create
a space of sanctuary from the exploitation and oppression integral to
neoliberal capitalism and austerity policies. This is why there is some
resonance with the African American homeplace as described by hooks
(Feigenbaum et al, 2013: 42). But how can Marxist and Black feminist
arguments about social reproduction be more fully integrated into thinking
about protest camps? I suggest reverting from the label ‘re-creational’ to
‘domestic’ infrastructures, precisely because of the debates about women’s
work that this taps into, and then analysing the continuities as well as the
ruptures between the camp and wider society in terms of the organisation
of domestic space and of domestic and affective labour processes. This
requires a more detailed examination of the material dimensions of, and
practices associated with, domestic infrastructures in camps, as well as of
the inequalities and insecurities these might generate. I will demonstrate
this approach in the next half of the chapter, in an analysis of two protest
camps in my locality: Occupy Glasgow (2011) and Faslane Peace Camp
(1982–present).
Constructing homeplace at Occupy Glasgow and

Faslane Peace Camp
In this discussion I draw on my previously published research that explores
how activists in these two camps reproduce and contest both ‘the everyday’
and gendered identities (Eschle, 2016b, 2017, 2018a, 2018b). This research
was conducted broadly from a stance of support for the camps and their
goals, but it was not from an ‘insider’ vantage point: I visited both Occupy
Glasgow and Faslane Peace Camp as a sympathetic citizen a few times
before conducting any research, but my involvement was peripheral (and
increasingly ambivalent in the case of Occupy) and I never stayed overnight.
Nor did I conduct ethnographic research: specifically, my data consists of
in-depth, semi-structured interviews conducted between 2014 and 2016,
averaging between two and three hours each, with a total of 24 individuals,
either campers who had lived on site or visitors with long-term/repeated
involvement, most reflecting retrospectively on their participation years
earlier. Of these interviewees, 14 are women, 10 are men and all bar 2 are
White. The interviews have been supplemented by an archive of campaigning
ephemera and newsletters from Faslane peace camp, and online blogs and
media coverage from and about both camps.
The two camps have in common their location in or near Glasgow in
Scotland and, to some extent, their composition, with both camps being
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mixed-gender, and largely White and middle class, albeit accommodating

groups of working-class protestors at times, and also some homeless and
mentally ill individuals. The camps have some differences, however, not
least in terms of their domestic infrastructure and approach to domestic and
affective labour, and consequently in their gender relations.
Reproducing Occupy Glasgow

Occupy Glasgow was established in mid-October 2011 in George Square,
on the fringes of the commercial centre of town, right outside the City
Chambers (headquarters to the city’s council), and a couple of blocks away
from the university where I work. This cluster of tents and banners (see
Figure 9.1) expanded at the weekends into rallies that drew many local
organisations campaigning against the role of banks and financial institutions
in causing the economic crisis, the austerity policies initiated in response and
the then-Labour Council’s ongoing neoliberal development policies. The
camp had a degree of support and interest from Glaswegians, exemplifying
as it did a long tradition of protest in George Square and drawing on themes
of economic disenfranchisement and political alienation with local appeal
(Donnison and Middleton, 1987; STV Local, 2012). In early November,
however, there was a gang rape on site (Miller, 2011). In the wake of the
disarray that followed, and facing threats of eviction from the Council,
campers moved to the greener surroundings of Kelvingrove Park in the
West End of Glasgow, with a smaller group hiving off to also establish a
shorter-lived camp in Blythswood Square, closer to the financial heart of
the city (STV News, 2011; Williams, 2011). The main camp voluntarily
disbanded in December 2011 in the wake of storm damage.
There was some domestic infrastructure at the Occupy Glasgow camps,
although much of it appears to have been intermittent and fleeting, or
provided through private homes or by the council. Thus Poppy2 described
a kitchen tent in George Square through which food was collected and
distributed rather than cooked: “Lots of people were coming with crockery
or bags of stuff … bringing flasks of hot soups … [and] there were tables
with … fruit and cereal bars.” Lindsay recollected some cooking taking place,
at moments when the camp was better organised: “Usually they would
make a soup or a stew.” Other interviewees told me they relied mostly on
local shops and cafes for food and the use of bathrooms –or went home,
sometimes taking “the homeless folk … to eat and shower and change
and do their laundry” (Elaine). In Kelvingrove, Poppy reported “more
camp cooking” but Elaine thought the cooking tailed off. For bathrooms,
Kelvingrove campers again went home, or relied on nearby public toilets
then Portaloos provided by the Council. In all, infrastructural ‘autonomy’
at Occupy Glasgow was sharply circumscribed.
164
Figure 9.1: Occupy Glasgow tents in George Square
Source: © Tony Clerkson/Alamy. Reprinted with permission.
There was, nonetheless, some restructuring of the boundary between public

and private in the camp, albeit in ways that often created considerable
anxiety. There was semi-private space in the sleeping tents, which campers
often shared with a friend, in part because of worry about others intruding
uninvited. Elaine reported she had “tried to propose a women-only tent … so
the women could sleep together” only for this to be dismissed as “ridiculous”
by other campers. Most interviewees slept on site only occasionally, if at
all, because of these safety fears, and all agreed that few women ever stayed
overnight. There was also some semi-public, communal space, as “people
brought or lent equipment so that tents got more like marquees, more
formalised” (Bella) and this enabled campers to mingle with each other and,
at least in George Square, with passers-by. These communal spaces appear
to have been rather ephemeral, however: for example, “a children’s tent
which was full of toys and books … only lasted about a week. Someone
threw a party in it and it … filled with cigarette smoke and we figured we
couldn’t have it as a kids’ tent anymore” (Elaine). In Kelvingrove, interviewees
indicated the camp became more cut-off from and increasingly intimidating
to visitors: “Particularly at night there was a lot of drinking and stuff going
on” (Ryan). Several interviewees remarked on the spatial reorganisation of
the camp after the gang rape, with sleeping tents clustered to provide greater
privacy and security for sleepers and night watches instituted to self-police
camp and tent boundaries, albeit to limited effect. Elaine expressed great
frustration that “security guys … sat drinking” and reported spending long
165
sleepless hours on security watch herself. It is clear that anxiety around the
acute porousness between public and private spaces, and the consequent
lack of privacy and security, were deeply gendered: the vulnerabilities thus
constructed were generally felt more deeply, and taken more seriously, by
the women on site.
Connectedly, there seems to have been little coordinated effort to
collectivise or redistribute domestic labour. The testimonies on this topic
weren’t entirely negative: Bella reported that she was quite impressed
with how young men at the George Square camp “just cleaned up after
themselves”, and Elaine confirmed that there was “quite an equal balance”
in jobs like washing up and waste disposal. However, Elaine also confirmed
that initial rotas for the more equitable organisation of domestic tasks –
and indeed any domestic organisation per se –“fell by the wayside” as the
numbers of women at the camp dwindled: “None of the organisational
stuff got done because there wasn’t anyone to do it.” Both Elaine and
Joanne asserted that the kitchen in George Square, when operational, was
chiefly run by one woman and that they took on the occasional laundry
runs themselves.
The picture is even worse for affective labour. Those interviewees with
children did not bring them on site and reported children as present only
when larger events were organised. They also described a marked lack of care
for each other among the campers –indeed, “loads of instances of aggression,
all the time” (Elaine), towards both men and women. Ryan declared that
people who were “very visibly potentially dangerous were overwhelming
it [the camp]”. Joanne agreed: “Some people were a terrible, terrible dark
presence. …There were also a lot of young men … that were quite vulnerable
and also dangerous with the wrong sort of guidance.” Interviewees talked
of a dominant group of older and more politically experienced men who
manipulated the group of younger homeless men in both George Square and
Kelvingrove: “backing up the behaviour, shouting, rowing, drinking, talking
drugs, all this sort of stuff” (Elaine). This was combined with an element
of “predatory behaviour” towards women and particularly teenage girls on
site, who were given alcohol and “encouraged to go into tents with men”
(Lindsay). Overt hostility was shown towards feminists trying to discourage
this, with both Elaine and Joanne reporting that they received sexist and also
antisemitic abuse online from other campers. Moreover, Elaine described
at length how her feminist-derived interventions aimed at creating a safer
environment, including not only the women’s tent mentioned earlier but a
broader ‘safe spaces’ initiative and finally a collective proposal after the rape
for a women-only camp, were met with rage and physical intimidation. In
sum, affective labour was marginalised in Occupy Glasgow, to the degree
that the camp was actually a traumatic experience for some of its participants
(Eschle, 2018b).
166
It is clear that Occupy Glasgow was far from being a space of ‘exception’ to
the neoliberal capitalist society and austerity policies it sought to resist, instead
reproducing much of their shadowy side. Why is this the case? Occupy
ideology may be part of the reason. As Katrina suggested of the slogan ‘we
are the 99%’, “anybody can come and anyone can project anything they
want, [it] encompasses a whole bunch of subgroupings that … have interests
that are at odds with other ninety-niners’ interests”. That made it difficult for
feminists to point out gender inequities and violence in the camp without
being seen as undermining the unity of ‘the 99%’. Indeed, the evidence
presented here reveals open hostility to feminism at the Glasgow camp, which
brought with it active resistance to a more gender-equal restructuring of
social reproduction and indeed an openly misogynistic culture that facilitated
violence against women. In this case, the broad ideology of Occupy appears
to have accommodated anti-feminism more easily than feminism. As I will
discuss in the conclusion to this chapter, the same dynamic works to make it
difficult to confront racialised hierarchies and open racism. In this connection,
not only was there reportedly little or no discussion of the near exclusively
White character of the camp, but several interviewees pointed to the fact the
Glasgow camp was home to an antisemitic group that blamed the financial
crisis on a Jewish conspiracy.
There were also obvious structural difficulties. The location of the camp
in the centre of a city with entrenched problems of homelessness, drinking
and antisocial behaviour, and on physical sites on which it was highly
challenging to develop autonomous domestic infrastructure to any great
degree, clearly posed a major challenge. In this context, it was unsurprising
to see the emergence of a divide on site between destitute individuals who
had fallen through the cracks of the neoliberal capitalist system and who
stayed in the camp because they had nowhere else to go, and activists, many
of whom continued in their jobs and their studies, and went back to their
homes when not on site, and who were thus still integrated into that system.
In such circumstances, it is difficult to see how social reproduction could
have been radically transformed.
Reproducing Faslane Peace Camp

Faslane Peace Camp, which marked its 40th birthday in June 2022, claims
the mantle of ‘the longest running permanent peace camp in the world’
(Faslane Peace Camp, 2013b). Shoehorned into a sliver of woodland
originally owned by a sympathetic anti-nuclear Labour council, the camp
survived an abandoned eviction attempt initiated when council boundaries
and composition changed in the mid-1990s (BBC News Scotland, 2012).
Although the camp is in a beautiful rural area within the Loch Lomond and
Trossachs national park, it fronts the busy A814 road, on the other side of
167
Figure 9.2: Faslane Peace Camp
which lies the sprawling bulk of Her Majesty’s Naval Base Clyde, housing the
UK’s nuclear arsenal. While numbers at the camp have been low for some
years now, the site remains crammed with ramshackle caravans and semi-
permanent structures decorated in vibrant colours, interspersed with lush
foliage (see Figure 9.2; also Faslane Peace Camp, 2013a). While it meets with
an element of local hostility, the camp draws on a broader pool of support
from an active Scottish peace movement and a Scottish population that remains
largely opposed to nuclear weapons (Scottish CND, 2013; Eschle, 2016a).
The domestic infrastructure at Faslane Peace Camp remains relatively
extensive, especially when compared to Occupy Glasgow. The campers
shifted from tents into more secure and weather-resistant caravans very
early on, various communal structures have since been erected and replaced
over the decades, and nowadays ‘[t]‌here’s a bathroom with hot and cold
water, flush and compost toilets, gas and wood-fired cooking facilities,
solar power, and telephone and internet’ (Faslane Peace Camp, 2015). The
development of this considerable infrastructure has been accompanied by
the deliberate reorganisation of domestic space, such that there is some
privacy and security for sleeping, but washing and toilet facilities are shared
and cooking, eating and relaxation is conducted in collective areas, usually
centring on the camp fire. Consequently, the private sphere (and private
property) is much reduced in the camp. Aside from instances when couples
168
with children have established separate family and cooking spaces, and the
eviction period when the camp became much more closed-off, much of life
usually hidden away in family homes is carried out more or less in sight of
other members of the camp and of the passing public. As one interviewee
commented, the visibility of the domestic space ensures its politicisation: “if
you’re at the side of the A814 hanging up the washing, everybody driving
past knows you’re somebody, a woman hanging out washing who is opposed
to nuclear weapons. … Just doing it there, visibly … meant everything you
did was a protest” (Anna).
The gendered division of labour has also been restructured. The considerable
domestic labour required –cooking, cleaning, repairing infrastructure and
gathering wood –has been organised either by rota or on a voluntary basis,
sometimes through meetings or at communal mealtimes, often through self-
selection. In this vein, Denise asserted that “we all take responsibility for it. …
We all take turns … to do at least three things a day”. This restructuring
has not always been entirely successful. Thus Toni described how in the
mid-1980s, “Anna and I had more of an organising role in terms of keeping
the place clean, making sure there’s money for shopping … and we ended
up running the kitchen”. She described this as a kind of ‘mother’ role. The
point is underscored by the admission of her contemporary, Vince: “I don’t
think I did my fair share of the cooking, or the washing up for that matter”.
Describing the later eviction period, Andrew hinted at a collapse in the basic
domestic processes of the camp as most women left. Nonetheless, interviewees
generally insisted that a refusal to assume that domestic work is naturally the
sphere of women has been part of the fabric of camp life, even if at some
points wider socialisation processes have meant that women have assumed
or been left with a larger responsibility for it.
In parallel, campers have sought to reshape affective labour. For example,
while parents at the camp acknowledged they still took on the primary carer
role for their children, they also mentioned some sharing of responsibility.
Anna put it thus: “‘How on earth can you manage to bring up a baby at the
peace camp?’ … It’s easy ’cos there’s always somebody around.” Interviewee
Andrew also emphasised the general participation in looking after campers’
children in the 1990s, before the eviction period, much to the surprise of
visiting social workers. And campers have tried to look after each other. For
Shirley, this worked well in the initial years of the camp: “There was caring
things done for each other … by men and women”. Willa, who lived at
Faslane in the early 1990s, stressed that the camp was like a family, albeit
a family outside of the liberal capitalist model, in which everyone looked
out for each other. Several interviewees underlined the challenges involved
in extending this caring ethos to campers with serious mental health issues.
Graham, for example, mentioned a woman who “barricaded herself in a
caravan … and threw urine on people” and was generally disruptive to camp
169
life, which led to a protracted struggle to persuade her to leave. Quentin

was blunter about personally evicting someone he felt was not pulling their
weight on camp: “I grabbed [his] stuff and I took it up to the bus stop …
went back, pulled his bed covers off him, said ‘your stuff’s at the bus stop,
away you go’.” As Andrew pointedly concluded, life on camp “wasn’t this
big love and hugs”.
Nonetheless, it seems that the restructuring of domestic space and of
domestic and affective labour at Faslane Peace Camp has been extensive.
Again, we should acknowledge structural and site-specific reasons for this,
such as the rural location (though this has the drawback of removing it from
proximity to the minority ethnic groups concentrated in Glasgow) and the
camp’s unusual degree of security of land tenure. It helps to have access
to relatively private caravans and other vehicles for sleeping and the space
and time to build structures for collective living. There are also ideological
factors, including the influence of feminist ideology on site, varying over
the years (Eschle, 2017), and the campers’ shared, anarchist-influenced
critique of capitalist norms. As I have argued elsewhere (Eschle, 2016b),
campers at Faslane frequently reject the institution of waged labour. In the
early days of the camp, “we were all unemployed so we all had giros …
people kept a certain amount for themselves and we … would just have a
wee kitty and people could take money out of it” (Nick). The reliance on
state benefit appears to have ended in recent years, in part because benefits
have become harder to access. As Fiona explained, “when I moved there
[in 2011] … we decided that we weren’t going to take any benefits and
that we would try to live without money where possible … everyone
contributed £5 a week [from savings and] … we ‘skipped’ most of our
food”. In such ways, campers have sought to ensure relative autonomy
from the capitalist economy and increasingly also from the state benefit
system, as it transmuted from a welfare to a neoliberal version. There are
questions about how sustainable this model may be in the longer term,
particularly in the context of protracted austerity politics –and how inviting
it may be to those already facing structural economic precarity, who have
good reason to fear confrontation with the police and state, and who may
find peace movement goals relatively detached from their concerns about
everyday survival (Brown, 1984). Yet it remains fair to say that campers
have succeeded for much of the life of the camp in creating a relatively
autonomous space in which the domestic sphere and social reproduction
have been substantially reconfigured.
Conclusion
Overall, the empirical analysis in this chapter indicates that scholars should
approach the utopian possibilities of camps with more caution than is evident
170
in Feigenbaum et al’s framework. The two case studies reveal a fascinating

paradox. Occupy Glasgow, set up to contest neoliberal capitalism, in the form
of the financial crisis, austerity responses and local development policies, was
the least autonomous from its structures and from its associated gendered
inequities and insecurities. In contrast, Faslane Peace Camp, while primarily
concerned with confronting the adjacent nuclear base, has been much more
successful in establishing autonomy from economic and social structures,
and with it a shift in gender roles and relations, even as camper efforts in
this regard remain imperfect and incomplete. The case studies indicate that
the creation of ‘a space of exception’ with radically transformed gender
relations requires not only a site that is relatively physically separated and
secure, along with a strong feminist influence, but also a self-sufficiency that
few can achieve and that is doubtless becoming more difficult as neoliberal
orthodoxies are further entrenched in a time of austerity. Autonomy should
thus be conceived as an increasingly challenging political struggle, rather
than an integral, defining element of camps.
The chapter has also shown that a feminist lens is crucial to a more critical
reckoning of protest camps. Specifically, I have argued that Marxist and
Black/anti-racist feminist work on social reproduction can bring the domestic
life of camps back into view, excavating its spatial dynamics and associated
labour processes, the insecurities these create, and how these are connected
to changing dynamics in capitalist societies. It is only by paying attention
to these continuities between camps and the larger societies and spaces in
which they are located, as much as to the ruptures, that we can expose and
explain some of the difficulties in generating sustained caring relations and
in eradicating sexual violence that continue to mar so many protest camps.
After all, as hooks makes clear in her narrative that is the starting point for
Feigenbaum et al’s analysis of social reproduction in camps, the homeplace
she experienced was produced within unequal gendered, racialised and class
relations –including her mother’s long hours of labour in White homes
and the family’s dangerous journeying through segregated spaces. These
are the constraints within as well as against which the resistant qualities of
Black homeplace emerge. By analogy, we are thus reminded that a protest
camp is embedded within and produced by the hierarchical social relations
that shape a particular context, even as activists seek to carve out a space of
autonomy from such relations.
The notion of homeplace, emerging as it does from the experience of Black
families and communities, underscores also the racialised constraints that
shape the protest camp form. This encourages us to ask whose homeplace is
made in camps? It is evident from both the literature reviewed earlier and the
case studies that there are multiple material impediments to the participation
of women of colour in White-dominated camps within White-majority
societies. These impediments include the economic challenges of entrenched
171
poverty and precarity, additional responsibilities for social reproduction in the

home and the community, and the targeted violence that Black and migrant
communities face from the state and police. Additional ideological barriers
are not reducible to open racism (such as the antisemitism lurking in some
quarters of Occupy Glasgow), but include the implicit lack of relevance for
women of colour in camps like the ones studied here that have, on the one
hand, a generalised ‘for the 99%’ focus that fails to recognise the structural
divisions caused by racial as well as gender oppression and, on the other,
a preoccupation with preventing future nuclear apocalypse that may seem
out of touch with the daily struggle to survive ‘precarious work and life’.
More generally, why would women of colour want to take on the labour
of transforming social reproduction in White-dominated activist spaces,
when they face not only a history of exploitation and oppression in White
homes as documented earlier, but also of marginalisation in Left-wing spaces
across Europe and the United States (Bassel and Emejulu, 2017)? Hooks is
emphatically clear in her narrative that women of colour have chosen to
critically re-engage with social reproduction in other kinds of spaces, in their
own families and communities (see also Emejulu and Bassel, 2018). The
analogy that Feigenbaum et al draw between protest camps and homeplace
runs up against its limits here.
While this chapter has emphasised the continuities of social reproduction
in protest camps with wider society, and the structural limitations of the
protest camp form, I want to end on a more positive note. As this book as a
whole attests, there is something worth holding on to in Feigenbaum et al’s
notion that protest camps can be sites for transformative experimentation
in collective, socialised forms of social reproduction, albeit this should be
conceived as a political aspiration rather than an in-built characteristic.
Their intuition that hooks’s notion of homeplace illuminates how we get
there is also well-founded. For me, hooks’s fundamental concern is to
ensure greater acknowledgement of the contribution of the domestic role of
African American women to Black liberation struggle: to ‘honor this history
of service, just as [we] … must critique the sexist definition of service as
women’s “natural” role’ (hooks, 2001: 384). Extended to protest camps, this
pushes analysts and activists alike to critically engage with the gendered and
racialised history of domestic and affective labour, and with who has had to
fulfil these roles, rather than assuming this is irrelevant to camps or can be
stepped over in the pursuit of alternatives. Hooks also warns against a narrow,
liberal feminist-style solution to this historic association, one in which
domestic and care labour is redistributed in order to fully integrate women
of whatever racialised grouping into the more important business of political
protest. Rather, hooks’s analysis of homeplace intimates that the key task –
one pursued in this volume in the chapters by Māhealani Ahia and Kahala
Johnson (Chapter 3), Anastasia Kavada (Chapter 10) and Sara Motta et al
172
(Chapter 11) –is to give much greater value to the domestic and care work
already undertaken in camps and in communities, most often by women,
as crucial to the creation of other possible worlds. In this task, scholars of
protest camps and activists can surely learn much from the distinctive ways
in which women of colour have sought to remake domestic work and caring
relationships, in often acutely hostile and precarious environments, in order
to create spaces of flourishing and transformation.
Notes
1
It was important to bell hooks that her pen name be written in lower case: see https://
www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/17/bell-hooks-obituary
2
All interviewee names are pseudonyms.
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10
Project Democracy in Protest

Camps: Caring, the Commons and
Feminist Democratic Theory
Anastasia Kavada
Introduction
Feminist scholarship has prompted a rethinking of liberal democracy and its
underlying assumptions. Building on this rich tradition, this chapter discusses
the insights offered by feminist thought into the democracy of protest camps
and its normative underpinnings. It argues that theories of care and social
reproduction, and feminist approaches to the notion of the commons, can
revitalise our theorising of democracy. This is because they allow for the
development of a more critical and all-encompassing understanding of power
and equality that goes beyond decision-making practices. They also expand
the conception of civic duties and responsibilities by including activities of
care and social reproduction. They centre vulnerability and dependence
as an integral part of the human condition to which democracies should
attend. They further illuminate the effect of property relations on liberal
democracy’s understanding of the citizen and pave the way for a notion of
citizenship based on interdependence and communal sharing. They thus
challenge some of the founding assumptions on which liberal representative
democracy is based and present a different set of criteria with which to
evaluate the operation of democratic systems.
The theoretical discussion presented in this chapter is grounded in extensive
fieldwork in the ‘movements of the squares’ from 2011 onwards, including
in-depth interviews with 91 participants in Occupy Wall Street (OWS),
Seattle, Boston, Sacramento and London, as well as the Greek Indignant
movement and Nuit Debout in France. The movements of the squares
emerged with the Arab Spring protests in North Africa that inspired activists
176
Project Democracy in Protest Camps
in Europe, the United States and elsewhere to occupy squares and parks
in city centres, protesting against a political and economic system that did
not serve the people’s interests. In Spain, protesters gathered in Puerta del
Sol in Madrid on 15 May 2011. Greece soon followed, with participants
occupying Syntagma Square in Athens on 25 May 2011. It was a time when
the economic crisis had hit the Greek economy hard and the country had
been placed under strict measures by the ‘European Troika’: the European
Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary
Fund. The Occupy movement emerged a few months afterwards, when
OWS activists took over Zuccotti Park in New York on 17 September
2011. Occupy camps soon proliferated across the United States and the rest
of the world. The camp in Seattle began on 26 September, while Boston
quickly followed on 30 September, then Sacramento on 6 October and
London on 16 October 2011. Nuit Debout erupted four and a half years
later on 31 March 2016, sparked by opposition against a proposed law that
was going to liberalise the labour market. However, the movement soon
became a generalised protest against the country’s political and economic
regime. Protesters started gathering in Place de la République in Paris to
discuss issues ranging from the environment to the oppression of women
to labour and the class system.
It is worth noting that while all these movements established protest
camps, some had ‘pop-up’ rather than permanent occupations, where the
camp would be put up and dismantled every day. This was the case for
Occupy Sacramento, where activists found it difficult to occupy due to
police repression, and for Nuit Debout, where, having learned the lessons
from past movements like the 15-M, protesters made the pragmatic decision
to avoid the problems that arise from camping permanently in public space.
The movements on which this chapter focuses all emerged in mature
liberal representative democracies but with different characteristics. The
United States operates with a federal system as opposed to Greece, the UK
and France. Greece and France have a stronger presence of the state and
more established and popular Left-wing political parties and trade unions.
Yet, while Occupy, the Greek Indignants and Nuit Debout were inflected
by the particular characteristics of the national and even local context in
which they emerged, they were all remarkably similar in their grievances and
their understanding of democracy. They favoured a type of decision-making
based on open assemblies and consensus. They viewed equality in expansive
terms, as equal power not only in decision-making processes, but in every
part of the movement. They were averse to central charismatic leadership
in favour of leaderfulness, seeing the movement as a space where a wide
range of participants can flourish into leaders.
These characteristics of movement democracy are not entirely new, and
have been thoroughly analysed in different contexts (for example, Polletta,
177
2002; Maeckelbergh, 2009). Yet, what seems to be missing from these

writings is the emphasis that the squares movements placed on action, on
empowering their participants to undertake the activities or projects they
were interested in. My interviewee Mehdi, who was a member of TV
Debout, a live TV station broadcasting from Place de la République, called
this ‘democracy by project’. As he put it, ‘I really believe that democracy by
project could work … it is in front of your eyes. People are coming to the
general assembly, some people have ideas, they want to do stuff and they say
“OK, I want to do something”, “I have a project, … so who wants to help
me to do it?”’. This emphasis on action, creativity and projects emerged
again and again in my interviews. For instance, Vica from Occupy London
thought that “what was beautiful about those first months was that anyone
could have an idea and they would just do it. So, like ‘I want do a film’, and
they would do it. ‘I want to do performance’, and they would do it” (emphasis
added). C from Occupy Seattle noted that “what … we really had time for
was hardly anything but coming in and saying ‘I’ve got this project, come
and help me over here’”. Thus, the encampment was meant as a space of
spontaneous creativity for those wishing to join. Of course, this is not to
deny the careful planning that preceded the camps, it is simply to highlight
one of their key functions once they were set up.
‘Project democracy’, with its emphasis on equality, inclusiveness and
action, can be seen as an indictment of the political systems in which the
movements of the squares arose. Protesters railed against the excesses of
capitalism and the ineffectiveness of representative democracy in serving
the people. They rebelled against the dominance of corrupt political and
economic elites and the exploitation of minorities and the weak. But this
emphasis on horizontality, direct action and participation was also a reaction
against the vanguardism of the traditional Left. This was particularly the case
in France and led to an internal struggle in the initial days of Nuit Debout.
For many activists that I interviewed, the movements of the squares were
putting forward a new type of politics that did not fit neatly into traditional
Left structures and characteristics. Movement participants attempted to
experiment with different ways of working and discussing and to attract a
broader audience beyond the usual participants in Left politics.
This ‘ideal type’ of democracy encountered various problems in its
implementation, from interminable assembly meetings to the development
of informal and unaccountable leaders. Some years later, these movements
are often characterised as failures, having crumbled under the pressure of the
authorities and of their own ambition. But their ideal type of democracy
can be a source of inspiration, particularly at a time when the crisis of
liberal democracy has given rise to a dangerously nationalist, exclusionary
and macho authoritarianism. As I show in the remainder of this chapter,
a feminist viewpoint can facilitate our understanding of these movements’
178
democratic vision and of the existential challenge it presents to the liberal

system of democracy.
Social reproduction and the expansion of civic duty

Establishing a camp in the centre of the city blends the private and public
as the space is used not only for political discussion but also for living –for
cooking, sleeping, eating and other needs (Feigenbaum et al, 2013; see also
Chapter 8 by Haran and Chapter 9 by Eschle in this volume). In this section,
I would like to consider what this mix between the public and the domestic
means for the concept of democracy and particularly how it expands the
notion of political participation and citizenship to incorporate duties around
the caring of the civic body.
In the movements of the squares, issues of social reproduction were also
brought to the fore by the type of democracy they were attempting to
practise. To ensure citizens’ direct participation and their ability to undertake
the projects they are interested in, their basic needs have to be tended to.
For participants to be ready for action, they first need to be fed and clothed,
to take care of the practicalities of everyday life. Karen, who participated in
several OWS committees and working groups, including general assembly
facilitation, media relations, legal and communications, explains how the
need to oversee the movement’s reproduction arose in New York for those
who were camping in Zuccotti Park:
‘I learned what it’s like to live when you’re fighting for survival. It’s
cold. It’s November. It’s New York. … So what are you gonna eat? …
And if you want to try to keep things going, which we did, tell the
world what happened, well, you’ve got to get roofs over people’s
heads, you’ve got to find a place for them to use the bathroom, and
you’ve got to feed them. … So the whole focus changed. Suddenly
it was, how do you take care of the people that were part of this movement so
the movement can continue?’ (emphasis added)
Thus, care emerged as a central axis of these movements’ system of

governance. Berenice Fisher and Joan Tronto (1990: 40) define care as ‘a
species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and
repair our “world” so that we can live in it as well as possible’. Silvia Federici
(in Haiven and Federici, 2011) also highlights the need for social movements
to create ‘communities of care’, ‘collective forms of reproduction whereby
we can address issues that “flow from our everyday life”’.1 Such ‘communities
of care’ are crucial for the movements’ self-reproduction, particularly in times
of crisis that make survival difficult. And they are absolutely vital in project
democracy, where they serve as a precondition of action.
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Therefore, some projects and activities undertaken by movement

participants also aimed at creating an infrastructure of care that looked after
people’s needs, both physical and emotional. In their excellent account
of protest camps, Feigenbaum et al (2013) show that such ‘infrastructures
of living or re-creation’ are central to the activity of protest camps. While
I agree with this view, I believe that calling them ‘infrastructures of care’ helps
us to consider how these movements attempted to democratise processes
of caring by placing care in a central position in the practice of democracy
(see also the chapter by Eschle in this volume).
Thus, alongside working groups that focused on developing policy and the
movements’ vision on different issues, there were other groups that centred
on caring for the civic body by cooking meals, growing fruit and vegetables
in communal gardens, keeping the peace at the camp, running makeshift
clinics, and ensuring the camp was cleaned regularly. For example, Karen
reported that OWS developed a sophisticated kitchen operation that even
did boxed lunches; it also had a full medical tent with nurses and doctors that
treated several hundred New Yorkers who could not afford health insurance
and/or medical procedures. Similar systems emerged in other Occupy sites,
including ‘pop-up’ protest camps as well. For instance, in an interview with
Darrell of Occupy Sacramento, he told me that the camp operated a kitchen
that served “upwards to three hundred, four hundred meals a night” as well
as cultivating an Occupy Garden “in a tent just growing organic … food for
individuals who lived in the Sacramento downtown area”. For activists like
Karen, it was this infrastructure of care that was most astounding about OWS:
‘To me the miracle was that we solved problems. When I was there,
we had a soup kitchen, and by the time we were done, we had organic
food coming in from farms in upstate New York and Pennsylvania,
being brought in, ’cos we were trying to teach people about food
and nutrition.’
Social reproduction includes not only people’s physical needs but also their
emotional ones. It may involve socialising ‘experiences of grief, illness, pain,
death, things that now are often relegated to the margins or the outside of
our political work’ (Federici in Haiven and Federici, 2011: 2). As discussed
in the next section on care ethics, social reproduction in the movements
of the squares thus involved different emotional practices, such as having a
‘temperature checker’ oversee people’s physical and emotional state during
the assemblies.
For feminist scholars of social reproduction, like Federici, the political
potential of movements also rests on this kind of capacity-building. As she notes,
the Occupy movement served as an example of how to scale up experiments
in socialising reproduction that were undertaken on a local level, such as
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community gardens, and linking them ‘up to confront the status quo’ (Federici
in Haiven and Federici, 2011: 2). But I believe that viewing these infrastructures
of care within the framework of labour, as scholars of social reproduction tend to
do, disregards their implications from a democratic perspective. This is because
infrastructures of care present a fundamental challenge to liberal democratic
theories which view social reproduction as private and thus separate from
democracy. Liberal representative democracy, Carole Pateman (1989) tells us, is
based on the assumption of a patriarchal private sphere that is separate from the
public sphere of democracy. This is how male domination can be maintained
in the private space of the home within democratic systems that advocate
for equality in public decision-making. Yet, as Jane Mansbridge (1993: 369)
notes, ‘it would be a mistake to make impermeable and mutually exclusive the
categories of household and polis’. Indeed, taking social reproduction seriously
as a part of democracy leads to two interrelated insights.
First, it highlights how, in practice, the governance of social reproduction
can be undertaken in a democratic way and the problems that might arise
in this process. Tronto’s work on care and democracy (for example, 1995;
2013; 2015) is instructive in this respect. Together with Fisher (Fisher and
Tronto, 1990), she has shown that the activity of caring is complex and
encompasses different phases. These include ‘caring about’, the identification
of needs that have to be met; ‘caring for’, assuming responsibility for the
provision of care; as well ‘care-g iving’, the actual work of caring. They also
encompass ‘care-receiving’, the response of care recipients that serves as
useful feedback on the care process as it may highlight future improvements
or other needs that require our attention (Tronto, 2015: 5–7). Tronto (2013)
added a fifth phase in later writings, that of ‘caring with’, where citizens can
decide democratically about caring activities and undertake them together
depending on their needs and skills. The infrastructures built by the squares
movements endeavoured to address, with variable success, all these aspects
of care, from monitoring needs to allocating responsibilities to facilitating
the giving and receiving of care to generating feedback flows. But they
also attempted to ensure that decisions about care were undertaken in a
democratic manner through the development of common policies around
how to handle these activities.
Second, and even more importantly from a philosophical standpoint,
incorporating social reproduction into our notion of democracy shows
that activities of caring are democratic duties, that they are an integral part
of democracy. For a system of governance to work, it needs to take care
of its citizens. This expands our notion of democratic participation, which
should now encompass not only activities focusing on the decision-making
process, but also caring activities centred around the civic body. What are
often considered as ‘private activities’ –rearing children, cleaning, cooking –
can also be considered as political activities that are part of democracy. If
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we attempt to resist the erasure of the private in classic democratic theory,

then such projects should be recognised as civic duties and be included in
our understanding of political participation.
Yet this is not to suggest that in the movements of the squares such
activities received adequate respect and attention. The sanitation, kitchen or
serenity working groups were not exactly on a par with others. As Emma
Gómez Nicolau suggests in her analysis of the Spanish 15-M movement
(Chapter 7 in this volume), the undertaking of such activities was gendered,
with women assuming more caring responsibilities than men. Furthermore,
the role of caring activities in the movement’s capacity-building and system
of governance were often rendered invisible. For instance, in my interview
with Jonah from OWS, he mentioned how impressed he was when he met
someone from the sanitation team, someone who worked to “support the
infrastructures as opposed to … get a message out to the world”, since
these activities were less visible within and outside the camp. For Jonah,
this lack of visibility had an adverse effect on the public’s perception of the
movement: “A lot of the misunderstanding of, you know, Occupy’s lack of
effectiveness or impact has to do with the difference between that message
communicated to the outside world versus the kind of capacity-building and
intra skill-sharing and communications that happened within that space”.
Thus, an expanded notion of political participation that includes activities
of social reproduction can only work if such activities are not relegated to a
lower position in our conception of democracy and civic duty.
Care ethics and project democracy

Care and the moral and ethical qualities it is associated with have several
implications for the ethical underpinnings of democracy. Care ethics revolve
around dependency and vulnerability. These are not considered ‘as conditions
to be overcome, but rather as ways of being for normal human subjects’
(Robinson, 2011: 847). What all citizens have in common, what should
form the basis of our solidarity, is that everyone is vulnerable and potentially
in need of help (Tronto, 2013). Thus, dependency and vulnerability are not
perceived as weaknesses, something shameful to be concealed. They are
instead foregrounded as a vital part of the human condition (Polletta, 2002).
This is an understanding of citizenship that mounts a radical challenge to the
conception of the rational individual on which representative democracy
is based. It goes against ‘liberal views of equality and of justice that omit
entirely the experiences of interdependency, cooperation, trust, and concern
that are so much a part of women’s lives –and of men’s lives, should they
choose to recognize it’ (Polletta, 2002: 152).
This emphasis on dependence and vulnerability was evident in the discourse
ethics of the general assemblies that centred not only the inclusiveness
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of different voices, but also the responsibility of listening attentively to

everyone. Fiona Robinson (2011) contrasts this focus on listening with the
Habermasian discourse ethics that emphasise voice and speaking. Listening
was one way in which assembly participants would take care of each other.
In this respect, C from Occupy Seattle related the following story where
care and listening are intertwined:
‘We had a little lady who is, oh, I can’t tell ages, maybe forty-five,
fifty years old, who stood up early on, and faced around four hundred
people in an assembly –a very brave thing for a woman who was
Indigenous and, chances were, impoverished. Her name was [xxx].
Undoubtedly she had been drinking. She had a look, a smile, that
said she felt good to be among us and the crowd took care of her. We’re
talking like four or five hundred people, mostly White, standing and
listening to this lady … they so gently listened to her … this was an
incredible thing to see because not only was it obvious this was a unique
event for her but these many people were smiling back at her and wanting her
to succeed.’ (emphasis added)
As C highlights, speaking in an assembly can be a nerve-wracking experience.

Voicing your opinion in front of hundreds of people places the speaker in a
vulnerable position as they can be mocked, disregarded or met with intense
disagreement. This sense of vulnerability is intensified for people with limited
experience in politics or for those whose structural position means that they
rarely speak or are heard in public. C’s story also reveals the effort that more
privileged participants had to make to take care of others in the assembly.
They had to learn to step back, allow space for others and actively listen
to them. Thus, listening can be conceived as a practice of caring for the
others’ vulnerability, and one that both recognises and nourishes relationships
of interdependence.
This can constitute a transformative and empowering experience both for
those being listened to and for those doing the listening. As Gary from OWS
noted, “in the first couple of general assemblies, when someone participated,
people got up and it was this beautiful thing to see … people actually feeling
that they could talk about something they really cared about and that people
were listening” (emphasis added). Mark from Occupy London concurred:
‘up until that point, I had never experienced a situation where large
numbers of strangers would be in a space and taking each other very
seriously and listening to each other. And … you know, talking
about things as if they mattered. So that, just that, myself I think was
extremely powerful. People walk away from that feeling a lot less despairing
and isolated.’ (emphasis added)
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The camps and the assemblies also became therapeutic spaces where people
could share personal stories of oppression and failure, where they could
express their feelings about what was going on. As Loukia from the Athens
Indignants noted:
‘There was a diffuse desire for discussion, so particularly in the first

two weeks they were discussing every day. It was also summer. …
They were coming every day before the general assembly, they were
discussing their most personal and innermost problems of the kind
“I’m unemployed and I can’t stand it anymore”.’
C from Occupy Seattle remarked that in some cases, “[w]‌e’ve had people
have breakdowns in the middle of the meeting, and the meeting became the
place where the person was taken care of. And the people learned what it was to
take care of a person with a breakdown” (emphasis added).
This goes against conceptions of the citizen as a rational individual that
draw a hard distinction between reason and emotion. As Iris Marion
Young (2000: 39) argues, such interpretations of democratic deliberation
‘tend to falsely identify objectivity with calm and the absence of emotional
expression. For those suspicious of emotion, expressions of anger, hurt,
or passionate concern taint whatever claims and reasons they accompany’.
Instead, the movements of the squares gave space to personal storytelling
and the articulation of emotion, considering them as inherent to democracy.
Caring for the physical and emotional needs of participants in the
assemblies was also formalised in the role of the ‘temperature checker’. As
Justin from OWS explained, this is a
‘person who kind of goes around, and takes people’s temperature,

asks how they’re feeling, and then reports that back to the facilitators.
Sometimes even speaks to say, “I think we’re all feeling a bit tired.
You know, maybe we need to take a five-minute break or do a dance
or sing songs”’.
This emphasis on radical empathy referred not only to other participants

in the movement, but also to the world as a whole. As Fisher and Tronto
(1990: 40) suggest, ‘the world that our care revolves around includes our
bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave
in a complex, life-sustaining web’. Thus, caring extends to all living beings,
human and non-human, which points to a radical notion of inclusivity in
our understanding of care. The Care Collective (2020) calls this ‘promiscuous
care’, care that is provided indiscriminately and across difference, including
distinctions between different species. As Melanie from OWS put it,
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‘until we see that empathy really is sort of the central goal of the
revolution, there will be clashes … on kind of a metaphysical level,
I feel like there are some of us who realize that all of us are part of the
same “brain”; that we’re all part of the same organism.’
However, many of the positive feelings about the assemblies refer to the first
few weeks of the camps. As people became more tired and with assembly
meetings lasting longer and longer, participants could not maintain the same
attentive listening or respect and patience for the others’ vulnerability. The
pressurised atmosphere of protest camps, the increased police presence and
threat of arrest also made it difficult for people to be in the right frame of
mind for participating in the assemblies. There were therefore many instances
when the process did not centre or take care of people’s vulnerability.
Indeed, what some interviewees took away from their experience in
the camps is the need to work on themselves in order to bring about the
kind of society they are envisioning. Some interviewees thought that it is
an obligation of radical activists to develop their capacity for empathy and
compassion and to work on themselves, as well as the world around them.
For Willow, this involves asking yourself “How can I be a better individual,
more responsible, therefore I’m better for my community, therefore my
community is stronger …?”. Gary put it even more emphatically: “radical
activists need to be able to transform themselves if they have an expectation
of trying to change the world”. This involves “understanding suffering and
overcoming it, and so also compassion and listening, allowing people to hold
suffering”. The crucial role of citizens’ emotional development tends to be
disregarded in liberal views of democracy as rational deliberation. Yet, as
Mansbridge (1993: 358–9) notes and as many interviewees had discovered,
such systems ‘will not work in practice without citizens’ emotional capacities
to understand their own and others’ needs’.
Still, placing dependency and vulnerability at the centre of democratic
politics cannot escape issues of power. Although we are all vulnerable, some of
us are more, or differently, vulnerable than others. Thus, important questions
arise around which kinds of vulnerabilities and whose vulnerabilities are
prioritised and centred. For instance, accounts of the Occupy movement
by Catherine Eschle (2018) and Celeste Montoya (Chapter 2, this volume)
have demonstrated that gender violence, to which women and LGBTQ
individuals are more vulnerable, was not treated with the requisite seriousness
and respect. Such accusations were sometimes concealed or dismissed as
they would be harmful to the movement’s public image (see Chapter 2 by
Montoya and Chapter 3 by Ahia and Johnson, this volume). And rarely
did they lead to an expulsion of perpetrators from the camps. While this is
partly due to the problematic accountability mechanisms of the occupations,
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where it was difficult to impose sanctions for such behaviour, this issue still
reveals the stratification of vulnerabilities within the camps.
It is also worth acknowledging that care has a fraught relationship with
democratic equality as it is often based on an asymmetric relationship
between carers and the living beings that are being cared for. As Tronto
(2013: 149) notes,
many care relationships are not relationships of equality and therefore

seem to be a threat to the very idea of democracy. … Historically,
democratic theorists and democratic practices solved this problem
by excluding those who were ‘dependent’ or not fully rational from
being citizens. For the ancients, these exclusions extended to slaves
and women.
Yet this asymmetry can also go the other way as care work tends to be
undertaken by the lower classes, by women and by people of colour, and it
is not amply compensated.
In the movements of the squares, this power asymmetry was addressed
by combining the ethics of care with an orientation towards equality. In
this respect, care took the meaning of ‘mutual aid’, denoting an equal and
horizontal relationship where helping –or caring for –each other is a mutual
practice. In contrast to charity, which points to an asymmetric and top-
down relationship between charity givers and receivers, mutual aid attempts
to erase the distinction between the providers and recipients of aid. This
conception accords with the key tenets of care ethics, which stress that we
are all vulnerable and dependent on each other. Peter Kropotkin (1902),
the leading anarchist thinker on mutual aid, directly relates interdependence
and collaboration with the ethic of mutual aid, arguing that ‘in the ethical
progress of man [sic], mutual support not mutual struggle –has had the
leading part’.
The ideas of mutual aid informed the provision of care in the camps,
but also initiatives like Occupy Sandy, where Occupy activists used the
infrastructure created by the movement to offer humanitarian relief after
Hurricane Sandy landed on New York in October 2012. As Dana from
Occupy Sandy noted, “one of the things that I liked so much was the mutual
aid coming on board … there was a chance that people who really cared
about the mutual aid component versus the protest component to show
how amazing it could be”.
Of course, looking at care through the framework of mutual aid does not
automatically erase power differentials. Instead, it suggests that issues of power
and equality within care processes should be continuously questioned and
foregrounded in our everyday practice of care. Does care constitute a mutual,
equal and horizontal relationship? Or does our practice of care create and
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reinforce power asymmetries? Without this commitment to equality, care, as

a value in and of itself, may result in a patronising and undemocratic system
as it can be used to gloss over, or even prop up, fundamental inequalities.
Commons, interdependence and communal sharing

The existential challenge presented by the ethics of care to liberal
representative democracy also includes a different understanding of the
economic relations that should underlie democracy. As this section shows,
the movements of the squares attempted to prefigure an alternative to private
property and economic relations that conforms with the principles of the
commons. These place interdependence, as well as caring for each other
and for shared resources, at the centre of democratic politics.
The ethic of care confronts traditional conceptions of the citizen in
‘Anglo-American democratic theory’ which ‘often portrays the polity as
constructed by free and unencumbered individuals who associate to promote
self-interest’ (Mansbridge, 1993: 351). The liberal conception of the citizen,
according to Pateman, is still based on the property and gender relations
that underpinned the origins of liberal representative democracies. As she
puts it in her critique of Locke,
the apparently universal criteria governing civil society are actually

those associated with the liberal conception of the male individual,
a conception which is presented as that of the individual. The
individual is the owner of property in his person, that is to say, he
is in abstraction from his ascribed familial relations and those with
his fellow men. He is a ‘private’ individual, but he needs a sphere
in which he can exercise his rights and opportunities, pursue (his)
private interests and protect and increase his property. (Pateman,
1989: loc 2952; original emphasis)
This is a citizen who is considered distinct from the bonds of the private
sphere that sustain and care for him. His interests in democratic participation
are related to the property that he alone holds as an individual. This
conception of the citizen thus erases the relationships of interdependence
between citizens and obscures the care work undertaken in the private sphere
for a person (historically, a man) to be able to function as an individual in
the public sphere. ‘Such a theory cannot easily draw inspiration from or use
metaphors derived from the typically “female” experiences of empathetic
interdependence, compassion, and personal vulnerability’ (Mansbridge,
1993: 351). It is, therefore, an understanding of the citizen that contradicts the
main tenets of citizenship based on care, where dependence and vulnerability
take centre stage.
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A feminist perspective illuminates the historical origins of this liberal

conception of the individual citizen and its relation to private property. The
emergence of liberal representative democracy occurred at a time when
the subordination of women was partially based on their exclusion from
property rights: not only did they lack the right to own property, but they
were often considered as the property of their husbands and fathers. But this
subordination extended to the political sphere. Early models of western liberal
democracy excluded women and other parts of the population who did not
or could not legally own property. Hence, the fight for women’s suffrage in
the 19th century was intimately connected with ensuring property rights
for women. In liberal democracies, the enlargement of suffrage progressed
alongside the expansion of private property rights, to the point that such
rights became (almost) universal.
It was at this time that the effect of property relations on democracy was
rendered invisible in liberal democratic theory. The theory often ‘assumes
that property relations are not intrinsic to democratic practices’ (Devenney,
2011: 158), and thus relegates them to the outside of democracy. Yet, as
Mark Devenney (2011: 158) reminds us, ‘[t]‌he legal regulation of property
establishes rules in which lives are unequally lived, and freedom is but an ideal
for those with little or no access to property of their own’. Within liberal
democracy, this disregard for the impact of private property relations and
other kinds of economic inequalities on the democratic system is effected
through the adoption of a minimal conception of equality (Pateman, 1970)
that is based on the ‘one-person-one vote system’, ‘The individualistic
formula, “each counts for one and none for more than one”’ (Mansbridge,
1993: 341).
By contrast, the movements of the squares operated with a conception
of property relations that accorded with the theory of the commons. This
is an understanding of property that shifts away from perceiving the citizen
as an individual who is separated from the private sphere and who operates
in public to serve his private property interests. Instead, it views the citizen
as immersed in relationships of interdependence and collaboration, thus
emphasising care and dependence.
At their most basic form, the ‘[c]‌ommons are collective forms of ownership’
(Wall, 2017: 1). However, in recent years scholars have shifted from an
understanding of the ‘commons as resources’ to one that sees the commons
‘as relational social frameworks’ (Bollier and Helfrich cited in Ruivenkamp
and Hilton, 2017: 1). This is ‘marked also by the evolution of the noun
form of “common” into the verb “commoning” to denote the continuous
making and remaking –the (re)production –of the commons through shared
practices’ (Bresnihan in Ruivenkamp and Hilton, 2017: 1).
Historically, the concept of the commons emerged in the struggle against
the enclosure of common land and its transformation into private property.
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This was a process that, according to Federici (2008), was particularly

damaging for women and their role in the economy, as they were the main
caretakers of common land. More recently, the concept has been ‘gaining
popularity among the radical left, internationally and in the United States,
appearing as a basis for convergence among anarchists, Marxists, socialists,
ecologists, and eco-feminists’ (Federici, 2008: 380). Viewed as a system
beyond the market and the state, the rise of the commons can be attributed to
‘the demise of the statist model of revolution that for decades had sapped the
efforts of radical movements to build an alternative to capitalism’ (Federici,
2008: 380).
The notion of the commons has also been revitalised with the advent
of the internet. The concept has been expanded and now refers not only
to land or other material resources, but also to knowledge and skills. The
commons have been at the heart of Open Knowledge movements advocating
for knowledge as a common good that should be accessible to everyone.
These overlap with free software movements which focus on the free use
and development of software code, considering it as a common resource
that should not obey the rules of the market.
Within the movements of the squares, the framework of the commons
served as a guarantee of equality by attempting to limit the power
asymmetries arising from private property relations. In contrast to the
minimal understanding of equality in liberal representative democracies, the
movements of the squares operated with a maximal conception, considering
political equality as ‘equal power in the making of decisions’ (Pateman,
1970: 14).
Although interviewees did not often use the vocabulary of the commons,
these key ideas were reflected in my interviews. Movement participants
referred to resources as commonly shared rather than the private property
of specific individuals. For example, people’s skills and knowledge were
considered as a resource to be shared and developed by the movement.
Talking about her involvement in OWS, Daphne noted how she served as
a resource for the community: “these are the things that I have, I can offer
these constantly, you know, new groups are forming because I want to do
this action or they have this study group that I can contribute this one skill
to … and I’m a resource in that community for that thing” (emphasis added).
This logic extended to the movement’s digital properties, from websites to
social movement accounts. It also informed the handling of the movement’s
knowledge and guidelines, as well as the documentation of decisions that
were openly circulated online and offline. This was partly because open
knowledge and free software advocates were present in the movements of
the squares, particularly in the tech teams. As Devin from OWS revealed,
such activists were behind OWS’s statement in its Principles of Solidarity
that it is an ‘open-source movement’ committed to ‘Making technologies,
189
knowledge, and culture open to all to freely access, create, modify, and
distribute’ (New York City General Assembly, 2011). In Nuit Debout as well,
members of the Library Commission published theoretical texts reflecting
on the movement’s library as a form of commons that challenged private
property norms (Calimaq, 2016).
The notion of the commons thus allows us to radically rethink democracy
in ways that accord with the ethics of care and their emphasis on dependence
and vulnerability. Instead of perceiving land and other resources as something
that can be enclosed and appropriated by specific individuals, the concept of
the commons suggests that we are dependent on each other for the creation
and management of resources. These resources should be commonly shared,
not only because it is the just thing to do, but also because interdependence
and vulnerability demand cooperation. The commons are therefore
connected with a feminist view of citizenship that foregrounds relationships
of interdependence. Interests are not based on private property relations
but on taking care of the needs of the collective in a manner that everyone
involved both contributes to and benefits from common skills, knowledge,
equipment and other capabilities. Interests thus go beyond property or
simply economic aspects, and involve also emotional needs and interpersonal
relationships of trust, support and love.
Yet the commons are not only a precondition, but also a product of the
democracy practised by the movements of the squares. For Elise Thorburn
(2017: 70), the assemblies can be considered ‘as a political formation [that] can
provide both the means for beginning to seriously engage with the production
of the common and the organisational terrain for the common politics to
come’. Donatella della Porta (2014) also has suggested that the construction of
the common is a key orientation of these movements’ democratic model. This
view of the movements was voiced in my interviews as well. For instance,
Vica from Occupy London remarked that the movement’s democracy was
based on “creating a space that people feel that they can do whatever they
want and contribute in some way, and it was because it was a space that did
not belong to anyone, it belonged to everyone” (emphasis added). The movement
did not operate as someone’s private property, but as a shared space for the
production of the common, for facilitating relationships of ‘commoning’
based on care and interdependence.
However, in practice, the movements of the squares could rarely escape
the power imbalances created by property relations. The conflicts over the
movements’ social media pages are instructive in this respect. All of the
movements that I analysed set up social media accounts on Twitter, Facebook
and other platforms that commanded large followings, particularly at the
height of the protests. And in every movement there were struggles over the
control of these accounts. These conflicts often took the form of ‘password
wars’, where activists changed the passwords on the account in order to bar
190
others from managing or posting on the page (Kavada, 2015; see also Treré,
2015). Such conflicts were facilitated by the design of social media platforms,
which is based on the logic of private property, providing the ‘owner’ of the
account with the power to control it (Gerbaudo, 2017). Thus, the private
property logic of social media platforms made it easier for such conflicts to
take hold with often destructive effects.
Nonetheless, in the movements of the squares, the notions of democracy
and the commons constituted each other in ways that accorded with
the ethics of care and their emphasis on dependence and vulnerability.
The commons served as a precondition for guaranteeing equality among
participants in the movement, an equality understood in maximal rather
than minimal terms. At the same time, the movements’ democratic model
provided a framework of ‘commoning’, a system for producing the commons
through the movements’ activities, from making decisions in the assembly
to creating infrastructure.
Conclusion
The movements of the squares discussed in this chapter emphasised direct
participation in open assemblies and considered the protest camp as a space
of creativity and experimentation, where participants could pursue projects
they were interested in. While this ideal type of ‘project democracy’ met with
problems in practice, it can still offer a guiding vision for progressive politics,
particularly in an era when the crisis of liberal representative democracy has
facilitated the rise of populist authoritarianism.
This chapter traced how feminist thinking helps to uncover the normative
underpinnings of project democracy and the challenge it presents to the
founding assumptions of liberal democracy. First, project democracy
expands the notion of political participation to include activities of social
reproduction, of caring for the civic body, that tend to be considered private
within liberal democratic theory and are thus relegated to the outside of the
democratic system. Second, the squares movements emphasised an ethic of
care that foregrounds dependence and vulnerability. It thus destabilises the
notion of the rational, invulnerable and independent individual that is at the
centre of liberal democratic theory. Finally, feminist thinking offers insights
into the relationship between private property and democracy within the
liberal system where the citizen is considered as separate from the private
sphere that sustains him and as aiming to pursue his own private property
interests (Pateman, 1989: loc 2952). By contrast, the commons point to
relations of interdependence between citizens in the polity, in ways that
accord with the characteristics of vulnerability and dependence that the
concept of care brings to the fore. For the movements of the squares, the
commons and democracy mutually constituted each other. The commons
191
act as a guarantee of equality within the democratic system, attempting to

prevent the power asymmetries created by private property relations. At the
same time, the movements’ democratic process is also the terrain through
which the commons is produced. This points to a conception of the citizen
that is immersed in relationships of interdependence and whose participation
within the democratic system is oriented towards the caring of the collective
rather than the pursuit of private property interests.
These insights offer an additional set of normative criteria on which to
judge the performance of democratic systems. Do they centre people’s
vulnerability and dependence? Do they take care of their citizens’ physical
and emotional needs? Do they accord an equal place to different types of
and different people’s vulnerabilities? Do they organise caring activities in
a democratic manner? Do they consider caring activities as part of citizens’
democratic duties? Do they accord the same value and visibility to these
activities as to more traditional democratic duties, such as participating in
decision-making processes? Do they assume that citizens are interdependent
and thus should be involved in processes of communal sharing of resources?
Do they attempt to counter the power asymmetries generated by private
property and economic relations in general or do they relegate such concerns
to the outside of the political process? By offering a lucid critique of the
separation between the private and the public within liberal conceptions of
the citizen and the polity, feminist theory facilitates a renewal of theorisations
of democracy and its normative underpinnings.
Note
1
Federici refers here to Craig Hughes and Kevin Van Meter of the Team Colors Collective
for the phrase ‘flow from everyday life’.
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and A. Hilton (eds) Perspectives on Commoning: Autonomist Principles and
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194
11
Feminised and Decolonising

Reoccupations, Re-existencias
and Escrevivências: Learning from
Women’s Movement Collectives in
Northeast Brazil
Sara C. Motta, Sandra Maria Gadelha de Carvalho, Claudiana Nogueira
de Alencar and Mila Nayane da Silva
Introduction
Our chapter intersects with and disrupts feminist scholarship in relation to
understanding of and contributions to the praxis of (feminist) protest camps.
We do this as revolutionary feminist popular-educators, working with
movements in the South (as geography and onto-epistemic positioning to
Power) and in the region of Ceará and city of Fortaleza, Brazil. We develop
a decolonising feminist intersectional revolutionary conceptual lens, which
exists in dialectical and dialogical relation with the women’s cooperative
Mãos que Criam of the Zé Maria de Tomé Movimento Sem Terra (MST)
settlement, along with three Afro-Brazilian women’s poetry collectives of
the periphery of Fortaleza (Elaspoemas, BaRRosas and Pretarau), and our
own kinship-making praxis as authors who have been collaborating for the
last 14 years.
In this chapter, we explore feminist/feminised protest camps as
embodiments of Black, campesino (peasant farmer) and Indigenous
sovereignties and reoccupations of tierra as both body and land. We stretch
our conceptualisation of protest to the feminisation of resistance, our
conceptualisation of camp to tierras or territory as land and body, and our
conceptualisation of occupation to onto-epistemological reoccupations of
raced and feminised southern subjects-in-relation, co-weaving new languages
195
and literacies of the political-epistemological. We explore what this looks

like and means for both a feminist politics of protest camps and a feminist
theorisation of forms of decolonising feminist revolutionary praxis, and
how it calls for the decolonising of reason and epistemological enfleshment
(Motta, 2016, 2022, forthcoming). Our work connects the territories of
the rural and the urban to make visible plural spatio-temporalities of both
the temporary protest reoccupation of the urban periphery and/as Black
feminised bodies, and the more long-standing occupations by rural campesino
and Indigenous communities who are co-weaving social economies that
centre pluridiverse forms of agricultural production and relationship with
tierra as body. Within these more long-standing occupations are struggles
of feminised resistances that seek to bring visibility and voice to the female
revolutionary campesino, her experiences of exclusion and the wisdom that
she brings to this revolutionary struggle. In this way, we map intersectional,
decolonial and Black revolutionary feminised resistances and re-existencias
(new ways of being) as onto-epistemological reoccupations of the territories
of land and body, and disrupt reified and unidimensional framings of protest
camps and of feminist theoretical-political engagements.
Our collaboration in this piece (and more broadly) is not separate from
such an intersectional decolonial/Black revolutionary feminised resistance
embodied as reoccupations and sovereignties over and as body and land.
Rather, it is emergent from the feminised resistances and re-existencias of
its authors. Our everyday struggles, our everyday commitments, and the
webs of connections with other raced and feminised women-in-movement
reoccupy the territories of life, social reproduction and subjectivity through
grammars of pain and joy, to produce a politics of dignity and sovereignty
otherwise. Such feminised and decolonised anti-capitalist reoccupations
exist thus in complex temporalities that connect us to ancestors and abuelas
(grandmothers), and to Madre Tierra (Mother Earth) herself, and that are
both momentary and long term. Such reoccupations exist and emerge in
multiple spatialities: the rural settlement of the MST, the women’s homes and
social economy in an agroecological cooperative; the temporary decolonising
and feminised occupied urban space by Afro-Brazilian poets; and the Zoom
windows connecting Fortaleza and Russas in Brazil and Newcastle in New
South Wales, Australia. Such reoccupations emerge through registers of
enfleshed thought, word and connection, through song and lamentation,
through grief and inspiration, through mãos que criam (hands that create)
(Motta, 2016, 2022; Gonzalez et al, forthcoming).
Our work engages and dialogues with the practice and concept of
protest camps through interlacing the concepts of territory (in the plural)
and territories in dispute, and (re)occupations (in the multidimensional
and epistemological). We do this work as women-scholars in kinship with
relationships to such praxis, and through centring the lens of raced and
196
LEARNING FROM COLLECTIVES IN NORTHEAST BRAZIL
feminised women on the margins of the urban periphery and at the frontlines
between agribusiness and agroecology in the rural landscape. We weave
our reflections and conceptualisation through the lens of feminisms in the
plural, and in a dialogue between the Marxist and decolonial feminisms of
the ‘feminisation of resistance’ concept developed by Sara C. Motta (one
of the authors of this piece) (Motta, 2013, 2019, 2020, 2022, forthcoming;
Motta and Seppälä, 2016); the concept of escrevivência (writing the life,
or ‘livature’) developed in the work of Afro-Brazilian theorist Maria da
Conceição Evaristo (2020); and the writings of the feminist linguist Veena
Das (2007) around the gramática da dor (the grammar of pain), along with
our new emergent concept of the gramática da alegria (the grammar of joy).
We raise questions about the reoccupation of the public by raced and
feminised subjects who have historically been and continue to be on the
exteriority of non-being of civil society and the public and who thus
present an onto-epistemological challenge to the very framing of protest
camp or occupation, reason, (political) subjectivity and resistance. We
engage with feminisms that problematise, politicise and collectivise social
reproduction, and who develop social agroecological economies against and
beyond heteropatriarchal capitalism. In this way we vision conceptually and
politically pluridiverse reoccupations emergent from the epistemological
undercommons. These are reoccupations of the terrains of (political)
subjectivity, of the grammar of the possibility of (political) speech as a
coming into knowing-being otherwise, and they centre epistemology as a
terrain in dispute. We thus disrupt any theoretical or political rendition and
theoretical register of decipherability that forces a separation between being
women and being Black/racialised or between struggles against and beyond
heteropatriarchy and capitalist-coloniality.
Reoccupying concepts and epistemology

In this section, we explain our theoretical and conceptual framework in
which we wrap tenderly the praxis of raced and feminised women-in-
movement within the settlement of Zé Maria do Tomé, the women’s
cooperative collective Mãos que Criam, Ceará, and the Afro-Brazilian
poetry collectives of the periphery BaRRosas, Pretarau-Sarau das pretas
and Elaspoemas: escritas perifericas. This framework is emergent itself
from layers, herstories and decades of militant prefigurative research. As a
transdisciplinary collective of activist educator-academic authors, we have
been unlearning taken-for-granted forms of critical research practice (Motta,
2011) and instead embracing revolutionary, decolonising and feminist
popular pedagogies that co-construct territories of healing and liberation
and cartographies of affirmative and enfleshed visions of Black/racialised
and feminised futurities.
197
Conceptually, we begin in dialogue with the work by Sara in relation to

the ‘feminisation of resistance’ mentioned earlier, which centres not only
raced and feminised subjects in new forms of transformative politics but
also how new patterns, rhythms and relationships of feminised politics are
emergent in the landscapes of the political. These patterns include attention
to horizontality, care, recognition, deep listening and knowledges of the
flesh –ancestral, cultural, embodied, spiritual –the dark wisdoms of which
Patricia Hill Collins (2009: 206) speaks in terms both deeply relational and
also deeply epistemological. This is a feminised and prefigurative politics
that actively rebels against a politics of demand solely coordinated around
state power, against the relegation of utopia to an undetermined future
point, and against a political subjecthood premised on mastery, Truth and
the capacity to hegemonically determine popular struggles (Motta, 2013;
Motta et al, 2020). Conceptually-theoretically we thus actively resist any
politics of knowledge-making that is representational and reproduces a
division of labour between thinkers and those thought about, between
leaders and led, between politics and the everyday, between the public and
intimacy, and between reason and emotion. From these feminised struggles
(which are both political and epistemological) emerge new subjects of the
political, in movements and in the academy. These subjects articulate new-
ancient (political) languages including ceremony, dance, storytelling, music
and art, which centre the recovery, healing, defence and nurturing of the
territories of the land and social political-economies, and those of the body
and subjectivity. In the centre of the web of these feminised resistances are
the intimacies of everyday life and the decolonisation of subjectivities/bodies
and lands from the systemic violences to which they have been subjected
(Anzaldua, 1987; Cruz, 2001; Motta, 2020, 2021).
We work with this concept of the feminisation of resistance as it enables us
to stretch and disrupt unidimensional conceptualisations of territory, protest
(resistance) and occupation and to bring to visibility ‘territories in dispute’.
It also exposes the fault lines between the ongoing onto-epistemological
violences of a ferocious heteropatriarchal capitalist-coloniality, reproduced
at the time of writing by the necropolitics of the Bolsonaro Government in
Brazil, and a politics of life and dignity that beckons lifeworlds already-always
prefiguratively present. We thus also extend this concept of territories in
dispute to the epistemological territories of theoretical and conceptual co-
production, refusing the hierarchal onto-epistemological divisions between
those that know and theorise and those that are known and theorised about
and for. Rather, we embrace the encounters between feminist scholar activists
from the South (in all its complex senses of geography and onto-epistemic
positionality to Power (Mohanty, 1988; Motta, 2013)) in which we suleá-
los1 in and through our relationalities with the movements and collectives
with which we write.
198
Our enfleshed voices in relation

We thus also make visible as part of our methodological underpinnings
the dialogical comadreando (co-mothering) from which our collaboration
as activist scholars from the South emerged. Together we have nearly a
century’s worth of combined struggle as (feminist) popular educators
committed to a politics of knowledge that is transformative in process and
in outcome. Sara is an Indigenous-mestiza travelling storyteller who has
lived across lands and territories as a result of logics of both dispossession
and desire/survivance. She has worked with Sandra and Claudiana for
more than 15 years in collective epistemological-praxis in Brazil with the
MST and mother-militants across movements in Fortaleza, in the UK
in radical education collaborations, and now from Australia developing
methodologies and pedagogies of decolonising and feminist transformation
and relationships of co-healing and kinship across borders. Claudiana is an
activist, poet, popular educator and critical decolonial/feminist linguistics
scholar. She is co-founder of Viva a Palavra: an activist-scholar collective
that works with poets from the periphery of Fortaleza with the objective
of strengthening their cultural grammar as onto-epistemological projects
of reoccupation in the face of systemic violations and denial of their
knowing-being. Sandra is a leader, activist-scholar and popular educator.
She has a decades-long relationship with the MST and with the radical
pedagogical project of the movement Educação do Campo as part of
her co-founding and ongoing coordinating role in the Laboratório de
Estudos da Educação do Campo (LECAMPO) and its emergence and
consolidation in the settlement of Zé Maria do Tomé. Her activist
research has focused on the emergence of radical subjectivities in the
settlement, the development of agroecology, the role of the pedagogical
in the political, and the place and practices of women MST members.
Finally, Mila studied in the master’s programme Popular Education, Social
Movements and Political Change and with the supervision of Sandra
developed a participant action research (PAR) activist project with the
residents of the settlement to strengthen their transformative struggles. As
part of her master’s research, she developed initial relationships with some
of the women settlement residents and from this went on to develop her
doctoral research Aprendizados e insurgências das mulheres na luta pela terra
[Learnings and Insurgencies of Women in the Struggle for Land]. Through
a PAR methodology, she explored with these women the emergence of
distinct political subjectivities that combine a struggle against the capitalist
system with that of patriarchy; a struggle that centres the everyday as a
site of reoccupation and transformation. The words and reflections of the
women residents of the settlement with whom we dialogue later in this
chapter are emergent from this collective research process.
199
In building a relational and dialogical conceptual-theoretical framework

for our writing, we honour our situated places of enunciation and everyday
struggles, fostering new encounters that enable us to fruitfully weave horizontal
and dignified epistemological practices into our co-creation of this piece. We
thus have sought to bring into dialogue the travelling onto-epistemological
framework of the feminisation of resistance of Sara’s scholarship with
Claudiana’s own situatedness within the territories in dispute and the Black
theory of Afro-Brazilian theorist Conceição Evaristo in relation to escrevivência.
As Evaristo describes it, escrevivência is ‘a quest to enter the world with our
stories, with our lives, which the world disregards. Writing is not for the
abstraction of the world, but for existence, for the life-world’ (2020: 35).2
Here writing from the place of feminised and racialised non-being is not
a process of abstract representation, but a calling into the flesh and (political)
being through word, embodiment and expression of our existence. Evaristo’s
concept holds to a vision of a society dedicated to life against and beyond
the necropolitical-epistemological logics and (ir)rationalities that seek to
suffocate the present. It is similar to and in sisterhood with the notion of
the feminisation of resistance in speaking from racialised and feminised non-
being and the co-weaving of other literacies of the political with which to
(temporarily) reoccupy the territory-body and prefigure other forms of
sovereignty and healing justice. It includes the epistemological and/as the
ontological, as ways of inhabiting and creating the world/subject are also
ways of knowing the world/subject. The attempted eradication and rendering
to social death of Afro-Brazilian women of the periphery is not only the
attempted eradication of lifeworlds, herstories and subjects-in-relation, but
also an epistemological denial of being-knowing ‘otherwise’. As Maria
Lugones (2010: 745) describes:
The civilizing transformation justified the colonization of memory and

thus of people’s sense of self, of intersubjective relation, of their relation
to the spirit world, to land, to the very fabric of their conception of
reality, identity and social, ecological and cosmological organisation …
the normativity that connected gender and civilization became intent
on erasing community ecological practices, knowledge of planting, of
weaving, of the cosmos.
Writing in this sense is existential; it is a coming into being, similar to the

registers of coming into being through ceremony, dance, art and storytelling
(de Alencar, 2019, 2021a). It is essential to the possibilities of a reoccupying
and resistance in and through camps/territories that does not reproduce the
elision and negation of the feminised and racialised women and her kin –not
just as bodies, but also as subjects at the heart of other onto-epistemologies
of life-making.
200
It is thus that escrevivência as written and spoken embodiment is a placed

form of the feminisation of resistance, placed in the Afro-territories of body
and land of Brazil. It necessarily ruptures the coordinates of representational
and abstracting logics of the epistemological project of capitalist-coloniality,
which render the raced subaltern women as invisible, indecipherable and
wretched. Thus, grammar works here in the broadest onto-epistemological
sense and underlies the terms of possibility of speech, decipherability and
visibility as and through text. It too becomes a territory in dispute. It is here
that the emergence of the possibility of our speech and writing as escrevivência
(as a coming into being as sovereign peoples) is put into dialogue with its sister
concept developed by Veena Das (2007) of the gramática da dor, a grammar
of pain out of which our words/worlds as life emerge. In her ethnographic
work, Das (2007) demonstrates how out of atrocious violences women
reinscribe their pain and suffering in everyday forms of meaning-making that
constitute a cultural grammar. Such cultural grammars are often hidden from
the gaze of power, and/or actively misrepresented. Yet, for the co-creators
they are a way to recover meaning and reclaim historicity /historical agency
from systematic trauma (Motta, 2018) and thus enable the co-production
of other subjectivities in resistance (de Alencar, 2021b).
However, in our dialogues that gestated the possibilities of the birth of these
words, we also remembered something. In the sharing of our struggles, we also
share our joys: our laughter at power that renders its violent growl somewhat
mute; our energetic hugs and shared singing of Milton Nascimento’s songs
that bring tender healing; and our sharing of the ancestral remembering
and teaching of the dark wisdoms with our children that is our dignified
recovery in which love and laughter reign (Motta et al, 2020; Gonzalez et al,
forthcoming). These are also landscapes of the emergence of the possibility of
our escrevivência (in body and written text), which we wished to give name.
Hand in hand with a gramática da dor is a gramática da alegria (grammar of
joy). For as Nini Rizzi (2020) writes in relation to the power of poetry, but
which travels to the power of our word, ‘we can bring to words everything,
that which we desire mostly deeply. A poem is magic, a weapon, a bomb!’3
It is from this tapestry in which we suleá-los that we seek to bring dignified
and relational visibility to the praxis of the racialised subaltern women-in-
movement in Northeast Brazil. It is to the women in the settlement of Zé
Maria do Tomé, and particularly in the women’s cooperative collective Mãos
que Criam, that we now turn.
Women of Zé Maria do Tomé and the Mãos que

Criam Cooperative
The Movement of Landless Rural Workers (O Movimento dos Trabalhadores
Rurais Sem Terra or MST), was founded in 1984 in the city of Chapecó, in
201
Paraná State. At the time of writing, it has over a million participants across 16
Brazilian states. The question of gender was present in the movement’s initial
struggles but the priority in its first years was the occupation of land. Women
participated in occupations and the organisation of settlements when occupied
and in the organisation of occupied land when legalised. However, they faced
challenges and barriers to their role as organisers and militants due to their
primary role as carers for children and responsibility for the tasks of domestic
labour. From the movement’s first occupations, women began to bring these
questions to debates and to organise and make demands, in particular to
advocate for the need for childcare and schools so that MST mothers could
both work on the land and in political organising. MST women accordingly
had a central role in the struggle for Educação do Campo that is the distinctive
critical education paradigm and programme of the movement (see de Carvalho,
2006, 2017; Motta and Cole, 2013). The continued organisation of women of
the MST resulted in the creation of the Gender Sector in 2000 and regional
women’s sectors have emerged throughout the 2000s. It is within this broader
context of emergence and consolidation of the MST as an organisation that is
anti-capitalist and increasingly anti-patriarchal as a result of women’s internal
political struggles within the movement, that we can situate the reoccupations
of the women of the Zé Maria do Tomé settlement.
The settlement is to be found in the Chapada do Apodi, between Rio
Grande Do Norte and Ceará, Brazil, in the municipalities of Limoeiro do
Norte e Quixere. These lands are a territory in dispute between peasant-led
agroecology and neoliberal-led agribusiness. Much has been written about the
settlements of the MST and their pedagogical work in relation to Educação
do Campo and its multiscalar efforts to form a popular anti-capitalist (inter)
national struggle premised on agroecology. Less has been written about the
role of women in these territorial conflicts and how the MST’s struggle is also
a struggle against patriarchal capitalism built upon everyday insurgencies and a
praxis of de-patriarchalisation around the figure of the female militant or activist.
The women’s stories of the onto-epistemological violences and harms
of agribusiness highlight the impact of air and water pollution through the
extensive use of agritoxins. These take a heavy toll on the health and well-
being of mothers and children, and poison lands on which they might carry
out family farming (de Carvalho and Motta, 2018; de Carvalho et al, 2020).
This peasant/indigenised racialised and feminised place of enunciation and
emergence centres immediately the territory of the home and family, and
the role of women in the defence of family and responsibility for well-being
and health. The visibility of these women’s wisdoms and recognition of the
intertwining of patriarchy and capitalism in the reproduction of peasant
dispossession is a result of women organising in the settlement. Women
both take up positions on the frontline when the settlement is threatened
by government and militarised interventions, and nurture alternative social
202
economies, as we will address later. As Monica, a member of the Zé Maria

do Tomé settlement, describes:
‘I came from the Tomé community but now I am from the community
Zé Maria do Tomé. I cannot envision my life outside of our community.
My experience here has been beautiful, we struggle daily to create a
different model, for the reintegration of the land which the government
is trying to destroy. They might throw stones at us. They might try to
destroy us but what we are building here, we will pick up the stones and
rebuild a step so that we rise up day by day.’ (da Silva interview, 2019)
Defending the settlement’s existence and nurturing an alternative model of

social economy, social relationships and subjectivity is a deeply pedagogical
process in which women’s participation in all instances of movement and
settlement activity is central (de Carvalho et al, 2020). Recognition of the
connections between patriarchy and capitalism depends on this participation.
As has become acknowledged within the MST as a result of women’s internal
struggles, ‘there is a link between the inherent patriarchal logic of private
ownership of land, the agribusiness model supported by capitalism and
the organisation of the patriarchal family based on the oppression of rural
women’ (de Carvalho el al, 2020).
Politically and pedagogically centring the inherent connections between
capitalism and patriarchy necessitates paying attention to how the organisation
of the hegemonic family and a gendered division of labour and power is
premised not only upon the exploitation of workers-peasants, but also on
the super-exploitation and subordination of female subjects in the private
sphere. In this way, the labours of social reproduction remain unrecognised
and devalued. Rectifying this has relied on women of the settlements
organising to bring visibility and value to the labour of social reproduction,
and to ensure the reproduction of the more visible acts of resistance of the
movement (Esmeraldo, 2013). It has also involved the struggle for a more
egalitarian division of labour between social reproduction (in the private)
and the public labour of (socialised) production and militancy.
Importantly women have played a key role in remembering ancestral
knowledges that are fundamental to the co-construction of social economies
based in agroecological models in which relationships of care between
community and land are centred, and in which devalued methods of
cultivation, seed protection and restoration and use of land are revalued.
This has often occurred in relation to the ability to farm plots of land. In
these moments of planting and remembering there are informal pedagogical
processes of learning and unlearning: unlearning the devaluation and
subordination of their roles and knowledges through a gramática da dor,
and relearning wisdoms and a sacred place in community survivance
203
through a gramática da alegria. The recovery and strengthening of women’s

agroecological knowledges are linked to other forms of social relationships
based in equality and participation that contest capitalism and patriarchy.
Since the formation of the settlement, its inhabitants have pursued the
strategy of an agroecological transition. The social economy practices of the
women of the community intersect and undergird this strategy. One example
is the formation of the women’s cooperative Mãos que Criam (Hands that
Create) in the settlement, which began to produce goods and, in this process,
enhanced the visibility of women in the space of the settlement and its politics
of resistance. The initial objective of the cooperative was to commercialise
their products and improve the families’ socio-economic situation. However,
through praxis and their informal pedagogical (un)learnings of patriarchal
capitalist forms of social reproduction and production, the women began to
foster the participation of the entire family in all production activities and in
all sites of struggles around the social-economic organisation of the women.
As Luiza Costa, one of the participants in the cooperative, describes: “We
decided to form a women’s group to show society that this was a myth
[that women in the settlements didn’t work], and that women do organise
[politically] and also work/labour” (da Silva interview, 2019).
From this process of creating new socio-economic relationships, recovering
and recognising women’s knowledges as well as learning more deeply about
agroecology, the women began to question their position as outside of or
secondary in the frontlines of struggle, production and local community
commercialisation, in public-facing seminars in relation to agroecology, and
in decision-making instances of the movement.
These processes of self/other learning strengthen the capacity of women
to undertake everyday insurgencies within the private space of their family
relationships and foreground a feminised politics of dignity and well-being.
As Heloise, a settlement member explains:
‘I can’t imagine my life without the settlement and without my home

here. If you would have had told me “ah Heloise I will give your own
house there in Limoeiro and you won’t have to do anything more than
live in the settlement, and you won’t have to experience all the things
you have experienced like humiliation discrimination, challenges”,
I would have said no because I couldn’t have imagined this for my
children … and each week as folks come to live here they have this
similar feeling, that they couldn’t have imagined living here … My
life now, living here in the settlements, I can sincerely say that I have
began to live.’ (da Silva interview, 2019)
These everyday acts of insurgency involve recognition that the labour of

social reproduction and domestic work are not merely women’s responsibility,
204
and contesting these gendered divisions of labour in the home. They involve
the creation of not only collective farming, but also collective kitchens in
which cooking and eating is socialised, and which nurture collaborative and
dialogical forms of relationship and organisation. New forms of egalitarian
sociability and the collectivising of labours of social reproduction resignify
motherhood, away from an individualised and fragmenting experience of
relegation to the home toward a collective mothering in the public, rooted
in socialised labours of production and social production. The layers of
informal (un/re)learning involved in this process can be viewed as feminised/
ist pedagogies in defence of territory, including the territory and integrity
of the settlement and new forms of social-economic relationships, and the
territory and integrity of their knowing-being as (political) women of the
MST (Korol, 2007, 2015; Motta, 2021). As de Carvalho et al (2020: 1833)
argue, developing the work of Korol (2007), such feminist pedagogies
recognise ‘not only the right of women to an education but also their
recognition as pedagogical subjects that contribute knowledges with which
it is possible to elaborate … the overcoming of patriarchy [and capitalism]
as a social relation’.
However, as noted in other work in relation to the feminisation of
resistance (Motta, 2013), these struggles over the terrain of social economies
and social reproduction that centre care and defence of territories in the
pluridiverse are emergent processes. Such processes necessarily navigate how
hierarchal constraints and separations fracture our feminised revolutionary
subjectivities and social relationships. It is thus the case that many of these
women find themselves taking on the triple burden of social economy
productive work, social reproduction labour and political organising. As
Monica continues to describe:
‘At home, right at the beginning, I worked hard at the coordination,

I had to manage the house and I still worked on the flower beds, on
things in the community, and on top of this that not everyone knows,
I had to go out selling vegetables. There were days when I arrived
home, everything was turned upside down, there was a day I made
a big fuss, when I arrived he was alone at home, he locked the door,
said he had washed the dishes, there was nothing dirty for me to tidy
up. … I know what the path is now.’ (da Silva interview, 2019)
Afro-Brazilian women’s poetry collectives of the

periphery:BaRRosas, Pretarau and Elaspoemas
As part of the Viva a Palavra (Long Live the Word) activist-research collective,
women artists and poets began to express and explore how the machismo
205
and racisms of the capitalist, colonial and patriarchal system also criss-crossed
their own communities and poetry nights and events.
These poets situate the dispossessions co-constitutive of these logics and
(ir)rationalities as causing dispossession of territories: both of land and home
and of kin and body (Motta, 2021). For them, these are onto-epistemological
logics that deny the possibility of other lifeworlds and epistemological
grounds of becoming. They therefore centre literacies not as languages in
isolation, but as the embodied structuration of subjectivity, social relationships
and ways of life; and the recovery of voice as necessarily outside the logics
of representation and recognition of heteropatriarchal capitalist-coloniality
(Lugones, 2010; Motta, 2018). In dialoguing with these collectives, we seek
to bring to thought how their praxis of occupation, while temporary, is not
merely physical or social and economic or ecological, but epistemological
and/as embodied. Their praxis decolonises the logics of the thinkable, sayable
and liveable, co-weaving escrevivências and re-existencias and the possibility
of Black life.
Their struggles for space-time of their own led these Afro-Brazilian artists
and creators to self-organise as poets and Black women to confront not only
the logics of patriarchy and racisms in the broader city, but also how these
criss-crossed the counter-cultural space of poetry collectives in the periphery.
From this emerged the Ellas poemas: escritas perifericas in 2020 with the
intention to challenge structural capitalist-colonial patriarchy in the poets’
lives. Ellas poemas went on to collaborate with BaRRosas, also formed
in 2020 with 11 Black women from diverse creative areas. In their work,
BaRRosas seek to confront structural issues such as racism, transphobia and
machismo. The collective came into being after Slam Violeta, a poetry slam
battle in which there were no female/feminised participants, when it was
decided that is was necessary to create a women-only space in the community.
The final collective is called Pretarau, also known as O Sarau das Pretas,
which formed in 2019 and is made up of 13 Black female/feminised poets
and slam poets. Their main aim is to strengthen Black female/feminised
poets of the periphery.
All three groups formed to combat and name the structural and everyday
violences that Black women and feminised peoples on the periphery
experience, and to form networks of mutual aid in and beyond the formal
and temporary reoccupations of urban space in the poetry readings and
writing groups they organise. Themes emergent from their work include the
power of the Black women of the periphery, the ongoing violence of racism
and/as a gramática da dor, and the singularities of Black women as opposed
to homogenising and pathologising dominant discourses. The cartographies
remapped are forms of escrevivência in which are produced other (political)
subjectivities in relation, and in which the sacred feminine and ancestral form
a central part in struggles for self-recognition and emergence as (political)
206
subjects on their own terms. The cultural grammar these collectives create
through their reoccupations of place and body can thus be understood as
co-creating ‘discourse and subjectivities … in new forms of life’ (de Alencar,
2021b: 616–17; see also Rizzi, 2020).
The three Afro-Brazilian women’s poetry collectives take us deeply
into the territories of the racialised and feminised self in her struggle for
survivance and life in the urban peripheries. They show us how, for Afro-
Brazilian women, the struggle for knowing-being is a feminised resistance
that necessarily stretches the coordinates, logics and (ir)rationalities of
heteropatriarchal capitalist-coloniality in its onto-epistemological project
of death of the racialised body. Her turning into flesh denied reason, safety,
nurturing and care is the space from which Black women develop a cultural
grammar that contests the very boundaries of territory itself and takes this
struggle to the epistemological territories of reason, knowing, voice and
political being and its conditions of possibility.
The praxis of these poets embodies a cultural-epistemological gramática
da dor e alegria that announces a society without domination and that rebels
against a logic of binary hierarchical structurings and subjectivities. This is
a placed feminisation of resistance that reoccupies the invisibilised urban
periphery and Black female subjectivity. These three collectives name and
speak the unspeakable trauma to the racialised and feminised body (Motta,
2018) that is constitutive of the modern city of Fortaleza. They map with
their embodied words and narratives the social relationships of cruelty and
territories of violence in which Black and poor populations are left for
dead and actively exterminated. They speak this as something that criss-
crosses and colonises their very communities, and thus they have had to
carve out, organise and occupy spaces in the periphery of their own, away
from the slams and poetry salons that often reproduce their silence/ing (de
Alencar, 2021b).
Through their words, these poets come into presence from invisibility and
denaturalise by speaking and contesting systematic suffering and exclusions.
Becoming authors of their own narratives, they reoccupy language/
representation/voice as territories in dispute. They mark and map new
grammatical territories, not only through narratives that expose and speak
the unspeakable, thus rupturing the false claims to democratic equality
of modern Brazil, but by changing language as an act of possession and
ownership of an individual into a collective form of poetry-making. They
also validate oral languages and slang, developing antipoemas (anti-poems)
against the canon of colonial-patriarchal Poetry that continues to reproduce
the pathologisation and elision of the knowing-being of Black feminised
subjects. They thus decolonise and feminise otherwise masculine terms such
as ‘o colectivo cultural’ to ‘a colectiva cultural’ or ‘o poema’ to ‘a poema’, bringing
into life their own being-knowing. This resonates with Gloria Anzaldúa’s
207
reflection on why she was compelled to write: because it enabled her ‘[t]‌o
become more intimate with myself and you. To discover myself, to preserve
myself, to make myself, to achieve self-autonomy’ (1987: 169). We see this
coming into knowing-being and self-autonomy, despite and beyond the
violences that contextualise her life, including those articulated through
the canon of colonial-patriarchal capitalist Poetry, in the poem by Nina
Rizzi (2020):
by the cross by the sword by the disease

and through language came domination
… the language of a father of a rapist of a church of a police of
a state of a genocide
from a past that is present and is fascist racist misogynist
homophobic life-phobic and colonial
not fit into totalising particles
of White power males
drop the binds
the language, the language
call her: she
and whoever wants to: desire
A poem is an original dialect and a pretugues4 and a slang
This coming into being and speech, making visible and denouncing
racialised and gendered class violences, ruptures enforced silence and builds
collective courage to overcome the fear of speaking. Poetic life in this way
is not merely a representative act or performance, it is a way in which the
entire corporality of the poets, a Black feminised flesh, comes into being,
rupturing the registers of visibility of the hegemonic script of the political-
epistemological. This is how escrevivência is enfleshed on the peripheries of
the territories of the city by feminised and racialised subjects-in-relation. As
the Pretarau collective declare, ‘we cry out poems … for the fundamental
and inexorable revolution of our bodies, of the pack that bathes in the brave
sea of courage to defend its own’ (2021: 5).
Their escrevivência ‘prefigures a different form of life from that of the global
patriarchal capitalist-colonial system’ (de Alencar, 2021a: 4). It is not merely
therefore a resistance or reoccupation of the urban periphery that articulates
its critique of the present, rather it is a rich and multidimensional praxis
that announces another political, subjective and material relationality and/as
the emergent possibility of Black feminised life and/as political subjectivity.
Here a gramática da dor combines necessarily with a gramática da alegria, of
pain with joy and laughter, of desire, and love. As Ma Njanu (Andrade,
2020) expresses-enfleshes:
208
eyes the walls

kiss your lick
The one I love: let’s change the world
This affirmative enfleshment of Black feminised reason and being otherwise

is held by and nurtured through connection to Ancestrality and traditions of
African diasporic spirituality such as Candomblé. Here the magical ancestral
power of convocation and intention enables the calling into being of other
Black worlds. This is a shamanic poetic expression, an ofô, or enchantment,
which is enfleshed ‘through words but it is much more than this: an ofô is a
magical spell, capable of deeply transforming the world’ (Pretarau, 2020: 5).
As the Pretarau collective continues, ‘For us Black women poets, an ofô is the
becoming of the history we want and dare to build, undermining the colonial
silencing of racism, LGBT phobia and machismo with the sharpness of our
voices’. Reoccupations of being and knowing thus rupture the coordinates
of non-being and denial of the Prophetic subject of knowing of capitalist-
coloniality through the dark wisdoms of these women-in-movement and/
as reoccupations of the territories of the body and city (Motta, 2018; Motta
and Bermudez, 2019).
Conclusion
The years 2010–12 have been heralded as the start of a global wave of
mobilisation centred around the occupation of public space. This chapter
has contributed to feminist analysis of such (re)occupations by tracing
an intersectional decolonising revolutionary feminist story of raced and
feminised subjects on the margins of theoretical production and political
power. Our focus has been on the reoccupations of territories as land and
body or subjectivity co-created through new languages of the political-
epistemological by campesino and Indigenous women of the MST and Afro-
Brazilian women and feminised poets of the periphery of the urban metropolis
of Fortaleza. To engage with dignity and integrity with these collective
enfleshments otherwise has implied relationship-building over many years
between the authors, and between the authors and the movements/collectives
honoured in this chapter. It also necessitates conceptual work to decolonise
and feminise taken-for-g ranted (feminist) framings of protest and resistance,
territory and space/place, and the multilayered onto-epistemological nature
of reoccupation itself.
The work we have pieced together in these pages has threads of (dis)
connection and resonance/dissonance with that of other contributors
to this volume. Bringing to text and thought these (dis)connections
and resonances/dissonances allows us to distinguish more clearly the
distinctiveness of this chapter and identify its potential gifts for feminist
209
struggles for emancipation and reoccupation more broadly, to ensure they

do not reproduce in theory or practice the elision and negation of raced and
feminised subjects and communities. Echoing Emma Gómez Nicolau (in
Chapter 7 in this volume) on the development in Spanish protest camps of
women-only spaces that are transversal and do not reify or essentialise the
category ‘woman’, the Afro-Brazilian women on the urban peripheries of
Fortaleza also found themselves in a situation in which they needed their
own spaces, to articulate their own voice, to enable onto-epistemological
emergence, co-creation and decolonisation. The lines of gendered, raced
and class exclusions criss-cross also the subcultural spaces of the underside
of the modern/colonial city. Like their transversal sisters in Spain, the
Black women poets of Fortaleza developed a politics of reoccupation based
on horizontality, intimacy and collective kinship. However, they develop
these along decolonising lines of enfleshed emergence through a gramática
da dor e alegria and the birthing of escrevivência that ushers in the emergence
of new-ancient political subjectivities, voices and Black reason from the
margins of non-being.
As the chapters in this volume by Chia-Ling Yang (Chapter 5), Joan
Haran (Chapter 8), Catherine Eschle (Chapter 9) and Anastasia Kavada
(Chapter 10) indicate, the women and feminised subjects of the MST
and the Zé Maria de Tomé Settlement are not alone in politicising social
reproduction and the invisibilised and devalued labours of care as the
font and source of another politics and of other political subjectivities.
The women of the MST, however, in their longer-term reoccupation of
the territories of land and economy, enable the prefigurative emergence
through feminist informal pedagogies of social economies embedded within
agroecological principles and practices. Moreover, the onto-epistemological
logics of non-being bring for the Afro-Brazilian poetry collectives further
depth to the enfleshed and to territory as body and self, which undergirds
the very possibility of (political) speech, reason and knowing-being: this is
the gramática da dor e alegria.
Finally, our archiving-of-sorts raises sister questions to those raised by
several chapters in this volume –by Haran (Chapter 8), Alison Bartlett
(Chapter 12), Niamh Moore (Chapter 13), Heather Hurwitz and Anne
Kumer (Chapter 14) and Kate Kerrow et al (Chapter 15) –about the
relationship of the protest camp to the archive. These chapters explore how
camps do not end at the gate and are not only physical sites: they are also
sites of feminist imagining that make other activism and ways of being a
possibility. We would add to this how feminised and racialised reoccupations
of urban and rural territories do not only provide the grounds of possibility
for feminised cultural imaginations, but also prefiguratively and horizontally
enflesh multiple grounds of knowing-being beyond the confinements,
codifications and violent separations of heteropatriarchal capitalist-coloniality.
210
These reoccupations make visible the complexities of territories in dispute

and herald new-ancient grammars of the flesh/political being and the
commons upon which to nurture and tend social-spiritual-epistemological
territories dedicated to life, our lives well-lived.
Notes
1
This is a neologism coined by the Brazilian scholar of popular education Paolo Freire. It
means to navigate or guide oneself but drops the reference to the North in the original
word in Portuguese to root this process of discovery within the South.
2
All translations of published and poetry texts originally in Portuguese are the authors’ own.
3
All the quotations in this chapter from the poets Nina Rizzi, Ma Njanu and the Pretarau
collective are from poems that are ‘open source’; that is, they are not copyrighted and
instead are made available on websites or online blogs for free distribution.
4
This term is used to emphasise the African influences on the language and culture of
Brazil (for example, Rios, 2019).
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213
PART IV
The Feminist Afterlives

of Protest Camps
12
Feminism on Aboriginal Land:

The 1983 Pine Gap Women’s Peace
Camp, Central Australia
Alison Bartlett
Introduction
This research is generated on Whadjuk country, the unceded lands of
Noongar people on what is commonly known as the city of Perth in the
south-west corner of Western Australia. This acknowledgement of country
positions this chapter in a particular political time and context. This recent
practice of acknowledging the Indigenous land on which we live and work
acts as a symbolic reminder of the violent colonial history of Australia. It
registers the ongoing colonising relations as both historic and insistently
present today. It is now common to see such phrases on email signatures,
before public talks and ceremonies, at openings of meetings and festivals,
and Australia Post now has a formal place for Indigenous country on
postal addresses.
This chapter is predicated on the continuing valency of political and
theoretical contexts, both historical and in the present. As a White Anglo-
Australian researcher, I think through some of the entanglements between
feminist ideas and practice as they take place on a colonised land, paying
attention to the language and politics circulating in the 1980s and their
relation to contemporary feminist discourses through which we now speak
and write. It is a complicated and often subjective set of engagements
that might be characterised as fractious, confusing, awkward and awe-
inspiring: both conservative and radical. In the 1980s Donna Haraway
suggested that we are always in the process of constructing ‘situated
knowledge’, rather than revealing truths, and can only ever attain a partial
perspective (1988). Striving for objectivity, Haraway argued, is misguided,
217
because we are all the products of our social experiences and inevitably
work from these premises, which form our epistemological foundations.
This argument might also be applied to the legacies of feminist theory and
philosophy through which we work, and which complicate the way we can
remember and narrate feminism and its histories.
More specifically, this chapter focuses on a women-only protest camp
held at Pine Gap/Quiurnpa in central Australia in 1983 and reads it as an
encounter of feminism on Aboriginal land. Since that event, the chant
‘Always was, always will be, Aboriginal land’ is often heard at protests of
all kind; however, feminist engagement with what was then known as
Aboriginal ‘land rights’ is rarely remembered or included in feminist histories.
While feminism in Australia is largely anchored to the subject position of
White middle-class woman, as Goenpul woman Professor Aileen Moreton-
Robinson argues (2000), this chapter uses the Pine Gap protest camp to seek
out scenes that complicate and transect Black–White relations and feminisms.
These entanglements and engagements involve reorienting how the event
is remembered, and also perhaps the forms in which it can be narrated.
Background: Pine Gap Women’s Peace Camp, 1983

The Pine Gap protest was conceived as part of the extended campaign
around the ‘knot’ that was Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp
(see Chapter 13 by Moore and Chapter 15 by Kerrow et al in this volume),
coinciding with the imminent arrival of the US Pershing missiles onto the
commons, but also to draw attention to the little-known US military satellite
facility at Pine Gap whose lease was about to be renegotiated. Pine Gap/
Quiurnpa describes a feature of the landscape, about 30 kilometres from the
township of Alice Springs/Mparntwe, but the most extraordinary aspect is
still the sight of an ever-increasing number of massive white radomes sitting
under the MacDonnell Ranges/Tjoritja amid military grade mesh fence
and sentry boxes. The protest camp was proposed at Easter at a meeting in
Ngunnawal country/Canberra, Australia, when the umbrella organisation
Women for Survival was established. It took place in November 1983
when hundreds of women arrived in the small outback town of Alice
Springs/Mparntwe from all over Australia and other parts of the world,
including Pitjantjatjara women who travelled from their homelands (James,
1984) which cover large tracts of central and the north-western section of
southern Australia (known as APY –Arrernte, Pitjantjatjara, Yankuntatjara –
homelands). The non-Indigenous women gathered initially at nearby Roe
Creek to form affinity groups and to undertake training in media, collective
decision-making, nonviolent direct action, legal rights and racism. They
then proceeded to the gates of the Pine Gap military base to camp for two
weeks on the side of the bitumen road in the red dirt.
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Feminism on Aboriginal Land
Participants were mostly White women from a range of occupations, ages

and political positions, and taking part in this women-only protest was for
many an introduction to protest culture, to feminist thinking, to women-
only spaces, and their first contact with Indigenous people and culture. For
others it was part of an activist life of protests, of feminism, women-centrism
and working with Indigenous people and organisations. The protest camp
was widely reported and criticised (see Murray, 2009; Bartlett, 2011) but
also supported by unions and politicians as evidenced by the collection of
telegrams and scrapbooks in the Jesse Street National Women’s Library (in
Ultimo, NSW) and the Melbourne University Archives, the two largest
collections of material from this protest camp. Located in the desert at the
start of summer, temperatures were hot during the day reaching 40 degrees
Celsius and still quite cold during the night dropping to near freezing. The
women were sleeping on the side of the road in tents and swags, they set up
kitchen areas and latrines and sometimes went to Alice Springs for supplies
and a shower or a swim in the local pool.
Akin to Greenham there were plenty of actions carried out largely for
the media: there was an initial march to the gates of the military facility,
street theatre, community singing, and a tea party planned on the manicured
green grass inside the facility after a demonstration of how to climb over
the fence. Donning hyperfeminised dresses and sun hats, and with rugs
and food to replicate a satirical ‘Boston Tea Party’, this was the day that
111 women were arrested for trespass and all of them gave their names
as Karen Silkwood after the US anti-nuclear campaigner. All 111 Karen
Silkwoods spent the night in the Alice Springs Watchhouse and went to
court the next day. While the protest camp was the central locus of actions,
protestors came and went over the two weeks, as did media, police and
local aggressors (Kelham, 2010).
There were two women’s peace camps held in Australia: one in November
1983 on Arrernte country at the Pine Gap Joint (US/Australian) Defence
Facility in central Australia, 20 miles from Alice Springs/Mparntwe; and the
other in 1984 on Whadjuk Noongar land known as Cockburn Sound just
south of the city of Perth in Western Australia, opposite a naval base on the
adjacent Garden Island/Meandup. My research interest in the first event is
partly due to my childhood lived in Alice Springs/Mparntwe; unlike most
of the authors in this volume who were part of protest camps, my primary
interest is with the site of protest, which was then a small remote town where
I remember nothing feminist ever happened. Indeed, I moved away from the
town around the time of the protest, without any awareness that it was going
on. There is, however, substantial archival material available, and the iconic
landscape of the ‘heart of Australia’ made the event globally newsworthy.
The sight of women protesting in the desert inverts enduring colonial
mythologies (Bartlett, 2013) as it continues to erase the continued presence
219
of Indigenous desert women. One of the local camp organisers, Jane Lloyd,
went on to write a thesis about how peace, Aboriginal and women’s politics
intersected at the protest camp, noting ‘the inadequacy of existing theorising
on the topics of the relationship of race and gender’ (Lloyd, 1988: 1). Since
then protestor Megg Kelham has stated there were ‘intense debates about
the relationship between the Aboriginal and women’s movements sparked
by the protest’s location’ (2010: 182). This chapter aims to reinvoke some
of those relationships as scenes of feminism on Aboriginal land.
Approach: critical theory, sources, scenes

Arguably, feminist protest camps were a different way of doing things, not just
of putting bodies on the line but of insisting on a continued presence until
change happened. This had fascinating consequences: of turning military
installations into places of domesticity and everyday life; of challenging male-
dominated domains and aesthetics, for example by decorating military fences
with symbolic objects of protest; of challenging heteronormative sexuality
and the connections between family violence and nationalist militarism by
women-only and openly lesbian safe spaces; and engagement with police
and judicial forces including going to prison in the service of voicing protest.
Contesting ideological social structures was a fundamental plank of women’s
liberation in the 1970s so its application in women’s anti-nuclear and peace
protests in the 1980s was symptomatic of broader contestations of form that
involved play, carnival, upending logics and reinventing templates. This was
apparent in the kinds of publications and activist events carried out, and
the adoption and remaking of commonly understood slurs for women like
witches, hags, gossips. Indeed, the remaking of language was understood
by some to be necessary for new understandings of a non-patriarchal
world. In this spirit, the entanglements and engagements I contend with
here are proposed as a series of scenes, put together without a desire to
hide the messy bits but to highlight them. As writers we are trained to
produce neat narratives to account for the past, even if this means ignoring
the frayed encounters, the unholy affiliations and the radical pleasures of
solidarity. As Claire Hemmings reminds us in Why Stories Matter, accounts
of feminist history are often told as ‘a series of interlocking narratives of
progress, loss, and return that oversimplify [its] complex history’ (2011: 3).
In this chapter I present a series of ‘scenes’ that are taken mostly verbatim
from the archives and which focus on Indigenous–White relations, the
feminist vectors produced and transgressed, and the structural relations of
feminism with colonisation. This is undoubtedly another selective account
of the protest camp which, on reflection, seeks to find a more complex
history of Indigenous and non-Indigenous women through feminism and
protest camps.
220
As a researcher who was not at the protest camp I research, my sources for
this chapter are based on public archives and published texts. Kate Eichhorn
notes in her book The Archival Turn in Feminism a dialogic relation between
archives and neoliberalism as a form of ordering ‘outrage’ that repositions
historical activism as the past, and also limits everyday access to that past in its
complexity (2013: 6). She advocates for archival activism as ‘a reorientation to
the past’ in order to understand the present, a process that ‘defamiliarizes the
very order of things’ (2013: 7) in ‘an attempt to regain agency in an era when
the ability to collectively imagine and enact other ways of being in the world
has become deeply eroded’ (2013: 9). Using archives in this project is both
agentic and also limiting, as only some social actors have a place in it: those
who write or are written about. Indigenous women who participated in the
peace camp appear only through the writing of non-Indigenous women. This
already partial material, then, is part of the entanglement of this chapter, and
foregrounds what Moreton-Robinson calls ‘the possessive logics of white
patriarchal sovereignty’ (2015: xi): ‘possessive logics are operationalised within
discourses to circulate sets of meanings about ownership of the nation, as
part of commonsense knowledge, decision-making, and socially produced
conventions’ (2015: xii). Possessive logics also determine what is collected
and preserved in archives (Janke and Iacovino, 2012). In partial reparation,
this chapter introduces Indigenous feminist theorists and commentators as
identifiable through their preferred kinship with particular First Nations lands
(Martin and Mirraboopa, 2003: 204), while non-Indigenous sources lack
this identifier. It also refers to place names (that is, to ‘country’), through
both the Anglo and First Language name. This chapter is not what Karen
Martin and Booran Mirraboopa name Indigenist research, which centralises
an Indigenous ontology as its standpoint, but more akin to critical Whiteness
theory in its attention to the construction of assumed dominant colonial
values that continue to frame scholarship and governance.
In Australia, Indigenous women have mounted exemplary critiques of
feminism arguing that it often runs counter to the interests of Indigenous
women. Writing in the feminist magazine Refractory Girl in 1976 Kunjandji
woman and Sydney magistrate Pat O’Shane asks in her essay title, ‘Is
there any relevance in the Women’s Movement for Aboriginal Women?’,
reminding readers that sexism ‘did not wipe out whole tribes of our people’
and therefore ‘our major fight is against racism’ (1976: 33). O’Shane was
writing after the 1975 Women and Politics Conference at which a Black
Women’s meeting was held which ‘focused firmly on issues affecting the
whole Aboriginal community, on behalf of land rights, on the improvement
in welfare policies, asserting Aboriginal self-determination’, as historian
Patricia Grimshaw records (1981: 88). Grimshaw cites two points regarding
women that are reported in Aboriginal and Islander Identity from those
meetings: ‘Helping stop forced sterilization on our black women in Australia
221
while white women campaign for the right to abortion, and Coalescing and
joining us as women to work together on all issues’ (quoted in Grimshaw,
1981: 88). Clearly there are counterproductive goals at work when White
women are agitating to limit their fertility while Indigenous women want
agency to have and keep their children within a regulatory social structure
that sees them as ‘bad mothers’ (Huggins, 1998; Bartlett, 2004), but these
accounts also register an interface between White feminists and Black women
around this time. Grimshaw cites another (unnamed) Indigenous woman
from the conference proceedings who explains that:
‘We do not have a nuclear family system. We are an extended family

system. In feminist theory there are theories such as the romantic
idealisation of women, Juliet Mitchell talks about dilemmas and drop-
outs. This is not at all relevant to us because in our traditional culture
and in our contemporary culture we are equal with our men.’ (Quoted
in Grimshaw, 1981: 88)
In her touchstone text, Talkin’ Up to the White Woman (2000), Moreton-

Robinson takes ‘an Indigenous standpoint within Australian feminism’
(2000: xvi), stressing that ‘an Indigenous woman’s standpoint is informed
by social worlds imbued with meaning grounded in knowledges of different
realities from those of white women’ (2000: xvi). Using ‘the concept
“subject position” to denote a socially constructed position whereby one’s
behaviour is significantly shaped by what is expected of that position rather
than by conscious intention’ (2000: xvii), Moreton-Robinson’s critique of
the subject position ‘white middle-class woman’ demonstrates the ways in
which ‘white middle-class women’s privilege is tied to colonization and the
dispossession of Indigenous people’ and ‘feminists’ knowledge of systemic
racism is easily abstracted from their embodied experience as white middle-
class women’ (2000: xx). Moreton-Robinson’s call for ‘new ways of thinking
about racialized inter-subjective relations’ (2000: xxv) as a critical approach
inspired much theoretical work on the complicity of White women in
violent Indigenous histories in Australia (see Paisley, 2000; Haggis, 2003;
Haskins, 2006) and the development of critical Whiteness theory. In the
dominant academic and popular imaginations, however, the concept that all
White feminists were racist tends to prevail as an overdetermined historical
position; this can also act to ameliorate White privilege in feminism today
by placing racism in the past. This is observed by a new generation of
writers like Arrernte woman Celeste Liddle (2014) and Darumbal/South
Sea Islander Amy McQuire (2018) who name themselves as Aboriginal
feminists developing Aboriginal feminism, and who are notable for their
work in public and journalistic domains rather than in academic publications.
Research into events like the Pine Gap women’s protest demonstrates the
222
complexities of intersectionality and tentatively engages with the narrative

that second wave feminism is remembered as an exclusively White women’s
movement in the Australian context.
Women for Survival: nuclear politics, land rights and

women
Women for Survival was the name of the umbrella organisation created in
1983 specifically to organise this protest camp, and their values are evidence
of the complex and intersecting politics of the 1980s. The organisation
brought together numerous established groups whose politics were variously
focused on feminist, anti-nuclear or peace movement politics. As listed
in a 1983 feminist publication Grapevine, their aims were: first, to draw
attention to the little-known military intelligence facility at Pine Gap and
the existence of US military operations in Australia; and second, to fully
support Aboriginal land rights, autonomy and self-determination, noting
the links between uranium mining and the nuclear arms race and their direct
denial of Indigenous sacred sites. The aims continue to list global violence
and its impact on women and children, nuclear violence and the Pacific, and
demands for defence spending to be redirected to protect the environment
(1983: 10). It is instructional that the organisation links Indigenous land
rights to surviving the nuclear arms race; this was an urgent threat in the
1980s, upheld by patriarchal systems of conflict through militarisation and
war which are replicated, in microcosm, in family violence. Indeed, one
of the reasons for some of the Aboriginal women supporting the Pine Gap
women’s protest was their living memory of Maralinga, land which was
used as a nuclear test site by the British government in the 1950s and 1960s
(Lloyd, 1988). Reporting on Aboriginal women’s responses in the magazine
Chain Reaction, Diana James quotes one of the ‘hundred or so Pitjantjatjara
women [who] travelled long distances to be part of the women’s peace
demonstration at Pine Gap’:
‘We want the Americans to take their war and instruments of war
back to their own country; their fight is nothing to do with us. We
want this land and to look after it well. We want to smell the clean
fresh air blowing over our land, not like at Maralinga where we smelt
the black dust from their bombs. Many of our relatives died after the
Maralinga bombs were dropped and the black dust blew over our
country.’ (Quoted in James, 1984: 17)
Land selected for mining and military operations is often not visible to
the high density of coastal and city dwellers, but constitutes an ongoing
form of colonisation, violence and erasure for Indigenous inhabitants. The
223
links between uranium mining, military nuclear testing and nuclear waste
sites that underpin the resources for nuclear power and nuclear war were
recognised by the organisers of Pine Gap protest camp, some of whom had
recently protested the proposed Jabiluka uranium mine on Mirarr country
near Kakadu National Park. A decade earlier, arguably the most famous
Australian protest camp –the Aboriginal Tent Embassy –was established
on the grounds of Parliament House in Canberra in 1972 to dispute the
priority given to commercial mining leases over recognition of Aboriginal
rights to the land. Ironically the site is now heritage-listed as a landmark
of national significance and, while the terms of protest change, the site
is still active in its focus on Indigenous alienation (hence the need for an
embassy). As Moreton-Robinson reminds us, ‘Indigenous subjects … have
a connection to the land that is not based on white conceptualisations of
property’ (2000: 163), but rather on custodianship and care.
Keeping in mind this constellation of critical issues, the protest camp at Pine
Gap/Quiurnpa offers a compelling example of broad-based peace politics
and feminism played out in the Australian desert on Arrernte land. Many
commentators note that it was fortunate that some Women for Survival
volunteers were employed by Aboriginal women’s organisations in central
Australia; their working relationships and knowledge were vital for following
protocol, and being able to speak ‘language’ to directly communicate with
the Indigenous language groups in central Australia. Nevertheless, there were
differences between the way they worked with stakeholders and how women
from other places imagined they ought to have been consulting, as well as
between urban Indigenous women and those living on country. Before the
camp in November 1983, there was a crucial weekend of meetings in the
small township of Alice Springs/Mparntwe in July which will set the first
scene for this chapter. Mostly quoted directly from various published/archival
sources, the selection and sequence nevertheless construct a tangled narrative.
Three scenes
Scene one: racism, July 1983
A number of local European women who had spent years working

closely with the Aboriginal community as lawyers, interpreters,
anthropologists and teachers … believed that any protest action had
to obtain the consent of traditional land owners before it could take
place, a complex process which could not be guaranteed to fit a pre-
determined European time-line. (Kelham, 2010: 176)
Additionally, there was a newly established Indigenous women-only camp

protesting a proposed dam at Werlatye-Therre, a women’s sacred site close
224
to Alice Springs (Lloyd, 1988; Kelham, 2010). Proposals to join with this
protest were
met with horror by local European women … it also angered a group

of non-Aboriginal women from Brisbane who interpreted it as a classic
example of Europeans taking over Aboriginal issues to promote their
own cause and hence a continuation of mainstream colonial politics.
(Kelham, 2010: 176)
The discussion about the Werlatye-Therre protest foreground ideological

rifts according to Kelham (2010) and Lloyd (1988):
Werlatye-Therre was not only a site of struggle between Aborigines and

the Northern Territory government but became a site of ideological
struggle between the groups of women participating in the weekend
of meetings. (Lloyd, 1988: 40)
Attempts to reach consensus became deeply emotionally painful when

European women began accusing each other of racism. Many of the
city women present, who observed local European women speaking
out whilst local Aboriginal women remained silent, judged the local
European-Aboriginal relationship as old-fashioned paternalistic
colonialism. Local women’s explanation that the Aboriginal women
spoke little English, were shy of public speaking, and were telling the
European women what to say and do behind the scenes … went either
unsaid, unheard or unbelieved. (Kelham, 2010: 176)
The disparity between the southern women’s and central Australian

women’s notion and understanding of consultation and the dynamics
of such issues as Aboriginal land rights emerged during the initial stages
of organization. (Lloyd, 1988: 35)
Condemning the protest as racist, the Brisbane women, along with

some Alice Springs locals and Adelaide FANG [Feminist Anti-Nuclear
Group], withdrew their support for the action. (Kelham, 2010: 178)
Some of the condemnations were published in the anti-nuclear magazine

Chain Reaction, by the Brisbane Women’s Land Rights Solidarity Group:
Pine Gap is located on Aboriginal land, support actions are situated on

Aboriginal land, where we live is on Aboriginal land, meeting places for
Women for Survival are on Aboriginal land … all the land in Australia
has been colonised and a commitment to land rights should not be time
225
and place specific. … It is easier to support via fund-raising and it is easier

to support something away from home. We kid ourselves we are doing
something, without risking our white privileges. … There is a difference
between encouraging black women to attend ‘our’ events by extending
invitations, and challenging our organization of events so that they are
not ethnocentric and colonialist. … Whites who support land rights
must constantly assess, analyse and redefine our actions and the basis from
which we act, including how we define our political priorities. (1984)
The emotional dynamics at work in these accounts are writ large. Reports
by White women of these meetings include registers of shame, guilt, anger,
outrage. This is a scene of White women negotiating their own racism, that
sets up hierarchies of authority and confusion between local and interstate
participants, rural and urban culture, Black and White women, land rights
and feminist and peace politics. It evidences vast differences in language,
cultural ways of speaking and not speaking, conceptions and commitments
to anti-racism, and the ever-present history and ongoing structures that
colonising cultures constantly re-enact. As Moreton-Robinson reminds us,
‘inter-subjective relations reflect the structural relationship between white
society and Indigenous society’ (2000: xxv).
Scene two: men, November 1983

On the first day of the protest, 11 November 1983, the women march to
the military installation led by Aboriginal women with a banner saying
‘Women For Survival. Close Pine Gap’. Striding at the very front is well-
known Wiradjuri activist Mum Shirl from Gadigal country, Sydney. Behind
the banner are local APY land women then the rest of the 800 women and
banners marching to the base.
Mum Shirl has the job of introducing the speakers, and she produces
one unscheduled one … Shorty O’Neill, male Aboriginal land rights
campaigner, out of the back of a truck. He is heard politely but it is
the wrong time and place. (Poussard, 1984: 28)
[U]rban Aboriginal women had chosen a man as first speaker at the

march. (Somerville, 1999: 39)
There was no open objection, but many of us were furious. (Merrilees,

1984: 5)
An ongoing debate in the women’s movement was and continues, about

the right of women to women’s-only spaces. (Somerville, 1999: 39)
226
General agreement that the protest should show support for Aboriginal
rights tripped over some women’s passionate views that if the camp
refused to allow traditional land owners the right to access their own
lands simply because they were men, then the women’s support for
Aboriginal rights would be nothing more than an empty tokenistic
gesture. (Kelham, 2010: 180)
The allegiance of Indigenous women to Black men before White women is

an ongoing anathema to many White feminists. Professor Jackie Huggins, a
Bidjara and Birri-Gubba Juru woman from Queensland, has argued that, ‘In
asking Aboriginal women to stand apart from Aboriginal men, the white
women’s movement was, perhaps unconsciously, repeating the attempts made
over decades by welfare administrations to separate Aboriginal women and
use them against their communities’ (1998: 27). Referring to the practice
of taking Aboriginal girls into service as domestics, and taking children
away from their families to be ‘assimilated’ into White foster care, Huggins
outlines a litany of ways Aboriginal women’s political needs were/are at
odds with White feminist demands of the 20th century:
The white women’s movement argued, for example, that compared

with men, women in Australia were poorly educated and worked
in poorly paid jobs yet Aboriginal women were better educated
than Aboriginal men, and when they were able to be employed,
they worked in better status jobs than Aboriginal men. The white
women’s movement was at that time concerned with sexuality and
the right to say ‘yes’, to be sexually active without condemnation. For
Aboriginal women who are fighting denigratory sexual stereotypes
and exploitation by white men, the issue is more often the right to
say ‘no’. Where white women’s demands to control their fertility were
related to contraception and abortion, Aboriginal women were subject
to unwanted sterilisation and continued to struggle against the loss of
their children to interventionist welfare agencies. (1998: 27)
Women-only space was a crucial part of the politics of this protest so that all
women felt safe to create a living campsite, but Lloyd suggests that ‘where
feminist separatism was the ideology underpinning particular women’s
practice links were assumed with Aboriginal women’s notions of gender
separation’ (1988: 83). In other words, knowledge that Aboriginal women
practice gender segregation led to an assumption by some that it would be
observed at this event. An extension of the ideology of women-only space for
White feminists meant lesbian-safe space, which similarly found little support
among Aboriginal women. Kelham notes Indigenous disapproval of ‘open
227
displays of same-sex affection from those “women with women husbands” as

one local Aboriginal anti-Pine Gap activist described the lesbian protestors’
(2010: 181). Some White women were also unfamiliar and uncomfortable
with the lesbian-safe space or even women-only spaces. Encounters with
unfamiliar epistemologies and ideologies were not restricted to being Black
or White. In reality, Lloyd argues that Aboriginal women’s responses to the
protest, both in general and to specific aspects, were as diverse as White
women’s responses and from both ends of the political spectrum (1988: 83).
Scene three: police, November 1983

‘We tried to make the protest a joint Aboriginal/women protest. But
it wasn’t really successful. The Aboriginal people are so afraid of the
police that they think it’s stupid to put yourself in an arrestable position.’
(Zethoven, 1984: 4)
The arrestable action was the day protestors practise making human
pyramids next to the military mesh fence keeping civilians out of the
military installation. At the given signal, they went over the fence and
conducted a tea party on the green lawns only if they were prepared to be
arrested. This is the moment that 111 women were arrested, each giving
their name as Karen Silkwood. Jenny Green, an Alice Springs White
woman who worked with Aboriginal organisations, talked to Indigenous
women (who did not want to be identified) about their responses for
Chain Reaction (1984):
‘I think it was a real peaceful march, I was real happy when there was
no trouble.’
‘Anwerne lheke arrweketye mape aretyeke, marchirreke anwerne, itne

marchirrenheke … Police mape tenetyame. Itne dancirreke, sing songirreke,
mperlkere mape.’
[We went to see all the women. We marched, they marched on. … The
police were standing there. They danced and sang, the white women.]’
‘I think it is very frightening for Aboriginal women to go through the

fence. I wouldn’t go through the fence ’cos I’d be scared. I think those
women were very brave to go through the fence and get arrested –they
probably just wanted to show the newspapers what they do. But I’d be
only too scared to go through that fence ’cos I know I’ll be the first
one to get arrested. I know that for sure –for an Aboriginal person,
you’d be the first one to get arrested.’
228
‘The itelareke anwernenhe lyete atyerretyine. The wrong way akwete iterlareke.
Ateriremel yenge tywekwenye akweteaneke. Alpmileke arrenthere itye
anwwerne aterireme. Mwerre kwete anwerne aneke.
[I thought they would shoot us today. I thought wrong. Being

frightened I was quiet. Someone said to us you mob, we’re not
frightened. We were still all right.]’
‘Mpelkere itne mwarre nthurre, anwerne lngkerrinyeke. Meetup irreme mwarre

nthurre parikenge jumpirretyeke? Itneke wrong aneke. Anwerne kangke ken
aremel, anwere iltye atwelheke itnenhe aremele.
[The white people, they were really good, for all of us. It was good to
meet up with them. But why did they think they had to go over the
fence? It made trouble for them. We were happy to see it, we clapped
our hands seeing them.]’
Indigenous people in Australia have much to fear from policing and judicial
institutions, are still ‘disproportionately arrested, remanded, and jailed’
with vastly increased likelihood of police violence and neglect and deaths
in custody often prior to any charges laid (Allam et al, 2021). This is an
example of what Moreton-Robinson names as ‘white race privilege, [which]
in Australia and elsewhere, is structurally located and it determines the life
chances of white and non-white people every day’ (2000: 52).
Entanglements and engagements

Scenes like these three suggest encounters between Indigenous and non-
Indigenous women that challenge individual and collective perceptions.
As Green notes, ‘for many it was the first time that they [White protesters]
had travelled to Central Australia, camped in relatively extreme climatic
conditions, met Aboriginal people, seen the inside of the Alice Springs watch
house’ (1984: 14). Lloyd also observes that the peace camp ‘was possibly the
first experience that most of the visiting women had of facing issues such
as racism and land rights as real dilemmas and not as an abstract or distant
intellectual and political issue’ (1988: 53), recalling Moreton-Robinson’s point
that ‘knowledge of systemic racism is easily abstracted from their embodied
experience as white middle-class women’ (2000: xx). Biff Ward and Liz
O’Brien call this ‘a “first-contact” encounter for many city-based white
women, which led to a deepened exploration of racism and its attendant
issues within the women’s movement’ (nd: 2). The idea of first contact
is usually used to denote the moment when Indigenous inhabitants first
encounter White culture, but in this instance is being used to denote White
229
activists first encountering Indigenous people. Australian social movement

historian Verity Burgmann notes that ‘women’s movement activists were
expressly anti-racist, yet contact with Indigenous women was very limited’
(2003: 145). Moreton-Robinson insists that, from an Indigenous standpoint,
‘we have become extremely knowledgeable about white women in ways that
are unknown to most of them’ (2000: xvi), her point being that the inverse
is not so. This was recognised by protestor Margaret Somerville who notes
‘the white women not even able to begin to understand the complex layers
of meaning about relation to land conveyed in the Two-Women dreaming
dance which was performed at our first contact’ (1999: 43) at Roe Creek:
The women dance at dusk by the light of flickering fires and there is
the same gesture of warm skin and touch; the beat of the dance seems
to travel up through the ground into the body. They laugh and fall
about as they negotiate their performance which is short, and then
they are gone. It was said to be a Two-Women dreaming story which
travels through Pitjantjatjara and Arrente country and includes the land
where Pine Gap is now. … We have no means to interpret this dance,
or the songline they are offering us, in terms of reading the landscape
or sharing mutual concerns. (Somerville, 1999: 24)
Lloyd later argues that ‘performance of awulye and inma, women’s songs
and dances, can be read as Aboriginal women’s response to the dynamics
of the women’s camp and the debates over issues of race and gender’ (in
Somerville, 1999: 42; see also Lloyd, 1988: 76), suggesting the dynamic
itself produced this dance.
The extent to which Indigenous and non-Indigenous women can engage
with each other is always limited by continuing structures of colonisation, as
these scenes demonstrate. An unexpected presence of Christianity provided
another entanglement of Indigenous and White missionary histories. While
there were White Quakers and nuns in the protest camp, protestor Wendy
Poussard wryly notes ‘Mum Shirl, the Sydney Aboriginal activist, talks about
the Virgin Mary … “I’m a mad Roman Catholic and I’m black and don’t
you forget it” she says’ (Poussard, 1984: 28). Poussard also remembers when
‘We go to a meeting with a big mob of Pitjantjatjara women who sing hymns
and a welcoming song, moving around the circle and holding hands with
each woman. They ask us to join them in a prayer for the land’ (Poussard,
1984: 34). Lloyd writes about the arrival of Pitjantjatjara women at the
Alice Springs Courthouse the morning the 111 ‘Karen Silkwoods’ were to
appear, where a group prayer was held: ‘The reality of Christian Aboriginal
women did not fit the image that many of the women participating in
the protest had constructed of Aboriginal women and central Australia as
the site of women’s spirituality’ (1988: 77). As with feminism, and White
230
culture, Lloyd argues that ‘the range of interests and political practices held
by central Australian Aborigines … do not fit neatly into any one political
theory and practice’ (Lloyd, 1988: 67). It is interesting that the Aboriginal
women’s Christianity is mentioned in accounts of the event, and yet it is
not considered notable that some of the organisers were active members
of Ananda Marga, a spiritual organisation with an Indian guru, particularly
controversial in Australia at the time due to some members’ links with the
Sydney Hilton Hotel bombing in 1978.
Lloyd identifies a disjuncture between theory and practice, between
ideology and lived relations (1988: 61) contributing to the encounters
at this protest camp, and yet the sheer volume of reflection and critique
published after the camp also suggests that it heralded much interrogation
of feminist theory for White Australia. The expectations and encounters
in the scenes around the Pine Gap protest camp were perhaps symptomatic
of fractures in theory and practice in Australian feminism at the time.
These are often remembered as coming to a head the next year in 1984
when the legendary Women and Labour conference was held in Brisbane/
Meanjin with ‘Racism’ as its major theme. These conferences have been
considered ‘the central conferences of the Australian women’s movement’
(Levy, 1984: 105), and yet the 1984 conference was so riven that it was
the last of its kind. Routinely figured as ‘a turning point –not only in the
feminist politicisation of immigrant and Aboriginal women, but also in the
politicization of all feminists about race and ethnic divisions’, Adele Murdolo
(1996: 69) suggests that this historical feminist narrative is itself ‘partial and
mediated by the lived, embodied experiences of anglo women’. Once again
orientation and sources frame the historical narrative.
Conclusion
This chapter seeks to reorientate the way the Pine Gap Women’s Peace
Camp is remembered and narrated, from its derivative association with the
English countryside through Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp to
a protest event on Aboriginal land with ensuing expectations, negotiations
and confrontations for White Australian feminism. I have argued that these
vectors involved scenes of encounter between Indigenous and non-Indigenous
women that were never simply dialectically racist or anti-racist, but complex
and disruptive in exposing the intrinsic connections between, for example,
colonisation and arrest, land rights and nuclear war, and even dance and prayer.
The scenes from this protest camp indicate a language and conceptual framework
of anti-racist feminism in the 1980s that continue to inform White feminism,
as the same structures of power continue to impact Aboriginal women’s lives.
Reorienting the story of this protest camp as taking place on Aboriginal land
tentatively proposes a renewed attention to sites of protest, colonial legacies and
231
remembering of historical events and discourses of feminism. This might have

significance for future feminist archival work on protest camps in colonised
landscapes: for example where land-names and language and relationships are
routinely Anglicised, when Indigenous voices are not immediately apparent,
and when ideological entanglements are too messy to narrate into a coherent
linear plotline. In such work there are always limitations in writing from a
White settler perspective but also an onus to ‘defamiliarize the very order of
things’, as Eichhorn (2013: 7) characterises the work of archival activists, and
an opportunity to undo the ‘possessive logics’ Moreton-Robinson refers to
(2015: xi). In this way much richer and complex feminist histories can be
remembered as engaging with the issues that still matter.
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234
13
Remembering an Eco/Feminist
Peace Camp
Niamh Moore
Introduction
In the summer of 1993, local environmental organisation, the Friends of
Clayoquot Sound (FOCS), set up a peace camp to support blockades of
a logging road into an area of coastal temperate rainforest (Figure 13.1).
Clayoquot Sound (pronounced ‘klak-wat’) is part of the traditional
territory of the Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations. Though more commonly
known as the West Coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, in
Canada, this is land which is unceded territory and has never been the
subject of any treaties with the Canadian government. Hence it is land
over which the Canadian state has no rightful or even legal jurisdiction,
but where the logics of settler colonialism enable dispossession of
Indigenous peoples from land and the ongoing extractive industry of
deforestation.1 In this complex context, activists created a peace camp
in a site named as ‘the black hole’, as a ‘moonscape’ (Figure 13.2), a
reference to the fact that the land had been clear-cut, and that the practice
of tree-planting clear-cut areas had not been successful. The camp was
in a bleak landscape, tents pitched wherever a relatively flat and even
piece of ground could be found, between the stumps of trees, and along
the side of a rough logging road. New arrivals at the camp were offered
workshops teaching consensus decision-making and the practice of non-
violence to support the protest of civil disobedience in the early morning
blockades of the logging road. Over the course of the summer of 1993
over 12,000 people passed through the camp and over 800 people were
arrested, in one of the largest acts of non-violent civil disobedience in
Canadian history. The camp offered a creative and inspiring site of the
kind of prefigurative politics to which many chapters in this volume
235
Figure 13.1: Temperate rainforest with moss growing on branches
Source: Clayoquot Lives archive: https://clayoquotlives.sps.ed.ac.uk/items/show/124, Creative

Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by-sa/4.0/
testify, intervening in forest policy and creating an alternative way of

living and working together, complete with compost toilets (see also
Chapter 8 by Haran in this volume) and a fine view over the devastation
of the clear-cut.
I spent a few weeks at the camp in 1993, and was arrested there during the
daily blockades of logging roads. This was a place where the politics of race,
class and gender in the context of settler colonialism (to name just some of
the most salient issues) were tightly bound up in controversies over logging.
The setting up of an ecofeminist peace camp, and the scale of politics and
arrests, was compelling and inspirational to participate in –and offered a
236
Remembering an Eco/Feminist Peace Camp
Figure 13.2: Moonscape
Source: Clayoquot Lives archive, https://clayoquotlives.sps.ed.ac.uk/items/show/88, Creative

licenses/by-sa/4.0/
profound contrast with dominant narratives of the end of feminism at the

time, to which I will return later.
The immediate impetus for the camp was the announcement that logging
company MacMillan Bloedel had been granted permission to log up to
70 per cent of the land in Clayoquot, site of one of the last remaining
contiguous coastal temperate rainforests in the world. At a time when
many environmental groups were focused on deforestation in the Amazon
rainforest, this campaign was a crucial attempt to hold a country in the
Global North to account for hiding the extent of logging in its own backyard
(Figure 13.3).
Three years later, in 1996, I returned to carry out oral history interviews
with activists, alongside ethnographic and documentary research, as part
of my PhD (see Moore, 2015), and I continue to reflect on the ongoing
significance of the camp.
The chapter draws on the experience of researching an ecofeminist peace
camp and gathering oral histories of activists in the mid-1990s, writing an
academic book and then, more recently, creating an open access digital
archive of these oral history interviews.2 By thinking through these different
moments of creating and remembering ecofeminism, in the broader context
of feminist histories, the chapter explores the fragility of traces of certain
moments and movements of feminism, and particular instantiations of
activism, especially activism that aims to enact alternative worlds. The chapter
237
Figure 13.3: Logging truck

licenses/by-sa/4.0/
asks: how and why do we remember, or forget, peace camps as part of our
story of feminist activism and what are the political consequences of these
acts of memory or forgetting? It considers what feminism would look like
if told through histories of feminist peace camps.
Before Clayoquot: Greenham as cultural memory

Before I ever set foot in the Clayoquot Sound Peace Camp, I had heard of
Greenham, Seneca, Puget Sound and other feminist peace camps. Clayoquot
made sense and was recognisable to me because of Greenham. I have never
been to Greenham, but Greenham has come to me: through stories from
people I met who have been there; through songs I learned and sang at other
protests, like around the Newbury bypass in the UK; through newspapers,
books, banners, film, badges, pamphlets, blogs, academic articles, websites;
through symbols, through other protests, through interviews with women
who mentioned Greenham; and through archives, both physical and digital.
These media are crucial documentation of experiences, stories and research
on Greenham, putting into circulation accounts of feminist peace camps,
passing on knowledge and learning to other activists, and inspiring further
feminist activism. Greenham and other feminist peace camps are part of
my ‘cultural memory’ of feminist activism –memories of events and places
I have not directly experienced, where I have no ‘personal memory’, but
238
rather a resonant awareness of these stories, which comes through the

circulation and remediation of feminist cultures of activism (Reading and
Katriel, 2015: 5).
Greenham was one source of inspiration for activists at Clayoquot. I was
excited but not surprised to hear references to Greenham at Clayoquot
and to meet feminists at the camp who had been to Greenham. Memories
of Greenham are reactivated, reanimated and remade time and time again
in subsequent camps like Clayoquot. Greenham is part of my version of
feminist history but, crucially, Greenham is also part of my imaginary of
feminist futures –my sense of what a feminist might be and do, my sense
of what has been possible and what is possible, what another world might
be and how it might be made.
Yet cultural memory, can be, like other memories, fickle, fragile, partial –
Greenham came to me because I sought it out. For all of the huge significance
of Greenham to me and many others, it is not actually a touchstone event
in mainstream UK feminism, or feminist academia.3 By now, shouldn’t I be
bored by endless familiar tales of Greenham, of Greenham hagiography,
rather than still hungry for every crumb? In a book on feminist peace camps,
Greenham is a touchstone –but it is necessary to make the point here about
how unusual this is, how long it has taken for a book where Greenham
almost, just almost, needs to be knocked off its pedestal. Greenham should
be done to death, but it is not. Stories of Greenham remain a site of feminist
archive fever for some of us, because we are so far from the endless repetition
of Greenham that we might expect. There is still so much more to be told
and learned and passed on from Greenham.
How then does a feminist, or even ecofeminist, peace camp enter –or fail
to enter –cultural memory? Anna Reading and Tamar Katriel (2015: 5) point
to the crucial importance of personal memory in contributing to different
forms of cultural production, an example of which we see in Catherine
Eschle’s and Rebecca Mordan’s accounts of their memories of Greenham as
a child motivating their current work (Chapter 15 by Kerrow et al, in this
volume). My own experience of Clayoquot motivates my ongoing work.
The persistence and circulation of cultural artefacts tells of the strength of
feeling around the importance of remediating stories of feminist activism.
In her work on DIY feminist cultures that remediate feminist histories, Red
Chidgey (2012: 87) argues that these forms of cultural production ‘enact
an archival function: they move feminist memory out of the realm of the
institutional and create grassroots memory texts that are mobile, shared and
networked’. There is a certain power in the ways that cultural memory is
not institutionalised, but rather is ad hoc, and this is hailed as crucial to
the possibility of history and memory being made and remade over time
(Reading and Katriel, 2015). However, what becomes apparent is that
much cultural production relies on happenstance, passion, creativity, skills,
239
connections and the complex privileges of enough time and resources. The
recognition and celebration of cultures of making, remaking and passing on
feminist activism is important, but also not always enough; cultural memory
does not always become collective memory, or even in this case a feminist
collective memory.
I want to resist any easy romanticisation of the creativity of feminist
cultural production in the transmission of feminist memory; such memories
are also vulnerable to intentional forgetting. In The Feminist Memoir Project,
Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Anne Snitow (1998: 23) make the important
point that ‘amnesia about political movements is not only an innocent effect
of general forgetfulness, but is socially produced, packaged, promulgated,
and perpetuated’. While they are talking about the role of the state and
mainstream media in the intentional forgetting of social movement activism,
I want to extend this argument to make the point that feminists are also
implicated in and non-innocent in the (failure of) transmission of feminism.
Feminists produce some memories and not others, some archives and not
others. Greenham is remembered by some feminists, but not all. Arguably
it is intentionally forgotten by some. Greenham was, and continues to
be, contentious for some feminists in the UK. (How) will Clayoquot
be remembered?
The traces of peace camps and the wider movements they are part of are
uneven –the role of personal memory and motivations to produce and
circulate creative artefacts is both intensely generative and also part of this
unevenness. The often embodied and tacit nature of feminist movements
also contributes to the unevenness of traces. In this context, feminists have
complemented modes of documenting and materialising traces of activism,
and creative acts of remediation, with the creation of specifically feminist
archives to gather together and make available histories of feminism.
Against the complexities of memory, archives can appear as sites of
evidence, offering tangible documentation and material traces of history.
However, many theorists undermine any sharp distinction between archives
and memory. In arguing that cultural memory performs an archival function,
Chidgey refuses any clear demarcation of memory and archive, or ephemera
and evidence. Similarly, Jennifer Lapp argues that feminist archives, ‘rather
than positioning evidence and memory as distinct or separate –understands
them as inextricably entangled in the maintenances and circulation of feminist
knowledges’ (2020: 4). Archives do not offer any straightforward site of truth
or evidence. Archives are not simply sites for depositing cultural artefacts,
but can also be approached as themselves artefacts of cultural production,
cultural remediation and meaning-making. This is the useful premise of
the ‘archival turn’ –a shift from approaching archives as sources, sites of the
accumulation of documents and records, to taking archives themselves as
subjects, understanding archives as also cultural products –cultural processes
240
even (Stoler, 2002). For archivist and archival theorist Eric Ketelaar, ‘cultural
practices of historical remembrance are not a substitute for archival memory,
but rather are a complement to the archive’. He argues that ‘archives are
not the cultural or social memory of a community’, rather, he sees archives
as ‘among countless different devices used in the process of transforming
individual memories into collective remembering’ (2017: 255). Thus while
media and other forms of cultural production have been identified as key
parts of camp infrastructures (see Chapter 9 by Eschle, in this volume), here
I approach archives as another part of the distributed media infrastructure of
peace camps, not only as repositories for other materials. This chapter thus
also aims to extend consideration of peace camps and their infrastructures to
stories about camps, to cultural production, including the work of creating
archives. In making this feminist archival turn, the chapter also takes up the
importance of the web as feminist method, bringing this work of webbing,
weaving, interconnecting, materialising, to our understanding of feminist
peace camps, arguing we need a diversity of tactics for the creation and
circulation of memories of camps, for remaking feminist histories and futures.
The web has been a creative metaphor for Greenham (for example,
Feigenbaum, 2015), yet it can do much further work. The web is a feminist
method. Against the dusty cobweb view of archives, Greenham’s active,
crafting, creative web suggests a lively account of the world-making work
of archival webs. I turn to Donna Haraway’s account of the string game
of cat’s cradle (1994) as a generative account of the work of webs (see also
Moore, 2018; Chapter 8 by Haran, this volume). It is no accident that
Haraway, with her penchant for cyborgs rather than goddesses, coyote
tricksters rather than spider woman, turns to the cat’s cradle rather than the
web, which may seem an overdetermined metaphor for her. Nonetheless
Haraway’s cat’s cradle is really a feminist web (see also Moore, 2017) and
her account of playing cat’s cradle is generative for thinking through the
worlding work of archiving and storytelling. In an account that echoes the
Greenham chant ‘we are the weavers, we are the web’, for Haraway (2013
[2011]: 18) cat’s cradle is:
a game of relaying patterns, of one hand, or pair of hands, or mouths

and feet, or other sorts of tentacular things, holding still to receive
something from another, and then relaying by adding something new,
by proposing another knot, another web, or better, it is not the hands
that give and receive exactly, but the patterns, the patterning.
The metaphor of cat’s cradle is well suited to passing on stories of feminist

peace camps, through movements back and forth, creating new patterns,
new knots. Haraway (1994: 70) insists that:
241
If we do not learn how to play cat’s cradle well, we can just make a
tangled mess. But if we attend to scholarly, as well as technoscientific,
cat’s cradle with as much loving attention as has been lavished on
high-status war games, we might learn something about what worlds
get made and unmade, and for whom.
Here Haraway offers crucial insights for telling stories of feminist peace
camps, and for working through their uneven remembering and forgetting.
Seeking alternatives to an over-reliance on metaphors of reflection,
Haraway also takes up diffraction as a promising metaphor. She find
diffraction useful because, drawing on the process of diffracting light, she
notes that the resulting image is not a reflection, not a mirror or a copy
of the same, but rather a record that shows the history of the passage of
the light. For Haraway, then, diffraction offers a method for ‘making a
difference in the world’, rather than merely copying or reflecting the
world as it is (Haraway, 1994: 63). Diffraction creates interference, which
might ‘make a difference in how meanings are made and lived’ (Haraway,
1997: 14).
What then did it mean to describe Clayoquot as ‘ecofeminist’?
Clayoquot as an ecofeminist peace camp

The Clayoquot Peace Camp was often explicitly described as ecofeminist.
Even the main provincial newspaper, the Vancouver Sun, ran a story ‘Eco-
feminists Run “Peace Camp” at Clayoquot Sound’ (Bell, 1993), and the
success of the camp was often attributed to the influence of ecofeminism.
Ecofeminism is what initially drew my attention. I had been reading the
emerging literature on ecofeminism in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and
found this to offer a compelling articulation of feminism. At the centre of
ecofeminism’s analytic was a critique of dualisms in western philosophy,
of binary and hierarchical thinking about women and men, nature and
culture, emotion and reason, to name just some key dualisms, as central
in the separation of humans from nature that enabled the devaluing and
destruction of the environment. This identification of a logic of dualism,
explicated by Val Plumwood (1993) in particular, demonstrated how dualisms
did not exist in isolation, but rather were bound together in an interlocking
relationship where terms on different sides of dualisms mapped on to each
other –thus women being associated with nature and emotion; men with
culture and reason. For Plumwood dualistic logics were also central to other
oppressions, including racism, colonialism and speciesism. This attention to
dualistic logics, and relationships across dualisms, has also been articulated as
an intersectional ecofeminism (see also Gaard, 2017; Kings, 2017). Against
dualisms, ecofeminism’s vision of a world of/as webs and interconnections,
242
bound together in a feminist ethic of care, offered a glimpse of an alternative

way of being in the world.
These dualistic logics played out through settler colonialism in Canada, in
seeing territory as a tabula rasa, available for occupation, while dispossessing
Indigenous communities of land. The ongoing logics of settler colonialism
allow forests to be understood as assets to be exploited for commercial gain,
in a forest industry where most jobs are men’s jobs; where technological
change leads to decreasing employment replacing workers with machines;
where the often well-paid work in the logging industry is disappearing
rapidly; where women’s jobs are often in the service sector, in the seasonal
tourism industry, which relies on the persistence of forests; and where First
Nations communities live with the grim consequences of settler colonialism,
on family life, education, health, employment and everyday well-being.
While the Vancouver Sun thought the camp was ecofeminist because women
were ‘running’ it, they misrecognised the role of women as leaders at the
camp and the nature of feminist organising. Women were not so much
‘running’ the camp; rather, ecofeminism at the camp was most commonly
articulated as a commitment to the philosophy and practice of non-violence
and consensus decision-making, and certainly women at the camp were
facilitating these processes. The naming of the camp as a peace camp,
rather than a protest camp, is significant here in revealing genealogies and
connections, and philosophy and practice, connected with other women’s
peace camps such as Greenham (see Moore, 2015).
Yet while the visibility of women as key facilitators of the camp was
perhaps the most tangible manifestation of ecofeminism, there were other,
perhaps less visible ways in which ecofeminism informed the camp. While
my cultural memories of Greenham made an ecofeminist peace camp as a
form of activism make sense to me, I turn to the Women’s Environmental
Network (WEN), an ecofeminist organisation based in London, for my
understanding that the ecofeminist politics of a peace camp far extended
beyond the site of a scrubby clear-cut.
I first heard about Clayoquot Sound through WEN. At a time when most
environmental organisations were focused on deforestation in the Amazon
rainforest, WEN was the only group in Europe with a campaign around
destruction of temperate rainforests, like the forest in Clayoquot. WEN
linked the consumption of disposable sanitary protection, period products,
and other disposable paper products such as toilet roll and newsprint, to the
logging of forests in Canada. The UK was a major importer of wood pulp
from British Columbia in the early 1990s, and the FOCS contacted WEN
when, realising some of the limits of campaigning locally, they wished to
develop an international campaign that targeted governments, companies
and consumers directly implicated in the logging of old-growth forest. While
many of the commonly cited instances of ecofeminist activism in the early
243
1990s were coming from the Global South, WEN’s campaigning was an
important instance of an organisation in the Global North, one that grasped
the ways in which women in the UK were both unwittingly complicit in
logging of temperate rainforest and also at risk through the use of period
products such as pads and tampons. These were often bleached with dioxins,
causing harm to the environment, to the workers involved in pulp processing
and to the women who used the products. The FOCS followed the trail
of wood pulp to the UK and other European countries, and brought their
campaign directly to the public through direct action and media campaigns.
In such ways, activism was diffracted through a range of connected sites,
tracing patterns in the travel of activists4 and trees, and tying new knots of
intensities into the project of opposing clear-cut logging (Figure 13.4). In this
light, the tendency to refer to camps through their locations –Greenham,
Seneca, Puget Sound –might best be understood as synecdoche, where the
site of the camp is but one knot in an extended campaign web that traces
and ties a range of places, politics and issues together.
Researching an ecofeminist peace camp during the

end of feminism
I was captivated by what I had seen and experienced and learned at the peace
camp, and in 1996 I returned to Clayoquot as part of PhD research, and
carried out oral history interviews with activists, drawing also on my own
recollections of my time at the peace camp. I spent time with the FOCS,
worked through some of their own records and documents, and I travelled
around Vancouver and Vancouver Island to follow up activists.
Recording oral history interviews was a way of documenting the
ecofeminism of the camp, that is, a way of materialising the ecofeminist
politics there, which otherwise left few traces in the records of the camp.
While some might (mis)understand oral history as creating heroes, individual
figures plucked out and made special in the process, this would be to
mistake the radical potentials of oral history, and of feminist activism and
its commitment to collectivities.
However, the time of the research, from the mid-1990s onwards, was a
paradoxical time, a time of the end of feminism and a time when ecofeminism
was flourishing (Moore, 2011). This complex web of ecofeminist activism
across and with the world was ‘successfully’ reduced to less than feminism,
through critiques of essentialism. In this context, it took some time to
write and publish a book from the research, and when The Changing Nature
of Eco/Feminism: Telling Stories from Clayoquot Sound (Moore, 2015) was
published in the mid-2010s, it necessarily also recounted a story about
how feminist histories are narrated, extending Clare Hemmings’s account
of feminist historiography in her book Why Stories Matter (2011; see also
244
Figure 13.4: Woman standing beside a tree in the forest

licenses/by-sa/4.0/
2005). Hemmings recounts how feminist decades are reduced to particular

versions of feminism –the 1970s a time of flourishing feminist activism; the
1980s a time of conflicts in feminism, sex wars and conflicts over race; the
1990s an era of post-structuralist feminism. Hemmings traces how different
accounts of feminism are produced depending on how these decades are
245
narrated. She identifies a narrative of loss when a vibrant feminist activism in

the 1970s is seen as fragmented by conflicts and superseded by the ‘success’ of
post-structuralism and feminist theory in the academy. Accounts that present
the 1970s as a time of naive activism, which then erupts in conflicts, to be
worked through in post-structuralist theory, produce a progress narrative of
feminism. Arguably the activism of feminist peace camps such as Greenham
have been relegated to a long feminist 1970s. In the book I recounted
how, while many critical accounts of ecofeminism commonly relegate
it to a distant feminist past of the 1970s, instead I sought to intervene in
these narratives to argue that Clayoquot disrupted stories of progress and
failure, and the encapsulation of particular modes of feminism in decades.
Through documenting the persistence of ecofeminist activism in Clayoquot
in the 1990s, the book aimed to make it harder to maintain the fiction of
ecofeminism’s essentialism, thus undermining claims that ecofeminism could
be relegated to the past. Rather, the book situated the camp in Clayoquot
as evidence of a vibrant, abundant more-than-feminist activism. It tried to
tell another story of an ecofeminist peace camp as a site where, through
living together and engaging in collective activism, women re-imagined
themselves and their genealogies and wove new connections, imagining,
envisioning and enacting new worlds and new understandings of what it
means to be more-than-feminist.
Archiving an ecofeminist peace camp: creating the

Clayoquot Lives archive
In the mid-2010s, almost two decades after I had carried out the original
interviews, I developed a new project to create a digital archive of my research
materials. Clayoquot Lives: An Ecofeminist Story Web is an online archive
that centres on 30 in-depth oral history interviews with activists involved
in the 1993 peace camp, in the form of both audio and transcripts, as well
as a small selection of photographs and other historical documents related
to the camp.5
Clayoquot Lives offers only a sliver of the stories of the camp, through
which over 12,000 people passed that summer. The archive represents a
‘modest intervention’ (Heath, 1997), but it gains a significance beyond
that, as an effort to make sure that some of the ecofeminist dimensions of
the campaign are documented. The archive is my way of making stories
of Clayoquot available for projects for cultural memory, stories that would
not be available through other means. Clayoquot Lives aims to open up the
Clayoquot peace camp to become cultural memory for those who do not
remember 1993 (for example, Hofman, 2021).
The digital archive also allows for an ongoing process of contributions
and development. The archive is open to new stories, which can be
246
added through a ‘contribute’ button on the site. Materials can be added

by people beyond the original interviewees, or these activists could add
updated reflections on their involvement in Clayoquot. Contributions
could come in a range of formats –written notes, audio, photos or video,
scanned documents, drawings –stories and materials that are not necessarily
framed through my original research interests. The archive is not finished –
Clayoquot lives. The archive may grow and change.
For me, the book and academic articles are not enough. While these kinds
of publications draw a range of voices together to tell a multifaceted story of
ecofeminism at the camp, there are clearly many more stories to tell about
Clayoquot. The archive is my commitment to sharing these stories. The
stories I heard far exceeded what I could write in a book and a few articles.
Academic articles and books draw on selected quotes from research interviews
and are framed by arguments that are important for the researcher, and perhaps
also by consideration of what arguments are intelligible, and may find an
audience, in a particular historical moment. Different historical moments
and/or different researchers could afford alternative, legitimate, narrative
interpretations drawing from the same sources. Clayoquot Lives provides
access to extended interview transcripts as well as audio files, meaning readers
and listeners can engage with the longer interview and the wider context of
the excerpts, listening to stories that would not fit in other publications, and
those that exceeded the focus of the original research. The book and articles
allow me to tell stories and create narratives that matter to me. The interviews
could do more work in the world. The archive opens up the interviews to
engagement beyond my own interpretation and storying, to new storytelling
possibilities. The archive is intended to open up possibilities for engagement
with different audiences to academic publications, to the book and articles
I have written, multiplying opportunities for the creation, transmission and
remediation of cultural memories of Clayoquot.
Ecofeminism’s essentialism is usually established without much
evidence –arguably through the erasure of evidence of ecofeminism. For
me, documenting the persistence of ecofeminist activism in the 1990s
offers a counter to stories of the end of feminism, and an account of how
radical, ecofeminist politics and activism persisted, despite these stories.
Archiving ecofeminism offers an opportunity to ‘stay with the trouble’ of
complex, conflicting, knotty, entangled histories. It means creating traces
for the future and the now, to build diffractive histories that interfere in the
present and make other worlds possible. Archives are sites for reactivating
feminist histories and futures. Kate Eichhorn has argued that archives’ power
come from how they can be ‘deployed in the present’ (2013: 160) in the
imagination, fabulation and circulation of new knowledges.
I take the academic book, the articles and the digital archive as forms
of cultural production, as remediations of Clayoquot, intended as
247
counter-memories and counter-archives, offering modest interventions

in narratives of mainstream feminism. The book and archive remain in
conversation with each other, kin, related, knotted together through the
oral histories that generated the book and are now published and put into
circulation through the archive. Perhaps the archive also recirculates the
book –both ‘bound in the spiral dance’ (Haraway, 1985; see also Haran,
2019). While the archive, with its extended oral histories, risks the illusion
of authenticity and transparency, against a book with selected extracts from
interviews and an explicit overarching academic narrative, the archive is
necessarily also shaped by all the decisions that went into generating research
materials for the book (see Moore, 2015). As Marianne Hirsch notes, the
archive ‘produces the very history it is archiving’ (2018: 174). Both book
and archive are motivated outputs, where I insist on the importance of the
ecofeminist politics of the Clayoquot Sound peace camp against its erasure.
We can add making histories and archives to the infrastructures of peace
camps. Clayoquot Lives is a cat’s cradle of activist stories, an ecofeminist
story web, which can open up the possibility of many patterns, stories, knots.
Invoking Haraway, I suggest it matters what archives we use to weave new
stories, ‘it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with’ (Haraway,
2016: 12), and if those archives don’t exist we must create them.
The mid-2010s offered a different moment in which to dust off these
cassettes and to imagine and create an archive of ecofeminist activism, as
‘climate change’ became a rallying cry for a mainstreamed attention to
the ‘environment’. Who would listen to, even welcome, these stories?
The mid-2010s brought the emergence of a new materialist feminism, a
self-declared successor project to post-structuralist feminism, carrying in
its very name a powerful claim about feminist history. Yet arguably new
materialism is not so much new (Ahmed, 2008), but rather comes after,
in the wake of, other materialisms; arguably it comes late to the matter of
matter, or nature. Drawing attention to ecofeminist genealogies challenges
the newness of this materialism and poses some demanding questions.6
The erasure of ecofeminism’s complexity creates a tabula rasa for building
new materialist feminisms. Indeed it creates the need to do the work of
reinventing materiality later. To take just one example, renowned feminist
scholar Elizabeth Grosz, in her book, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power,
while insisting on the need for ‘positivities’ against critique (2005: 2),
proceeded, with barely contained disgust, to relegate her only reference
to ecofeminism in a book on feminism and nature to a footnote: ‘With
the exception of the ecology movement, with its ecofeminist and eco-
philosophy offshoots, with which I am loathe to be identified, virtually all
forms of contemporary political and social analysis continue this tradition
of ignorance of, indeed, contempt for, the natural, which today remains
either passivity or inertia’ (2005: 34).
248
In relegating ecofeminism to a branch of the ecology movement,

excluding it from feminism altogether, Grosz betrayed a ‘willful ignorance’
(Pohlhaus, 2012) of ecofeminist texts, of ecofeminists’ efforts to intervene
in deep ecology’s misogyny, of ecofeminism’s careful, intersectional, anti-
dualistic analysis of the world and how it might have usefully informed her
own work.7 On the basis of no evidence at all, ecofeminism is discarded.
And with its restatement of matter, new materialist feminisms appear to
risk reinstating the dualisms that ecofeminism seeks to undermine. What
is new materialism’s version of passing on feminism? What is its citational
politics and what is in its archive? Would new materialists build a feminist
peace camp, or even write about them? These questions matter as feminism
confronts, that is, continues to confront, the challenge of a climate crisis that
faces all women, if some much more pressingly than others. Returning to
marginalised histories of ecofeminism, and of feminist peace camps, offers
resources that could support mainstream feminism in imagining inclusive
flourishing worlds, and articulating a visionary engagement with social
justice, racial justice and climate justice.
Attention to the emergence and development of ecofeminism reveals the
lack of nuance in common versions of feminist history. Feminists have long
worked with the doubled burden of making history –not only having to
do activism in order to change the world, but also needing to do the work
of documenting this activism. Ecofeminists have long had to reckon with
the inability, or perhaps refusal, of mainstream feminism to listen carefully to
the complexity of ecofeminist stories, or to appreciate the polyvocal nature
of much ecofeminist work. Writing academic articles and a book, and
creating a digital archive, are my interventions, my efforts to make academic
research, personal memory and stories of an ecofeminist peace camp open
to enduring cultural memory. These interventions materialise and make
ecofeminist activism matter against those who would render ecofeminism
in/essential, im/material.
Clayoquot as cultural memory

Clayoquot will be remembered. In 1993 it was already positioned as a
major historical event –as the biggest act of non-violent civil disobedience
in Canadian history (even if this was contested later). But the question of
whether it will be remembered as an ecofeminist peace camp is less sure.8 Two
other academic texts focused on Clayoquot politics vary in their recognition
of the significance of ecofeminism. Bruce Braun’s (2002) critique of how
wilderness imagery is invoked on the West Coast does include some selected
artefacts related to the broader campaign against logging. But while the text
draws on many feminist theorists, attention does not extend to a recognition
of ecofeminist activism and the difference that might make to his analysis of
249
West Coast politics. Warren Magnusson and Karena Shaw’s collection (2003),
A Political Space: Reading the Global Through Clayoquot Sound, demonstrates
a more far-reaching appreciation, including chapters by ecofeminist Cate
Sandilands, and acknowledgements throughout of gender, race and class in
forest politics, although ecofeminism is not a central focus of the collection.
Writing this just before the 30th anniversary of the camp in 2023, I am
considering the possibility of returning to Clayoquot to see how the peace
camp of 1993 is remembered, perhaps to reinterview original participants,
and/or to gather new interviews, or new materials related to the camp, or
find new activists, animated by new cultural memories of the peace camp.
New material can continue to be added to the Clayoquot Lives archive.
And inspired by Greenham Women Everywhere’s reanimation of their
archive (see Chapter 15 by Kerrow et al, in this volume), I plan to continue
to extend the archive and create further resources to support engagement
with the material there.9 Or perhaps someone else might pick up the baton,
do another relay of the archive. The archive is open to new connections.
But rememberings and commemorations do not come always come
neatly in the temporal logics of anniversaries. While writing this chapter,
a new, Indigenous-led camp was set up in Ada’itsx, Pacheedaht Territory,
also known as Fairy Creek, a little further south on Vancouver Island than
Clayoquot Sound, to protest ongoing logging. In accounts of this camp, the
Clayoquot protests from 1993 are frequently invoked. There have been more
arrests than at Clayoquot, over 1,000 people arrested in Fairy Creek, a new
‘record’, serving as an indicator of the power of feeling around logging, as
well as the ability to mobilise activists. Clayoquot appears as a reminder that
people have not forgotten, that they can mobilise again. Invoking Clayoquot
functions as a threat to the logging company active in Fairy Creek that
there is local (and global) memory, and expertise in activism, which can
be reactivated. Activists from Clayoquot have reappeared at Fairy Creek –
Tzeporah Berman, one of the key organisers at Clayoquot in the summer
of 1993 has been to Fairy Creek, and was arrested there (Logan, 2021). It
is not clear from a distance if Clayoquot’s ecofeminism is being invoked.
Clayoquot is invoked as a measure of lack of progress on protection of
temperate rainforests –why is old-g rowth forest still being logged, despite
the mainstreaming of concern about climate crisis? Why are the land rights
of Indigenous people still denied? Many have identified the more brutal
treatment of protestors by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, noting the
appearance of the ‘thin blue line’ on police uniforms that denotes Right-
wing allegiances, and linking increased violence against protesters with the
fact that Fairy Creek is an explicitly Indigenous-led protest (for example,
Coyne, 2021).
The story of Clayoquot is being diffracted through other campaigns and
issues. For some Clayoquot will be a new story, becoming their cultural
250
memory in its reactivation in contact with Fairy Creek. New webs are
patterned. Some patterns are made and others are not. How will Fairy
Creek be remembered? What archives will it give rise to? What new worlds
will it generate?
Conclusion
I began with my own ‘cultural memories’ of Greenham Common Women’s
Peace Camp. Some have only found Greenham through going in search
of ecofeminism in archives. Artist Yvonne Billimore recounted how she
went to archives looking for ecofeminism and found Greenham, a story
she used to introduce a pair of workshops engaging with Greenham’s
archive in the Glasgow Women’s Library, the UK’s only accredited feminist
museum and archive.10 Greenham was not part of her personal memory;
rather, documents and artefacts that she found in feminist archives meant
that Greenham entered her cultural memory and contemporary art
practice, where she weaves new webs and passes on Greenham. This
search for ecofeminism suggests that something might be missing from
the contemporary feminisms circulating in public culture. Maud Perrier
and D.M. Withers write that they ‘go to the archive to confront precisely
what we do not know about feminist history’ (2016: 358, emphasis in original),
echoing Billimore’s journey. Yet not all feminists are so generous or curious.
Hemmings’s documentation of dominant ways of ‘telling feminist stories’
(2005), and how feminist decades are reduced to moments of essentialism,
or conflict, and narrated to tell stories of loss or progress, evokes Victoria
Hesford’s reflection that our encounter with feminist archives is often
overdetermined by a kind of screen memory of what we have already
imagined we will find in the feminist archive, that works ‘to contain and
displace our knowledge’ (Hesford, 2013: 16).
Creating feminist archives remains vital, if feminism is to claim relevance,
and importantly a critical vision, in the context of what gets called ‘climate
crisis’. Feminist archives are powerful sites where we might begin to tell other
stories and weave another world. Stories of peace camps are for diffraction,
for creating interference, for the passing on and telling of new stories, for
making new patterns, new worlds. Archives are critical sites for unlearning
mainstream feminism’s powerful stories of the past, and telling new and more
complex stories. We have to ask who gets to remember radical activism, and
with what consequence, for feminism, and for the world. Chidgey reminds
us that ‘memories have political consequences’ (2012: 96). I would also
emphasise that memories have worldly consequences. Feminist histories are
still in the making. Archiving feminist peace camps is essential to materialising
social transformation, to feminist histories and futures. A history of feminism
told through story webs of feminist peace camps would look very different.
251
It is not too late to write that history –indeed this book can be understood
as a contribution to that project.
Notes
1
See: https://native-land.ca/maps/territories/nuu-chah-nulth-tribal-council/
2
See: https://clayoquotlives.sps.ed.ac.uk/
3
Though Sasha Roseneil’s key texts (1995, 2000) remain critical contributions
on Greenham.
4
Including Starhawk, the subject of Chapter 8 by Haran in this volume. Starhawk both
visited the camp in the summer of 1993 and was arrested there, but also had organised many
WitchCamps in British Columbia (precursors to her Earth Activist Training) annually
over about ten years prior to the Clayoquot camp. A number of activists involved in the
campaign had participated in many of the WitchCamps and this informed their activism
and organising.
5
Making the archive has largely been an unfunded project –I received a small amount
of internal university funding to cover the cost of some research assistance to make the
archive. Wonderfully, the conversations with my three collaborators on the archive, Nikki
Dunne, Mary Hanlon and Martina Karels, became rich and we are currently continuing
to collaborate on a co-authored book, DIY Academic Archiving: Curating Research Materials
and Creating Open Research Data, which draws on our experience creating Clayoquot Lives,
and turns to the theory and practice of community archiving to inform the creation of
open research data (Moore et al, forthcoming; see also Moore et al, 2021).
6
For further reflections on ecofeminism and new materialism, see also Gaard, 2011;
MacGregor, 2021; Gough and Whitehouse, 2020.
7
For a further example of how ecofeminism has been subject to erasure in a way that
creates the ground for a supposedly ‘more sophisticated’ feminist theory and politics,
see Moore (2008, 2011) for an account of how gender and development scholars have
dismissed the work of Vandana Shiva on ecofeminism and the protests of women of the
Chipko movement against deforestation. See also Foster (2021) for a rare revisiting and
more positive re-evaluation of the work of Shiva (and other ecofeminists such as Starhawk
and Susan Griffin).
8
Though see also Stoddart and Tindall, 2011.
9
I am also inspired by learning from a subsequent project I have been involved in,
Reanimating Data: Experiments with People, Place and Archives, http://reanimatingdata.
co.uk. The resulting archive is available here: https://archives.reanimatingdata.co.uk/s/
fays/, with details of a range of experiments and reanimations of the archival materials.
10
Yvonne Billimore organised these events, working with Caroline Gausden at the Glasgow
Women’s Library. See: https://womenslibrary.org.uk/event/re-reading-greenham-com
mon/2019-11-26/
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Moore, N., Dunne, N., Hanlon, M. and Karels, M. (forthcoming) DIY
Academic Archiving, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Per r ier, M. and Withers, D.M. (2016) ‘An Archival Feminist
Pedagogy: Unlearning and Objects as Affective Knowledge Companions’,
Continuum, 30(3): 355–66.
Plumwood, V. (1993) Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, London: Routledge.
Pohlhaus, G. Jr (2012) ‘Relational Knowing and Epistemic Injustice: Toward
a Theory of Willful Hermeneutical Ignorance’, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist
Philosophy, 27(4): 715–35.
Reading, A. and Katriel, T. (eds) (2015) Cultural Memories of Nonviolent
Struggles: Powerful Times, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Stoddart, M.C.J. and Tindall, D.B. (2011) ‘Ecofeminism, Hegemonic
Masculinity, and Environmental Movement Participation in British
Columbia, Canada, 1998–2007: “Women Always Clean Up the Mess”’,
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14
US Occupy Encampments and

Their Feminist Tensions: Archiving
for Contemporary ‘Big-Tent’
Social Movements
Heather McKee Hurwitz and Anne Kumer
Introduction
Since the 1970s, US feminist movements have diversified into new
institutional contexts and have taken on a variety of goals (Staggenborg
and Taylor, 2005). As feminist movements have become more diffuse, their
goals, strategies and personnel have influenced other social movements, and
other social movements have likewise spilled over into feminism (Meyer and
Whittier, 1994; Hurwitz, 2019a). Feminists have utilised the protest camp
tactic for decades to both advance feminist goals and contribute to a variety
of other social justice objectives, from peace to civil rights and economic
issues (McKnight, 1998; Wills, 2012; Nicolosi, 2013). Participation in
protest camps exemplifies a contemporary feminism that is characterised by
a wide variety of goals and tactics (Reger, 2012; Crossley, 2017). Yet because
feminist and women activists have been active in so many different types of
US movements and utilised such diverse tactics (Crossley and Hurwitz, 2013;
Crossley, 2017; Hurwitz and Crossley, 2019), and because gendered and racial
inequalities persist even within progressive spaces (Hurwitz, 2019b), women
and feminists have often been marginalised within broader movements. In
this chapter, we explore the invisibility of women and feminists of different
genders, races/ethnicities, and sexualities in the US Occupy movement and
reveal the feminist archiving practices that are required to recognise and
analyse their substantial contributions.
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US Occupy Encampments and Their Feminist Tensions
In autumn 2011, activists in New York City and San Francisco, including
some feminists, joined the global wave of pro-democracy protests by
founding the Occupy movement. What began in New York City on 17
September 2011, with concurrent solidarity protests in San Francisco, spread
over the course of weeks to more than 1,000 cities and towns across the
United States and around the world. Activists used online social networks
like Facebook and Twitter extensively to build the movement. They also
circulated art, flyers and other movement documents at information tables
in protest camps and handed out literature to passers-by to encourage them
to join in the camps. The movement was both highly place-based –with
participants camping overnight together and sharing everything in their
daily lives, including food, medical support and entertainment –and based
in the digital sphere, with participants amplifying the movement online and
dialoguing across camps and across spaces on social media. Some scholars and
journalists argued that the Occupy movement was dominated by White men,
that sexism was rampant but ignored in the encampments and movement
organisations, and that feminism was peripheral to the movement (Butler,
2011; McVeigh, 2011; Pickerill and Krinsky, 2012; Reger, 2015; Eschle,
2018; Montoya, 2019). Yet others took the position that women participated
in all aspects of the movement’s work and that feminist organisations
contributed significantly to Occupy protests (Brunner, 2011; Seltzer, 2011;
Stevens, 2011; Maharawal, 2011; Milkman et al, 2013).
To reveal the extent to which women and feminists of diverse genders, races/
ethnicities and sexualities not only participated in key Occupy movement
protest camps, but also created diverse items to advocate for feminism and
a range of other issues, our team used feminist archiving strategies to create
a digital archive of Occupy two-dimensional paper documents and three-
dimensional items. This archive drew on a larger ethnographic study by one
of the authors of this chapter, Heather McKee Hurwitz, a feminist sociologist
by training and an activist for more than 20 years in many different US and
global social movements. In the study, Heather utilised feminist methods
to examine the submerged voices and experiences of women and queer
persons of many races/ethnicities and sexualities in Occupy, many of whom
were feminists (Hurwitz, 2021). The materials she collected encapsulated
the diversity and complexity of a contemporary ‘big-tent’ social movement
that developed on the heels of the global spread of the protest camp tactic.
They include badges, social media posts, art, ephemera, mainstream and
movement newspaper reports, examples of citizen journalism, movement
flyers and other documents, which taken together reflect tensions about
sexism and racism that shaped the development of the Occupy movement.
As mass street activism continued throughout the decade after the camps,
we formed an interdisciplinary and intergenerational group to create
an independent open-source, digital community archive on the back of
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Heather’s research. Despite the marginal, diffused and contentious presence

of feminism within the Occupy movement, which was exacerbated by the
online and ephemeral nature of both contemporary feminism and Occupy,
this archive extends feminist archiving practices that record and amplify
feminist ‘outrage’ (Eichhorn, 2013).
Using feminist archiving practices to create a digital archive of Occupy
reveals the necessity of archiving movements like Occupy that are both
place-based and virtual, and that include critical but submerged feminist
contributions. By digitising and archiving women and feminists’ contributions
within the context of a range of other movement artefacts, the archive reveals
the state of feminism as both ‘nowhere and everywhere’ (Reger, 2012).
Furthermore, our effort to archive a contemporary movement that is not
explicitly feminist reveals the benefits of bringing feminist methods and
perspectives to the forefront of archiving. Prioritising reuse, the Occupy
Archive was designed to be examined and used by students, teachers, scholars
and both feminist and non-feminist activists. Through print and online media
items, artworks, objects and flyers collected from protest camps, the archive
reveals feminist debates about the direction of the Occupy movement and the
continuing need to analyse these in order to highlight feminist contributions
and the fault lines that develop around feminism in contemporary activism.
In the sections that follow, we argue for using feminist archiving even in
contexts that are not explicitly feminist, as necessitated by contemporary
feminism’s diffuse and diverse character. Then we spotlight the case study
of our creation of a digital archive for the Occupy movement. Arguing for
feminist archiving that is collaborative, interdisciplinary and prioritises reuse,
we explain in detail the methodology of creating an explicitly feminist digital
Occupy Archive. Next, we share examples of the tensions around feminism,
by highlighting archival materials that reveal feminism both ‘nowhere and
everywhere’ (Reger, 2012) within Occupy. We conclude by arguing that
the Occupy Archive shows deep tensions about feminism continue to
characterise contemporary activism.
Feminist archiving in contexts that are not feminist

Archives and libraries have long been seen as neutral spaces where
free thought, education and scholarship nurture the development and
preservation of culture in a society. More recent scholarship, however, shows
that libraries are not at all neutral and instead often reinforce the prejudices,
biases and preferences of a dominant culture (Honma, 2005; Galvan, 2015;
Gibson et al, 2017). Library and archive collections typically document the
experiences of those with the power, resources and wealth to preserve their
materials for collecting in future archives, in effect upholding current power
structures and inequities. Feminist methods that are founded on critiquing
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traditional, patriarchal, racist and colonial powerholders, and that feature the
voices and experiences of women of a variety of racial/ethnic backgrounds,
mitigate biases within archives and make them more complete.
Because libraries are usually situated within larger academic or government
institutions, the values of those institutions – often rooted in White
colonialism –play a significant role in defining policies regarding collecting,
preserving and documenting within libraries, thereby limiting what becomes
archived. In addition, archives often lack feminist approaches because of
the composition of library collections; the writing and implementation of
collection policies that dictate what a library will collect and preserve; and
the largely homogeneous demographic of library professionals as White,
highly educated and trained in western traditions. As a result, there has
been a steady increase in community archives that exist independently from
a larger governing institution. In effect, these community archives become
intellectual and even sometimes feminist spaces, where collectors, creators
and users intentionally focus on a shared identity, idea or purpose that may
not fit so neatly in the archival canon, but that follow some of the same best
practices for collection stewardship.
The creation of independent community archives is a form of activism
that seeks to rebalance the pattern of privileging and marginalising present
in most institutions, while providing a validating community resource for
shared experience and history (Flinn et al, 2009). Community archives,
‘honour specific communities and forge new relationships between parallel
histories, reshape and reinterpret dominant narratives, and challenge the
concept of the archive itself ’ (Sellie et al, 2015: 454). Often, activists create
these archival spaces outside of libraries and museums. Many produce
archives on the web, such as the Clayoquot Lives: An Ecofeminist Story
Web (see Chapter 13 by Moore, this volume) or in activist centres, such as
the LGBTQ Community Centre and Archive in New York City and the
Black Culture Archives in South London.
Similarly to how protest movement organisers borrow from traditional
societal norms of leadership and organisation (whether intentionally or
not) (Hurwitz, 2019b), community archives often borrow from traditional
archival collecting, documenting and preservation ‘best practices’. In doing
so, these archives can legitimise marginalised objects or social phenomena.
Providing a defined space, scope and context for their collections, as well as
systems of organisation and descriptive practices, community archives bring
to the surface otherwise submerged protests and debates. Furthermore,
archives create a collective memory of a group or movement and convey
their historical significance. Community archives challenge the limits of
what is considered an archive and propose new possibilities for archiving.
Feminist community archives likewise push the boundaries of archiving and
address ongoing debates about feminism.
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Community archives can be feminist spaces when they pursue inclusive

description practices that especially highlight the contributions of
women and feminists, collection policies that prioritise objects otherwise
overlooked in traditional archives, reuse potential for a diverse audience,
and unmitigated, open access. Rachel Lobo (2019: 81) encapsulates the
relationship between archives and progressive, even feminist, politics when
she argues:
Central to the politics of anti-authoritarian organizations is the

prioritization of access and shared ownership as a means of fostering
more egalitarian and democratic social relations. … [For] community
archives, the aims are to provide space for communities to represent
and redefine their own lived history and to support a continual process
of archival engagement.
Archiving necessitates a certain amount of metadata systemisation for

indexing, preserving and providing access to any collection of materials.
Feminist archivists have sought to systematise in a more inclusive and
egalitarian fashion by, for example, adapting the Library of Congress
Subject Headings (LCSH). In publication since the early 1900s, the LCSH
was founded within the constraints of a White colonial perspective, and
foundationally used to catalogue published books. Though it has been
heavily altered though the years, LCSH terminology often does not reflect
the chosen language of marginalised groups and activists, or the colloquial
usage of language. As a result, use of LCSH renders collections that use
submerged vocabularies or encapsulate experiences of marginalised groups
all but invisible and unfindable in catalogues, inventories and on websites
(Lobo, 2019). Feminist archives that adopt the institutional ‘best practice’
of the LCSH tend to add in vocabulary unique to the community or
marginalised group to redefine the relevant descriptive terminology. The key
here is to amplify experiences through their reuse potential; in other words,
to describe them so that they can be found and used by others. A feminist
open-source and open access archive should allow the public to engage with
the full breadth of a marginalised discourse: to see what would otherwise
remain hidden within it.
Creating a feminist archive for the Occupy Movement

For the Occupy Archive, we mirrored the community-based archiving
approach and opposed the conventional hierarchies of traditional archives by
including submerged feminist discourses that emerged in tension with the
overall discourse of the movement and that were largely invisible within it.
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Collecting the objects for archiving

From autumn 2011 through to 2018, Heather explored the extent to which
women and feminists were represented in newspapers, magazines, social
media and other web-based articles about the US Occupy movement. She
started with the online media about the movement in 2011–12 and found
the New York City and San Francisco Bay Area occupations to be two of
the largest and most influential encampments. They received the most news
coverage. They modelled tactics and strategies that Occupy activists in other
locations replicated. These camps developed organisations specifically for
feminists and people of colour and women appeared to be involved in a
range of committees. Heather participated in the main Occupy movement
events in these locations and at the Occupy National Gathering. The
Occupy National Gathering was a conference that drew representatives
from encampments throughout the United States and served as a location
in which to meet key organisers and activists from many encampments and
learn about the breadth of the US movement. Like the New York and San
Francisco protest camps, the conference (based in its own protest camp in
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) featured several feminist speakers, events like
the first National Feminist General Assembly and LGBTQ+gatherings.
As a feminist researcher and participant visiting protest camps while
continuing to monitor online movement communications, Heather collected
data on the activities of the most active groups and events, which included
those organised by feminists, women, lesbians, gay people, queer people
and people of colour. She gathered flyers, pamphlets, badges and signs from
the encampments and during the semi-structured interviews she conducted
with 73 participants. Collection took place during 15 days at multi-event,
all-day encampments and an additional 25 partial-days at citywide meetings,
protests and cultural events. The archive of documents and ephemera
included feminists’ words, actions and art. These objects in their many forms
and formats not only provided great vibrancy within the protest camps but
contributed to the complexity and tensions that characterised the Occupy
movement overall.
The objects are highly eclectic, ranging from articles about the movement
from mainstream newspapers, such as the New York Times and the San
Francisco Chronicle; through ‘founding’ documents that were read, referenced
and circulated widely during protest camps especially in New York City
such as the ‘Declaration of the Occupation of New York City’; to the
movement’s main newspapers, including The Occupied Wall Street Journal,
Occupy! An OWS-Inspired Gazette and Tidal. The collection also includes
documentation about feminist organisations and feminist collective actions
within Occupy such as documents used by feminists to create and plan the
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townhall-like Feminist General Assemblies (FemGAs), flyers advertising

specific protest events and mission statements from working groups and
committees within the movement like Safer Spaces. The movement’s
newspapers, articles from feminist magazines and bloggers, and the wide
range of media together provided a written history of the complexity of
this ‘big-tent’ social movement, revealing the intersectional conflicts and
the development of feminist mobilisation within it.
Many objects provided documentation of the contributions by, and
criticisms made of, feminists. The range of objects pointed to the feminist
currents that influenced Occupy and also to their marginalisation (Hurwitz,
2021). This dynamic whereby women and feminists make legitimate,
essential, but marginalised contributions to progressive struggles in the
United States is all too familiar from the Civil Rights movement (Robnett,
2000), the New Left (Evans, 1979), and AIDS activism (Roth, 2017). The
Occupy Archive became a place to reveal and historicise these tensions
within a contemporary ‘big-tent’ social movement.
Designing a feminist archive

The design of the Occupy Archive embodies and extends feminist archiving
by prioritising the experiences of women, queer persons and feminists;
by making the materials open access and available for broad reuse; and by
utilising community archiving practices that centre feminist and activist
discourse. We will explain each of these in turn.
First, the Occupy Archive reveals the feminist contributions within the
Occupy movement and contextualises these debates in the larger sweep of
Occupy movement discourse. While other collecting and archiving initiatives
have gathered documentation on Occupy, they lack a feminist lens to reveal
intersectional tensions.1 The digital Occupy Archive is a feminist archive
because it provides a historical record of these debates for further reflection,
and a more complete and complex picture of this moment, including the
diffuse and diverse feminist goals submerged within it.
Second, we made the decision not to sequester the paper-based objects
collected into a library, or even an activist organisation’s filing cabinet,
given this would have opposed the reuse and open access characteristics
of feminist archiving as well as the open-source spirit of Occupy’s protest
camps. Creating the archive in 2019–20 in the midst of heightened street
activism in the United States, during frequent street protests against the
Trump Administration and for #BlackLivesMatter, gave urgency to our
efforts to develop an archive that could be reused. Therefore, the Occupy
Archive takes the form of a free, digital, open-source archive (the digitisation
and web-based platform are discussed in the next section).
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Finally, the Occupy Archive’s taxonomy, its unique ‘structured vocabulary’,

is essential to its character as a feminist archive and its reuse. The taxonomy
is a selection of terms that were used to organise each object with a label
or ‘tag’. The taxonomy provides standardised metadata, which are set terms
that allow users to search the archive and reuse it. Conscious of the best
practice from community archives and of the need to create a space for
feminist discourse, we developed the taxonomy out of three main types
of vocabularies: the LCSH, as a starting point and reference for traditional
archives; the subject-specific Thesaurus of Sociological Indexing Terms,
which included more comprehensive social movement discourse; and an
original, highly relevant set of terminology culled from the collection
materials themselves, participating student researchers’ knowledge, the
scholarly literature on feminism and social movements, and activist websites.
Feminist archiving praxis

The team developed the digital Occupy Archive through interdisciplinary
and intergenerational collaborations and with the shared objectives of using
inclusive description practices, prioritising objects otherwise overlooked in
traditional archives, and offering reuse and open access potential.
As Heather collected the items from 2011 to 2018, she enlisted –and
paid –undergraduate student research assistants to store them thematically
and chronologically in three-ring binders. These binders became the
foundation of the digital Occupy Archive’s Collection Objects. Objects
within the binders were arranged by physical location, in the chronological
order that they were collected in person, and by theme. Initially, arranging
the objects became a collaborative process across generations and sparked
the insights and passions of the students involved.
Subsequently, in 2019, Heather met with librarians from the Freedman
Centre for Digital Scholarship at Case Western Reserve University’s Kelvin
Smith Library to discuss a proposal to digitise and make available an online
archive of the Occupy documents and ephemera. She was awarded the
Freedman Fellowship in the early summer of 2019 to complete the project.
The Fellowship granted priority access to librarian expertise, digitisation
equipment, software, temporary storage for the physical collection within
the library, and funds to hire a team of five student research assistants. Each
team member contributed to the development of the project drawing on
their unique background and skills. Among several other librarians who
contributed (see https://osf.io/gvuh2/ for a full list), Digital Collections
Manager Stephanie Becker brought an interest in activism and expertise in
digital collection stewardship to the team. Electronic Resources Metadata
Librarian Anne Kumer (co-author of this chapter) had lived in New York
City and visited the Occupy encampment on numerous occasions, and
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had extensive experience working within both traditional and community

archival collections. Finally, Research Data Specialist Ben Gorham was
an expert on the open-source online database, Open Science Framework
(OSF),2 that was used to host the archive.
Student research assistants worked with each other, the librarian
team members and ourselves. They were valued because they made the
collaboration cross-disciplinary and multigenerational. Together, the team
collaboratively developed digitisation workflows, file-naming structures,
and categorisation systems for the objects (Becker et al, 2020). The research
assistants handled digitising, saving, uploading and organising the objects.
Students invested heavily in the project because they found pride in their new
archiving skills and valued creating an archive with diverse content. Usually,
they worked together in the lab early on Friday mornings and during their
lunch break. They met in person from September 2019 to March 2020 and
then continued work remotely during the early days of the COVID-19
pandemic from March 2020 through June 2020. The project team also used
the collection to create teaching resources such as a PowerPoint introductory
lecture about the archive, in order to prioritise the reuse potential. In addition
to creating course materials, the research assistants tested those same materials
by lecturing with them in two introductory social sciences classes, allowing
the student researchers and the students attending the class to engage with
and reuse the archive immediately.
Encapsulating both the diverse teamwork experience and the importance
of the Occupy Archive to younger generations and activists, research assistant
Zoe Nguyen elaborated:
‘When I first heard about the Occupy Wall Street Movement, I was
11 years old. I thought it was amazing how people were able to gather on
such a large scale to protest and advocate for what they believed in. Now,
almost a decade later, I can see that this movement was just one of the
factors that influenced me to become a social justice advocate. Working
on this archive has allowed me to view a point in time where you can
feel the hundreds of hours spent on this movement, the objects of history
and their stories, and the issues that were and are still majorly prevalent
in today’s society. I hope that those viewing the Occupy Archive can see
the materials telling a story. Also, I hope they will be able to weave their
own stories for advocating what they believe in –just as I have been able
to –while working on this project with such a supportive team.’
Nguyen elaborates a sentiment held by nearly all members of the

team: creating the archive was a complex experience that furthered each
individual’s social justice commitments and revealed not only marginalised
activist stories, but also the stories of those who created the archive.
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With the unique interdisciplinary and intergenerational personnel in place,

the team developed complex workflows and standard operating procedures to
create the archive. Because the digital Occupy Archive resides within OSF,
a large database that hosts many different data sets all openly searchable, and
because the collection includes over 400 items, many of them with several
unique front and back pages, it was necessary for us to develop comprehensive
workflows for digitising and describing each of the archive objects. The
overall workflow included developing a comprehensive file-naming system
for each digital surrogate, created so that it could be properly stored and
retrieved, and methods for communicating progress so that all of the research
assistants digitised consistently and did not replicate work (Becker et al,
2020). Likewise, workflows enumerated standard procedures for uploading
the digital surrogates into OSF and applying descriptive metadata. The team
established an inventory spreadsheet to keep track of completed work, a
folder structure within OSF to organise individual objects, and a taxonomy
of descriptive terminology for applying metadata in order to facilitate open
access searching and reuse of the collection. In addition to the collection
objects, we included documents that describe the workflow and digitisation
process, research guides that list several objects for key subject themes, and
a sample slide presentation and educational assignments to facilitate reuse
among researchers and teachers using the archive. The Occupy Archive’s
Collection Objects is a data set openly available from: https://doi.org/
10.17605/OSF.IO/6V9ZF.
As a team, we held frequent group discussions about how objects should be
described and organised, with constant feedback and participation from student
researchers to make the archive intelligible to their and future generations.
Also referred to as participatory description, this process was one component
of a larger feminist praxis that engaged the collection’s creators and potential
users in the process of organising, cataloguing and caring for the archive, in
order to ‘empower creators and their communities to share their stories and
perspectives’ (Haberstock, 2020: 126). This methodology promoted a more
diverse and inclusive creation of the archive and was foundational to making
the collection open, accessible, reusable and feminist; by including students
who were not formally trained archivists or librarians in integral decision-
making parts of the process, we were able to create descriptive practices more
relevant to the creators and to general users of the collection.
Feminist absence and presence within the Occupy

Archive
Activists created unique, creative, art-and media-filled worlds to discuss social
change and to protest together in the New York City and San Francisco
Occupy encampments. While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to
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address the breadth of the Occupy Archive, this chapter would be incomplete
without highlighting a couple of objects that demonstrate the narrative
tensions that circulated within the some of the largest US protest camps
and can be found within the archive. On the one hand, feminism appears
absent. A flyer like this is typical:
Occupy Wall Street is a leaderless resistance movement with people

of many colours, genders, and political persuasions. The one thing
that we all have in common is that we are the 99% that will no longer
tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1% … OWS is an experiment
in direct democracy, with the General Assembly (GA) being our current
model of decision making. … There is no single leader or governing
body of the GA –we struggle to ensure that everyone’s voice is equal.
Anyone is free to propose an idea or express an opinion as part of the
GA. (Occupy Archive, https://osf.io/j8n76/)
In just a few lines, the flyer conveys not only some of the movement’s key
objectives, procedures and basis for unity, but also an aspiration for the protest
camp to be a model of a different kind of world, an experimental society.
In this iteration, the future world to which the movement aspires is one of
leaderlessness, diversity, stopping the 1% and hearing everyone’s voices and
ideas. On the flip side of the flyer, its authors suggest five ways to create this
future ambitious world right in the moment, including: ‘Occupy! Bring
instruments, food, blankets, bedding, rain gear, and a sense of justice’. Even
though this flyer circulated in 2011, it echoes a view of prefigurative politics
grounded not in contemporary feminism but in longstanding anarchist and
Marxist traditions (Törnberg, 2021), manifested in direct, participatory
democracy without hierarchal leadership structures in which supposedly
anyone can be leader (Breines, 1989; Polletta, 2002; Williams, 2017). In
addition, the flyer’s discourse echoes the neo-anarchist desire to undo
existing power structures and create a political force for the future (Yates,
2015; Wagener-Pacifici and Ruggero, 2020). Despite substantial feminist
contributions to prefigurative politics and participatory democracy (see,
for example, Chapter 10 by Kavada and Chapter 8 by Haran, this volume),
feminist discourse was invisible in flyers such as these.
On the other hand, feminism is very much present in the archive.
Documents like the mimeographed Post-Post Script Zine were also circulated
in the New York and San Francisco encampments and conveyed a very
different view of the goals for Occupy movement politics from the neo-
anarchist text above. The Post-Post Script Zine, subtitled ‘Open Letters To
and From the (Un)Occupy Movement’, is a compilation of mostly feminist
assessments on how to improve the movement. One letter, from the Alliance
of Community Trainers and written by Starhawk, Lisa Fithian and Lauren
266
Ross, amplifies feminist views about movement strategies beyond just

opposing the 1%:
We embrace many labels, including feminist, anti-racist, eco-feminist

and anarchist. … ‘Diversity of tactics’3 becomes an easy way to avoid
wrestling with questions of strategy and accountability. … It becomes a
code for ‘anything goes,’ and makes it impossible for our movements to
hold anyone accountable. … Nonviolent direct action creates dilemmas
for the opposition and clearly dramatizes the difference between the
corrupt values of the system and the values we stand for … [S]‌trategic
nonviolent direct action is a framework that will allow us to grow in
diversity and power. (Occupy Archive, https://osf.io/xnrzc/)
Openly drawing on a history of feminist protest along with anarchist and

other traditions, Starhawk, Lisa Fithian and Lauren Ross’s letter suggests
that the future of the Occupy movement should be non-violent in order to
protect and empower a movement of people of diverse genders, races, ages
and abilities. They suggest that the next iteration of the movement, and a
future world, must be based on more than just ‘anything goes’. In this, they
oppose the strands of anarchism and direct participatory democracy that
eschew all structure (Breines, 1989). In opposition to ‘diversity of tactics’,
they argue that a broad, diverse, impactful social movement and future ideal
society are built through a feminist emphasis on coordination, trust and
collaboration (Crossley and Hurwitz, 2013; Crossley, 2017). They emphasise
less Marxist traditions of economic change (Törnberg, 2021), and more
personal and organisational forces and holistic notions of subjectivity that
are woven into the politics and goals of feminist activism (Williams, 2017;
for more on Starhawk, see Chapter 8 by Haran in this volume).
In sum, as Occupy participants formed protest encampments, shared
food, lived together and protested together, they not only formed an
experimental space, but also created feminist politics that supported and
critiqued the Occupy movement simultaneously. Their efforts are captured
in feminist objects archived in the digital Occupy Archive, even as they
remain submerged in other objects that render invisible the long history of
feminist political contributions to struggles for social change.
Conclusion
The Occupy Archive encapsulates the complexity and tensions that
characterised the ‘big-tent’ Occupy movement and its accompanying period
of heightened social media activity. Occupy included activists from many
different movements, necessitating a unique archive. It was not dedicated
to a particular group like suffrage archives (Library of Congress, 2021), or
267
to a single protest camp with a particular objective like those at Clayoquot

Sound or Greenham Common (see Chapter 13 by Moore and Chapter 15
by Kerrow et al in this volume). The Occupy Archive set itself a large task: to
gather and make visible women’s and feminist movement objects as part of
a broad movement that was not explicitly feminist. Digitising the Occupy
Archive on OSF continues the community-based tradition of that movement
and represents its rich and sometimes problematic complexity. Built with
the skills and perspectives of a diverse interdisciplinary and intergenerational
team, the archive prioritises reuse potential and highlights feminist tensions
within the movement. Through its objects, the Archive reveals feminism as
important, relevant and essential to some strands of the Occupy movement,
as well as marginalised in others.
The Occupy Archive implies that deep tensions about feminism
characterise contemporary activism. Within the Occupy encampments,
feminists often created separate ‘free’ or ‘safe spaces’ (Hurwitz and Taylor,
2018; Montoya, 2019; see also Chapter 2 by Montoya in this volume). In the
New York City and San Francisco encampments, feminist and queer activists
even cordoned off areas and tents specifically for feminist and queer activists
to continue participating in the encampments while practising an explicitly
feminist culture otherwise marginalised in the camp space (Maharawal, 2016;
Eschle, 2018; Hurwitz, 2021). Despite the exemplary Post-Post Script Zine
and objects like it, feminist politics remain strikingly absent from many of the
archival materials. When present, feminist discourse and perspectives serve as
important additions to the movement, providing critical commentary upon
it. The marginal feminist discourse in the archive mirrors the experiences
of women and feminist activists who participated in the movement, and
found problematic the lack of intersectionality, the persistence of domestic
and other forms of violence, and the exclusion of women from leadership
positions –and who fought hard to transform Occupy camps from within.
Notes
1
This is true of both community and institutionally housed archives. For example, the New-
York Historical Society collected Occupy ephemera from the New York encampment,
NYU’s Tamiment library recorded meetings held by the Occupy Think Tank group,
and the Internet Archive and the Rosenzweig Centre for the History of New Media at
George Mason University both embarked on web archiving projects to preserve associated
web pages (Schuessler, 2012). None of these archives prioritised a feminist approach.
2
OSF is an interdisciplinary platform for online access, storage and preservation of data. As
a team, we chose OSF because it does not require hosting fees or associating the project
with a domain name. The platform is supported by Case Western Reserve University’s
Information Technology department, which provided ongoing user support for our team.
We also chose OSF due to its technological capacities: several research team members
could simultaneously upload digitised objects, apply metadata, and add research and
teaching documents into the archive’s OSF site from multiple computers. By choosing
to host the Occupy Archive on OSF, an Open Access platform, the priority shifts from
268
ownership to access, and the identity of the collection retains some independence from a
larger governing institution. It also ensures that a wider audience can access the collection
with virtually no restrictions.
3
This phrase commonly referred to the unencumbered and volunteer-driven use of a
breadth of protest tactics, including non-violent protest actions like sit-ins and permitted
marches, as well as what could be considered more aggressive or even violent tactics like
purposeful property destruction or antagonistic stand-offs between police and protesters.
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15
Greenham Women Everywhere:

A Feminist Experiment in
Recreating Experience and Shaping
Collective Memory
Kate Kerrow, Rebecca Mordan, Vanessa Pini and Jill (Ray) Raymond,
with Alison Bartlett and Catherine Eschle
Introduction
In September 1981, 36 women walked from Cardiff to the RAF base
at Greenham Common in protest against the American government
holding nuclear cruise missiles on common land. This marked the
beginning of a 19-year protest at Greenham Common.
The Common became home to thousands of women acting in
political resistance to the nuclear arms race. In Autumn 2018, The
Heritage Lottery Fund South West awarded … a £50k grant to bring
this hugely important piece of feminist history and heritage into
public access.
With this funding, Scary Little Girls and The Heroine Collective
embarked on an 18-month project to interview the women who
formed the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp between 1981
and 2000. … It culminated in the largest collection of oral testimonies
of the Greenham Women yet collated, digitised and made available to
the public. (Scary Little Girls, nd)
So opens one of the webpages associated with the Greenham Women

Everywhere project, instigated by Rebecca Mordan of feminist production
hub Scary Little Girls, and Kate Kerrow of women’s history online
publication, The Heroine Collective. Although their project title drew
inspiration from a multi-voiced book from the early days of the Greenham
273
Common Women’s Peace Camp, one that emphasised the camp’s wider
network and legacies (Cook and Kirk, 1983), Rebecca and Kate nonetheless
feared that Greenham stories were in danger of being entirely lost from
public and activist memory, or replaced by tabloid distortions. They thus
wanted not only to recover the voices of Greenham, but also to find creative
ways to engage a wider and younger audience. In collaboration with co-
worker Vanessa Pini and Greenham woman Jill (Ray) Raymond, and
many other individuals and institutions, Rebecca and Kate have produced
an online archive of testimonies from Greenham women (Greenham
Women Everywhere, 2021). The project has also generated a multimedia
touring exhibition; online events (concerts, book readings and theatrical
performances); an interactive ‘virtual reality’ website aimed at enabling a
new generation to re-imagine life at the camp (Greenham Women Digital,
nd); and a book (Kerrow and Mordan, 2021).
This chapter explores the genesis, processes and outcomes of the Greenham
Women Everywhere project. Catherine Eschle and Alison Bartlett facilitated
two informal conversations with Ray, Rebecca, Vanessa and Kate over
Zoom in April 2021, then transcribed, edited and recombined over four
hours of discussion, before sharing it with each participant to comment,
rearrange, augment and edit. We also inserted some verbatim text from a
subsequent discussion at a workshop for this book. While the chapter is
thus a co-creation that retains the form of a dialogue, the responsibility for
instigation, organisation and structure, and the writing of this introduction
and the endnotes, lies with us (Catherine and Alison). We have tried to
push ourselves into the background of the conversation that follows, to leave
as much space as possible for Rebecca, Vanessa, Ray and Kate. However,
it remains the case that our specific preoccupations –Catherine’s with the
politics and representation of protest camps in the UK, and particularly of
Greenham, and Alison’s with feminist archiving and with the intertwining
of academic and cultural feminist interventions –shape what follows.
The conversation begins with Rebecca, Kate, Vanessa and Ray introducing
themselves, their organisations and the project. Together, we discuss the ethics
and process of interviewing Greenham women, before moving on to the
techniques through which the testimonies of campers were reinterpreted and
recreated in the various spinoffs from the project. Finally, the conversation
takes in the politics of forgetting and remembering Greenham Common
Women’s Peace Camp, and its legacies, especially on the occasion of the
40th anniversary of its founding. All this will be of particular value to those
researching Greenham (Roseneil, 1995, 2000) or involved in debates about
feminist archiving (Moore, 2016; Ashton, 2017), especially in relation to
protest camps. But it also raises larger questions. How can contemporary
feminists approach and recover lost feminist stories? What are the ethical
and political challenges of feminist interviewing or oral histories? How do
274
Greenham Women Everywhere
activists navigate or contest the extractive model of academic research? How

do historical erasures or nostalgic attachments shape contemporary feminism?
Origins of Greenham Women Everywhere

Rebecca: I run Scary Little Girls, and I co-run Greenham Women
Everywhere. My mum, Marie Knowles, took me to
Greenham and it changed the course of my life, as well
as hers. It was a lovely generational experience, which is
why we need to make sure those experiences are available
to other people, by creating the archive and being very
active in its creation and promotion and dissemination.
Ray: I got involved just by being an interviewee for Greenham

Women Everywhere and I thought, ‘What a brilliant
thing!’ I think there was a call out on the FiLiA [Feminism
in London] newsletter, or there’s a Blue Gate group1 and
different Facebook groups, and I responded immediately
and became quite supportive. So many of the stories of
Greenham are all about the build-up, the missiles arriving,
and then they went, and everyone was happy, everyone
went home; when actually we were on the Common for
another eight or more years to get rid of the fence. Also,
I’m the third Greenham woman to be housing for posterity
the Blue Gate diaries. (We decided that we wouldn’t lodge
the Blue Gate diaries for public access until we’re all dead.)
So that’s partly why I felt a bit of a responsibility; I’ve got
these diaries and they are an incredible resource which
I’ve been using at times to tell the story to Greenham
Women Everywhere.
Vanessa: I’ve been working for the Greenham Women Everywhere

project for just over a year now. My background is in
theatre and teaching. Greenham is something that I knew
a little bit about before I joined the team, I remember
asking my mum about it, but yeah, I’m very passionate
about it now. I speak to women every day and find out
their interesting and inspiring stories. That’s my job!
Kate: I am a writer and I edit an online publication called The

Heroine Collective, which details the lives of women who
challenge and develop socio-political culture in the past
and present. I started it about six years ago, as a sideline
275
really, designed the website that would hold lots of different

articles, and then recruited a team of writers from various
places: the UK, the USA, Italy. We release long-form
content onto the blog once a month and readers can search
for inspiring women via location, historical period, vocation
and so on. It’s very much an activist project –it comes from a
real eagerness to share important stories about women’s lives.
Rebecca: It was due to the success of The Heroine Collective, how

brilliantly Kate had put it together, that I first talked to
her about how we were losing the voices of Greenham.
Kate: I think it was Helen John dying, wasn’t it?2 I remember a

panicked phone call then, when we asked ‘What are we
going to do? All these stories are disappearing!’ We felt
like we hadn’t heard their voices. So Becca and I came
together to work on this –we’ve known each other for
over twenty years. We trained as actors together.
Alison: Rebecca, how did you start Scary Little Girls?
Rebecca: Scary Little Girls is a production hub; primarily live

arts and theatre practice but increasingly collaborating
with different kinds of artists, embracing animation, live
music, VR [virtual reality], all sorts of different media,
and now we are really involved in the digital world due
to the COVID lockdown. But the unifying thing is a
commitment to feminism: having a feminist voice and
diverse, feminist, women-led casts. I started it after I went
to a very traditional, extremely competitive drama school,
and we were so grateful to be the few women that got
in that we let this this institution do the most ridiculous
things to us as a matter of course, from institutionalised
sexism to organised #MeToo style bullying. It was a very
unpleasant three years. So I saw how easy it was to have a
structure that didn’t treat people very well. I thought, ‘I
can’t change everything but I can make one small structure
that tries to be a supportive environment that creates really
great art and is at least a haven from predatory, sexist,
bullying, shitty men’. Now I’m surrounded by absolutely
lovely women and a few great men. I got really, really
lucky. The financial insecurities that go along with that
are utterly worth it.
276
Ray: What Rebecca has just described is basically the process

that a lot of us went through to end up at Greenham. We
can’t change this, but we can create our own alternative.
Rebecca: I am sure I came to that conclusion quicker because I knew

about Greenham. That’s why I become passionate about
what cultural robbery it is for other women to not know
about Greenham. I think we have a duty of care as women
to make sure other women know about that.
Alison: Can you tell me how Greenham Women Everywhere

emerged from Scary Little Girls?
Rebecca: I turned 40. My mum died a few years before, taking all
of her Greenham stories with her and, talking to other
women, I realised that no one younger than me had heard
of Greenham. I thought, they’re erasing these women
within their own lifetimes and, if someone doesn’t step
in, their stories will be gone. I wasn’t the only woman
who thought that, there are quite a lot of cultural projects
now about Greenham. I then approached The Heroine
Collective and we put together a Heritage Lottery bid to
do the original 100 interviews. That’s how it started and
now it is its own Community Interest Company, separate
from Scary Little Girls.
Alison: Was it a conscious decision to not go to an institution, for

example where other Greenham archives are held?3
Rebecca: Actually, Kate was doing her MA at the time, so one of the
partners we had through her connections was the Women’s
Library at the LSE [London School of Economics]. And
Goldsmiths was a partner, also Bristol University and
Gwithtiow Kernow, which is an archive for Cornish life.
They had roles in training. The University of West England
trained the volunteers in how to interview, consent forms—
Kate: And in archiving, training people to actually put the

data online.
Rebecca: Falmouth University was on hand for questions like,

how do you deal with someone talking about somebody
who’s died? We could check in with them about legal
277
best practice. And we are now archiving all of the existing

interviews with the LSE and their archivist.
Kate: Goldsmiths offered us exhibition space and asked us to do

a talk.
Rebecca: But we wanted to be the main creators behind it, not tied
up with one institution.
Interviewing Greenham women

Alison: Can you say more about the women you’ve been
interviewing? Who comes forward? Why do they want
to talk about it? What’s it like remembering Greenham?
Vanessa: A mix of women come forward. Some get in touch and

say, ‘I’ve come across your project, I’d love to talk about
it’. Others we find, and contact them, and sometimes
women are quite reluctant because they don’t know why
we’d be interested in them, some because they say they
never actually lived there so they think they weren’t really
a Greenham woman –even though they supported the
camp, did Cruisewatch,4 took food every single weekend
for five years! So some think their stories aren’t valuable.
Lots of them through the interview then remember all of
these things, it helps them remember.
Rebecca: When we first set up the project, Kate and I expected to

interview twenty to thirty women, if we could find them out
there. We were deluged with women! Actually, during the
first year of the project we lost trust because we fell behind
with the amount of women contacting us. Vanessa’s role in
keeping in touch with interviewees can’t be underestimated, it
helps us keep faith with the networks of Greenham women.
Ray: I think it helps that you are using these networks. I’ve
done a few interviews for academic research, and they are
off-putting. You feel like some sort of specimen. I have
no say on how they’re going to represent me, and they’ve
got their own agenda and it’s going to be extracted to
illustrate their agenda. In one instance, questions like,
‘What did you do about supporting disabled women to be
278
at camp?’ Well, we were being evicted twice a day!5 It’s a

very institutionalised question. Disabled women came with
their abilities and they knew what support they needed,
they have their own solutions to hand and we worked with
them according to their requirements. It wasn’t us being
the social services: they came with their own solutions.
Catherine: How was the experience of being interviewed for the

Greenham Women Everywhere project different from
academic interviews?
Ray:
I could tell my story. I was reading ecofeminist Vandana
Shiva in Manushi before I went to Greenham and had
a separatist phase which fitted with Greenham. People
associate Greenham with a motherhood approach to resisting
nuclear weapons, but I and others really did not like or relate
to that as a motivation, it was a mainstream narrative, we
were creating a separatist and lesbian culture and lifestyle.
Also because I’ve got the diaries –I went to the meeting
to vote for it to be women-only and get rid of the men;
I went with my girlfriend to tow away the last caravan at
Blue Gate: I wasn’t there consistently but I have a broad
overview. I have my own agenda and part of my theme
was Greenham women are everywhere. The women that
Vanessa just talked about, who brought hot meals for five
years, I wanted to make them visible. You didn’t have to
camp to be a Greenham woman.
Rebecca: Kate and I were both aware that Greenham women can
be quite distrustful about how they’re represented. I think
one of the things that helped us was that we weren’t saying
this is a body of work for this university, or for this TV
programme: it was just: Be in it for your own sake, in
your own voice, on this website. And though you change
things even by documenting them, it is important that the
women know their story is changed as little as possible.
Vanessa: It’s also important that I reassure them that they can listen
before we upload it and can edit it. We can check for when
people mention names of people who may not want to
be named, or respond to people who have gone on to be
judges and don’t want the interview out there.
279
Rebecca: I honestly think it made a big difference that I was a

Greenham child. As soon as I mentioned it, interviewees
would ask, ‘Ooh, what was your mum’s name?’ It totally
changed the style of the dialogue; suddenly it was a
memory share. So the two biggest tools have been: ‘we’re
just trying to record your stories’; and then, ‘I was at
Greenham so I know how important it is’. Those two
things seem to gain women’s trust.
Alison: Have you come across other Greenham children?
Vanessa: I interviewed a family where the grandmother, her

daughter and granddaughter had all been at Greenham.
So it’s not just the stories of Greenham but the impact that
it’s had on people’s lives since. The daughter was there at
Embrace the Base6 at the age of five and while she doesn’t
have distinct memories of it, she said in her interview that
she must have absorbed holding hands with 30,000 women
around a nine-mile fence and singing, because now she
runs singing circles as her main job.
Catherine: Like Rebecca, I went to Greenham as a child with my

mum, Sheila Eschle, and it’s only as my work developed
that I’ve realised how formative that was. You interviewed
Mum for the archive, she was worried about not
remembering things correctly, and then she had a strong
emotional reaction during the interview as the memories
came back. How did others react?
Rebecca: Lots of women get upset and have a little cry, some of them
get all giddy and giggly and sing us songs, sometimes both
in the same interview. They get rageful. Very highly literate,
articulate smart women being honest, emotionally and
intellectually, they’re quite passionate interviews. I think most
women seem to feel good that they’ve done it. There’s only
been a couple of women in the whole process that have said
‘I don’t want my piece used at all’. A few women who check
carefully every word, do several edits. But by and large women
go, ‘Yeah, I did do all that! Now it’s there forever. I was pretty
bloody great wasn’t I!’. We don’t get enough time to reflect
on what we did and what we’re capable of. I really hope
we’re doing everything we can to make it empowering for
the women who give us interviews and who listen to them.
280
Catherine: And Ray, you’ve gone from being interviewed to doing

interviews now?
Ray: I’ve only done a few, and it’s mostly been with friends that
I’ve press-ganged into doing them. It’s more conversational,
but sometimes I know that they know things that they’re
not telling me, which is difficult, but maybe they don’t
want it on record. The other thing I find challenging is
when they say things that I know are wrong! But it is really
fun, and I’m up for doing more.
Rebecca: It’s really important having a Greenham woman in the

team of interviewers too. It just brings something else out
in the mix. Just by saying, ‘Yeah, I remember that, did this
happen?’ Or, ‘Do you remember this?’.7
Representing and re-imagining Greenham Common

Women’s Peace Camp
Rebecca: The original funding was to collect the oral testimonies
and then to create a pop-up exhibition to be a kind of
conversation piece –to create awareness.
Kate: So we created a tent filled with paraphernalia, memorabilia,

objects, news articles, photographs, into which people
could go and listen on headphones to the Greenham
women speaking. The idea was to direct them back to
the website to hear the testimonies. A visual arts academic
from the University of the West of England designed the
tent. It went to a few festivals, libraries, even to some quite
Right-wing locations around the UK—
Rebecca:
to CND [Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament], and back
to Greenham Common. Where people from the nearby
town of Newbury had a go at us because they were still
really angry forty years later! We always host these things
with Greenham women.
When the pandemic hit we got some funding to redo it all
as a VR exhibition online, Greenham Women Digital, with
a group called Animorph.8 And we were also funded to make
the original website more accessible, so we’re using software
to turn all the audio into transcripts. And another artist, LH
281
Trevail, suggested some open-source software called Twine

that would make a narrative game out of the transcripts.
LH has made this amazing ‘choose your own adventure’
game: so you read it, and it might begin with: ‘You approach
a campfire. There are six women. Who do you want to talk
to?’. And then you click through and ask them questions.9
And then during lockdown we started thinking about
how many women needed remote tech skills, so now we
have funding to teach women to use the software so that
they can make their own versions of these games. We’re
using the transcripts, and it also gives them remote skills
that they can turn to absolutely anything else they like.
Catherine: I went to an event at Glasgow Women’s Library, where we sat

with an archive box of newsletters and other documents from
Greenham, and people loved seeing the text and images.10
But what really struck me about your work, particularly
the interactive VR website, is the distinctive use of sound.
The visual imagery is quite simple, but there are layers of
music and birdsong and you make creative use of recorded
interviews and performance. Sound was also important in
the tent exhibition, wasn’t it? Is there something about that
which is important for documenting Greenham?
Rebecca: I think the images really date, because photos looked a

certain way then. They were using analogue technology
to make zines and posters. So even though these things are
lovely, it’s a very particular aesthetic that is quite separate
from where we are now. Whereas when you hear women
talk about, ‘This is what we did. Oh! and then I did this
with my life’, or ‘Now I’m doing this’, you suddenly realise
it’s not finished, it’s not this place in the past where they do
things differently: it’s these people doing things and here are
the things we’re still doing, here’s the nuclear policy that
we still need to change, here’s this resurgence of veganism
that they were doing at the camp forty years ago. It makes
it very current and much less dismissible if you have those
women actually speaking.
Catherine: There’s also something particularly immersive about the

sound. There are parallels with a Glasgow Transport
Museum exhibit that had a caravan from Faslane Peace
Camp,11 you could go inside and listen to a recording
282
from someone who lived in the van, people talking, the

campfire crackling.
Kate: I think it shows how many of the interviews were so

focused on life outdoors, survival outdoors was such a
huge part of it, as if a primary memory was the fire, being
outdoors and surviving. And the resilience it gave them
to then combat other things in their lives. Once you’ve
snapped a blanket in half that is frozen over your head,
you can do anything! There is a visceral quality to that.
Alison: Tell us about the book. Is your imagined audience people

who don’t know anything about Greenham?
Kate: I don’t think so, because it is with the History Press,

people go there with an interest in history. I imagine
their demographics are a little older, so marketing it to
younger people will be work we have to do. We tried to
make the book’s language as accessible as we could for the
younger generation.
Rebecca: And there’s so many women’s voices in it, even if you

know about the camp, you will still find loads in there.
Kate: It’s like an ensemble piece. We’ve called it Out of the

Darkness, after a Frankie Armstrong song.12 It took the
best part of a year. We spent a lot of time listening to
the interviews, and we talked a lot about how to make
it voice-led rather than led by us. Rebecca and I have
co-written it, as a vehicle for the 60 interviews we’ve
peppered throughout –so there’s loads of their content,
far more them than us.
Rebecca: We planned out a map, everything we wanted to include

about, say, camp life, we would then think, ‘So these are
the things people who don’t know this yet need to know,
and here are all the women that talk about it’, and then we
worked out a structure with a story arc. It was helpful that
both of us are fiction writers. It’s the book I was looking
for about Greenham, with as many women’s voices in as
possible, to tell me the story of the camp.
283
Kate: The chapter themes seemed quite obvious by that point as

we’d interviewed so many women, and it was the same things
coming up every time. There were some difficulties like,
how do you talk about NVDA [non-violent direct action]
and not talk about violence; 13 how do we talk about NVDA
and separate it from their use of art as a form of activism?14
Rebecca: A crucial decision we made was whether there should be

a chapter on sexuality and lesbianism and we decided no,
that should just be in every chapter, because it’s such a huge
underpinning of the camp. It was probably, generously, 70/
30 lesbian/straight, so having their own chapter was just
weird; they should actually be represented in every chapter.
Kate: It was articulated all the time in the interviews. So much

of the art was about being a lesbian. Then so much of the
NVDA stuff was entwined with being a lesbian. And the
aggression from the media and police was often targeted
at lesbians, so it was everywhere.
Rebecca: In the last chapter of our book we look at the kind

of work Greenham women went on to do, and some
continued in various campaigns, and they work today in
the #MeToo movement, for Black Lives Matter, animal
rights, Extinction Rebellion. We’re now making more
Trident nuclear missiles, nuclear proliferation is back on
the agenda:15 almost everything they did at Greenham we
could be learning from, and Greenham women are still
involved in these issues, it’s not all about ‘back then’.
Forgetting Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp

Catherine: You talk of people being robbed of the memory of
Greenham. Who it was that had forgotten: was it feminist
women specifically, or women generally, or activists? Or
the wider public?
Rebecca: All of them. I’ve been working with younger feminists, my

background is in tackling male violence, doing Reclaim
the Night marches,16 my partner’s family is in the radical
Green movement, anti-fracking, non-violent direct
actions,17 and I would say, ‘That’s like Greenham’, and
284
they would say, ‘Like what?’. I would say, ‘How can you
not know?’. I recognised there were a lot of people not
standing on the shoulders of the giants that came before
them because didn’t know they existed. It’s just not in our
cultural framework to talk about it. Unlike the suffragettes.
I’ve given talks to primary school through to university
level students, hundreds of them at a time, and when you
tell them about Greenham, their first reaction is, ‘This is
brilliant!’ And their next reaction is, ‘Why don’t I know
about this?’.
Ray: I think it was completely erased, even from radical stories.

At the time it was worse, we were slandered and silenced.
We were ‘dirty lezzies’ [lesbians], squatting in the mud.
The vilification in the mainstream media was much more
vicious then. And after the Cruise missiles left, other parts
of the peace movement were like, ‘Why are the women still
there?’. And then it was, ‘No they’re gone, they’re not there
anymore’ –and we were! I’ve got evidence in the diaries
that CND said in their Sanity magazine that we weren’t
there anymore. The Quakers pulled out support once the
Cruise missiles went. Which is pretty weird, because the
base at Greenham Common was still the largest military
runway in Europe. I think the separatist and lesbian culture
and lifestyle became stronger after Cruise had gone and
with it much anti-nuclear interest and support.
Rebecca:
I also think there is a big problem with academic and activist
representation of Greenham when I hear it dismissed as
‘White feminism’. I find that really problematic and I would
love our archive to challenge it, because it is a patriarchal
move in my opinion. This is the biggest women-led
campaign since suffrage, we are talking about the experiences
of thousands of women. It’s another way of silencing women,
to write off a movement of thousands of women as one thing.
Ray and other women in our archive speak very
eloquently about the dynamics of race at the camp. It was
a very international camp, but it was largely White. The
women that we have spoken to who are mixed heritage or
Black say that it wasn’t the camp that was the problem, it was
the institutionalised racism of the military and the police
and the courts structures that made it really difficult for
women of colour to be there. And there are other women
285
who talked about it being a self-fulfilling prophecy, so one

of our interviewees says she can imagine if she was Black
and she turned up, she’d be like, ‘not sure this is for me’. But
other women also talk about their successful outreach to
women all over the world, particularly Indigenous women,
which I know was a big part of the Pine Gap camp,18 and
those women, some still work with Indigenous women in
international rights movements, particularly in the Pacific
where they tested nuclear weapons.19
Ray: Land rights was one of the issues that linked us with
Indigenous groups –reclaiming the common was always
part of the Greenham campaign. This was not much on
any other movement’s agenda, although the anti-apartheid
movement was big for a long time during that era.
Rebecca: Also I think dismissing Greenham as White feminism is a

really reductive way to catalogue diversity, because actually
our archive –which is only a couple of hundred women
representing thousands of women –it’s got women of
colour, it’s got women of all different classes, different ages,
really broad physical abilities, women from Europe and all
over the world and of course it is predominantly lesbian.
And women who are now into all sides of the different
political feminist debates –‘gender critical’, trans feminist,
pro sex work, abolitionist –our archive covers all of those
opinions as well and the women don’t necessarily agree on
all those things. So it is an enormously diverse collection
of women at Greenham, because how could thousands of
women not be? To write off all of that diversity as White
feminism: it’s another way of not counting it.
Vanessa: A lot of that is about turning women against women.

The media just puts it down as very middle-class, White
housewives, who’ve got lots of money and it’s just a
hobby for them because they’ve got nothing else to do.
That can influence women from other classes and cultural
backgrounds to think, ‘Oh yeah that’s what it was’. I think
a lot of women do think that way about it.
Ray: An academic piece that Rebecca sent to me was specifically

about the role of religion and spirituality at camp and
all the way through, except for one or two occasions,
286
the author completely erased the word ‘women’: it was

Greenham Peace Camp. One of our identities was that we
are Common women. You can’t take Greenham and then
remove the women bit because it’s a lie. That’s a part of
the erasure in academia now, I think it’s a queer theory
thing that they sign up to, erasing and rewriting by not
using the word ‘women’.20
At Aldermaston Women’s Peace Camp21 –I stopped
going about ten years ago, it’s one weekend a month usually
Friday and Saturday night –we had a couple of inquiries
from trans women who were interested in what our policy
was and we said, ‘Just turn up. Just come and meet us. We
don’t have a policy. We’re not being forced to make any
exceptional statements. You’re welcome. Come and meet
us.’ I mean, they never did, or if they did we didn’t know. But
if they had stayed overnight then we would have seen how
it goes: when you actually start living with people, having
breakfast, when you’re feeling hungover, it all shakes down.
Rebecca: It’s interesting to wonder what would happen now. Almost

straight away some of the major arguments would be: ‘Who
is a woman? Who gets to come? How do we define
“woman”?’22 I wonder if it would survive those debates –
especially now, when we can offload straight away on social
media. At Greenham if there was division, if there was a row,
it might take a few weeks to get to the mainstream papers.
Kate: Yeah, there were arguments between women at Greenham

but I think there’s something about having the same overall
goal, where space can be made for different political
opinions. I feel we can learn from that. At the moment it
often feels like we’re punching at each other rather than
coming together.
Catherine: Is there something about the protest camp space,

when people were actually living together, that allows
those conversations?
Rebecca: One of the women we interviewed talks about how it’s

really unusual now to sit down with someone who is
fundamentally not from your world and find out their
experiences, and Greenham allowed that space. If you
disagreed with someone it was your duty to try to enlighten
287
them, and their duty to enlighten you, and you had to put
the time and the work into properly discussing things. And
then later you would be watching each other’s backs, linking
arms because the missiles were coming out, and so on. I think
there is something to be learned about not playing into the
hands of patriarchy. We don’t necessarily have to agree with
each other all the time. We do need to be united against our
oppressors and save our biggest fights for that.
Greenham futures
Catherine: What are your plans for the project moving forward?
Kate: We are working on a podcast. I am interested in getting

more articles out there about the content of the archive,
to explore that in print, I’m not sure where but I’d like to
write about how you do this kind of work, in non-fictional
writing or journalistic work.
Rebecca: Scary Little Girls and Greenham Women Everywhere are

working toward a big celebratory event for the start of the
40th anniversary of Greenham later in 2021 –Greenham
women don’t all agree when it ended but they do all agree
when it started! We are recreating the initial march from
Cardiff to Greenham Common that started the camp.23 We
hope to walk in the last week of August and arrive the 3rd
September. Have a day to relax and then a day of celebrations,
or some collaborations with local organisations. But we
don’t yet know about COVID, or if we will have money to
organise any infrastructure or digital activities for it.
Ray: There’s been a bit of conversation around nostalgia, but

recreating is not about nostalgia. There are many different
ways of taking control of our own stories, writing our
own herstories, so one of the one of the words I call it is
a re-enactment.
Rebecca: It has divided the Greenham women a bit, that it’s either
nostalgic or it’s a waste of energy, but we exist to catalogue
and promote Greenham and part of that is to reach the
next generation, to say not ‘just look what they did’ but
288
‘look what that means you could do if you want to’. We

can end patriarchy together.
Ray: It also sidesteps the questions about ‘why women only?’.

Anyone can come, because anyone came on the first one.
And on a walk you walk alongside different women, for
different lengths of time, and have actual conversations
that are not recorded. It resolves all sorts of issues.
Rebecca:
And it is not about the past, it is viscerally linked to our
current policy, the way the law works now, how new
campaigners and new activists have to deal with the
law. The laws around activism, and how we penalise it,
come out of how they penalised Greenham women and
developed the law to penalise them more. It’s current.
My more personal mission is to get a fiction film
or documentary made by a British or American TV
company. My dream is a TV series about Greenham, a
kind of Orange Is the New Black, with a writers’ room,
not just my thing, a group of women writing it, a diverse
multi-women cast. Television is probably the most
potent and most immediate medium, and when it’s done
well, it’s brilliant. And the BBC [British Broadcasting
Corporation] are going to let this whole anniversary year
go by and not do anything!
Kate: It needs to be chipped away at in different areas. We

talk in our book about Greenham radicalising an entire
generation, and I think if you start putting Greenham
out en masse on TV stations –what’s going to happen?
Stories are really powerful: they make us act, they create
feelings in us. In terms of upholding the patriarchy, it’s
a very good idea not to put Greenham on television.
Rebecca: Because women inspire women. And it’s nice to have a win
story when you become politicised, so it’s not all about
all the problems, what we still have to do. These women
impacted international policy, they got the Common back
for the British people, they lived huge lives in the process
of doing it –this is a really celebratory story. We can enjoy
learning from that.
289
Notes
1
Initially, Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp was just one camp, at the main gate
of the military base. Over time, other camps were set up at other gates: all were colour
coded by the campers, and each attracted a particular subset of women and had a different
‘personality’ (Roseneil, 1995: 75–82).
2
Helen John was a Greenham woman who remained a prominent peace campaigner until
her death in 2017, see: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/nov/13/helen-
john-obituary
3
Greenham archives are kept in several university and public libraries, including in the
Women’s Library collection hosted at the London School of Economics (https://archives
hub.jisc.ac.uk/search/archives/c4a932b1-8836-3d12-a7bb-d98b537cc36f), at Feminist
Archive South, based at the University of Bristol (Bartlett, 2015), and at Glasgow Women’s
Library (https://womenslibrary.org.uk/about-us/our-projects/the-womens-archive/)
4
Cruisewatch brought together peace campaigners in the 1980s seeking to track and raise
awareness of the transportation of ground-launched, nuclear-armed Cruise missiles on
the roads of the UK (Nuclear Information Service, 1986). The contemporary equivalent
is Nukewatch UK (https://www.nukewatch.org.uk/).
5
The ‘cat and mouse game’ of evictions at the camp is detailed by Sasha Roseneil (1995: 120–4).
6
Embrace the Base took place on 12 December 1982: over 30,000 women took part,
attracting significant media attention (Roseneil, 1995: 101–2).
7
These observations on interviewing Greenham women recall Ann Oakley’s classic text
on feminist interviewing as a kind of conversational exchange of experience between
equals (1982). While Oakley’s view can be critiqued for ignoring power inequalities and
experiential differences between women, and between feminist researchers and their
research subjects, her trenchant criticisms of the exploitative and hierarchical nature of
conventional academic interviewing, and her insistence on the need for a more egalitarian
and caring feminist alternative, remain highly influential. Unfortunately, it would appear
that Ray’s experience of feminist academic interviews replicates some of the dynamics
so criticised by Oakley.
8
The Greenham Women Digital experience can be accessed here: https://greenhamwo
men.digital/about.
9
The game can be accessed here: https://scarylittlegirls.co.uk/campfi re/.
10
This was one of a pair of archival workshops organised in 2019 by artist and curator
Yvonne Billimore, discussed in more detail in Chapter 13 by Niamh Moore.
11
See Chapter 9 by Catherine Eschle in this volume.
12
Hear Frankie Armstrong talk about the inspiration for this song on the Scary Girls website
(Scary Little Girls, 2020).
13
Non-violent direct action or NVDA refers to a long-established tradition of political
intervention in which activists do not rely on institutional or representative mechanisms
for change but instead seek an immediate impact that disrupts business as usual, in ways
that are shaped by a commitment to not doing harm to others. As Roseneil puts it, ‘It was
a principle of Greenham that no violence should be used either in daily life at the camp, or
in the course of actions, even when faced with violence from police or soldiers (1995: 63).
Simultaneously ‘there was an increasing tendency for actions to have a direct impact as
well as a symbolic one, that is, for them to involve physical interventions in the work of
the base or sabotage and/or damage’ (1995: 100). This involved a specific understanding
of NVDA as active not passive, involving confrontation with authority, risk of hurt to
the self, and damage to property. As Chris Rossdale recognises (2019: 26), NVDA at
Greenham and the media attention it received, ‘played a major role in normalising mass,
obstructive and illegal direct action within anti-militarist politics’ and beyond.
290
14
The art of Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp ranged from songs to zines
(Feigenbaum, 2010, 2013), along with the creative incorporation into direct actions
of visual imagery (family photographs, spider sculptures, textiles and woven thread)
intended to invoke both everyday domesticity and subversive symbols of feminine power
(Feigenbaum, 2015).
15
See the UK Government’s Integrated Review for details of the planned increase in the
overall nuclear warhead ceiling from 225 to 260 (HM Government, 2021: 76–8).
16
Reclaim the Night marches defend the right of women to move safely through public
space at night, free from the threat of sexual violence. Beginning in the late 1970s, the
marches were a common feature of the second-wave feminist movement in England, but
petered out in the 1990s. However, they underwent a revival from the mid-2000s, led
by the London Feminist Network (Mackay, 2013).
17
The 1990s saw an upsurge of radical environmental activism in the UK, characterised by
a rejection of institutionalised lobbying techniques in favour of direct action and centring
initially on opposition to road-building. A new generation of protest camps was established
in this context (Doherty, 2000). Since around 2010, road-building has been replaced by
fracking –or the hydraulic pumping of water and chemicals at high pressure through rock
to extract gas –and latterly by the climate crisis as the main focus of UK environmentalists’
direct action (see: https://frack-off.org.uk/ and https://extinctionrebellion.uk/).
18
See Chapter 12 by Alison Bartlett in this volume.
19
The UK–Pacific solidarity network, Women Working for a Nuclear Free and Independent
Pacific, emerged from Greenham and continued until the late 1990s (Eschle, 2020).
20
Ray’s concern that the rise of queer theory within the academy has displaced a focus
on women’s experience echoes some radical feminist critiques of queer theory’s
poststructuralist-influenced destabilisation of fixed identity categories, or of the presumed
dominance in queer theory of gay men and with them the rise of a male-dominated
politics (for example, Walters, 1996; Rudy, 2001). However, it is worth noting that queer
theory has been used productively by feminists to interpret Greenham. In this vein,
Sasha Roseneil argues that a queer lens can show how the camp ‘destabilized gender and
sexual identities, and provoked radical reworkings of ways of thinking about and being
a “woman”’ as well as underlining the ‘unusualness of its politics and practices … how
life there uncompromisingly challenged authority and convention’(Roseneil, 2000: 6–7).
See also Chapter 4 in this volume by Finn Mackay.
21
AWE (Atomic Weapons Establishment) Aldermaston is a UK Ministry of Defence nuclear
research and testing centre. Greenham women began camping there intermittently in
1985 and a monthly women’s camp has taken place regularly ever since (see https://www.
facebook.com/Alder maston-Womens-Peace-Camp-176886025697350/).
22
Such arguments did take place at Greenham, right from the decision in February 1982 to
become women-only. Roseneil argues that ‘[q]‌uestions about who the women of Greenham
were, about degrees and hierarchies of being Greenham women, and how the identity of
“woman” was to be performed at Greenham were the issues which constituted the internal
politics of the movement’, giving rise to fractious and often unresolved debates and conflicts
(Roseneil, 2000: 141). However, on Roseneil’s account these conflicts were not about the
biological status or otherwise of the category of ‘woman’ and whether the camp should be
trans-inclusive, which is what Ray and Rebecca are alluding to and which has become a
much more politicised issue in the UK in recent years. In Chapter 4 in this volume, Finn
Mackay has reinterpreted her experience at Menwith Hill Women’s Peace Camp in the light
of this development, in ways that destabilise fixed understandings of ‘women’ at that camp.
See also Chapter 7 by Emma Gómez Nicolau, which documents how recent feminist protest
camps in Spain reinterpret ‘women-only’ to include trans women and non-binary people.
23
See: https://greenhamwomeneverywhere.co.uk/march/.
291
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293
16
Conclusion: Rethinking Protest

Camps, Rethinking Feminism
The chapters we have collected here offer a polyphonic response to the

feminist questions of protest camps we asked in the Introduction. They
showcase a range of feminist theoretical and methodological frameworks that
collectively reach towards a broadly intersectional or decolonial approach,
along with case studies of camps from past and present, and from around
the world. Notably, the chapters consider both Cold War western women-
only peace camps and mixed-gender camps from the recent ‘global wave’
and beyond, previously studied in largely distinct sets of scholarly research.
Together, our contributors reveal fresh insights into how camps are sites
of both gendered politics and of feminist activism; they draw on feminist
theoretical frameworks to develop new ways of assessing the limitations
and possibilities of the protest camp form; and they spotlight the complex
legacies of past camps for feminist theory and practice today.
This conclusion draws out some of the cross-cutting insights from the
chapters, in two sections. First we consider several ways in which the feminist
orientation of our authors produces new lines of sight into the politics of
protest camps. Second we reverse our focus and reflect on how grounding
the analysis in protest camp politics generates new perspectives on feminist
theory and practice.
Rethinking protest camps

So how does the feminist perspective adopted in this book –and the specific
feminist approaches of our authors –help us see protest camps differently?
We organise the following discussion in terms of power, space, the body
and language.
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Power
To begin with, the chapters draw our attention to the persistence, complexity
and granularity of power relations within protest camps. Like the social
movements in which they are embedded, camps do not transcend the
power dynamics in wider society that activists may seek to overturn but are
often mired within them, in ways that constrain activist interactions with
each other in the camp and their broader sustainability and effectiveness.
This phenomenon is illustrated vividly in the chapters on mixed-gender
camps. Take the discussion of Occupy camps in the United States and UK
in the chapters by Celeste Montoya, Catherine Eschle, and Heather McKee
Hurwitz and Anne Kumer (Chapters 2, 9 and 14), which together show
how women, people of colour and queer and trans activists were sometimes
subjected to physical and sexual violence, made to feel unsafe as well as
unwelcome, in camp and online spaces. The chapters by Māhealani Ahia and
Kahala Johnson on the Mauna Kea camp in Hawai’i, Chia-Ling Yang on the
3/18 Movement in Taiwan, Emma Gómez Nicolau on the Spanish 15-M
movement, and Sara Motta et al on the camps of the Landless Movement
(MST) in Brazil (Chapters 3, 5, 7, and 11 respectively), all reveal hierarchical
gender relations between activists in very different camp contexts.
Moreover, because the broad feminist approach shared in this volume does not
focus on gender hierarchies in a vacuum but instead emphasises the multiplicity
and intersectionality of power relations, the chapters also underscore how power
is at work in women-only camps, and in women-only spaces within mixed
camps. While previous studies of the women’s peace camps of the Cold War
have certainly paid attention to tactical differences and ideological conflicts
on site (for example, Krasniewicz, 1992; Roseneil, 1995; Bartlett, 2011), the
persistence of social hierarchies cutting across gender have received less attention.
Rectifying this, Alison Bartlett in Chapter 12 identifies the ways in which
living in a colonised nation produces political priorities at odds for the non-
Indigenous and Indigenous women protesting at Pine Gap military installation
in the Australian outback in 1983. These lived relations of dis/possession created
conflict around issues such as the involvement of men in the Pine Gap protests,
interactions with police, and lesbian relationships. And Gómez Nicolau discusses
how the Spanish activists who set up the #OrditFeminista camp in 2020 sought
to respond to the past exclusions of women-only spaces by reconceptualising
the parameters of their ‘non-mixed’ camp to include trans women and non-
binary activists, and by centring the experiences of migrant women.
Space
Connectedly, the chapters in this book illuminate the gendered spatiality
of camps. There is already considerable attention in the social movement
295
literature to the spatial dimensions of protest camps: to how camps are spaces
of movement convergence with their own distinctive topographies and
infrastructures, online and offline (Kaika and Karaliotas, 2016; Kavada and
Dimitriou, 2018); and to how the global wave of camps sought to reclaim
public space from corporate ownership and neoliberal governmental forces
in order to revitalise democracy (Dhaliwal, 2012; Arenas, 2014). In parallel,
feminist geographers have argued that there are gendered dimensions of
political processes and spaces at multiple scales (Staeheli et al, 2004; Pain
and Smith, 2008; Kern, 2020). Bringing this work into view adds to the
study of protest camps an understanding of how their spatial topographies,
and the public space that underpins democratic participation, are stratified
by the power relations discussed earlier.
In this vein, several of the chapters in this book draw attention to how
protest camps transgress the foundational divide in liberal capitalism between
public and private life, and with it the notion of a separate private sphere,
historically associated with women and the feminine. The public/private
distinction still functions today both ideologically and in practical terms to
constrain women’s full political participation and particularly the participation
of women of colour and migrants. Camps establish domestic and intimate
spaces in public view, however, and bring associated relations of care into
public space, which Eschle in Chapter 9 and Anastasia Kavada in Chapter 10
both seek to capture by extending the heuristic of camp infrastructure
developed in social movement scholarship to incorporate domestic and care
functions. Connectedly, camps can be spaces in which some women are
rendered strikingly visible as democratic actors or as resistant subjectivities.
Yeşim Arat’s account in Chapter 6 of the iconography of the Gezi Park protest
in Istanbul testifies to this, for example, as does Finn Mackay’s reflection in
Chapter 4 on the visibility of diversely embodied women at Menwith Hill
camp in the UK. The material and symbolic importance of the domestic
dimensions of camp life and of the labour processes that underpin them
may be particularly valued by women and feminist activists, as we can see in
Chapter 8 by Joan Haran on the infrastructural work of the US ecofeminist
organiser Starhawk, or in Yang’s Chapter 5 on the 3/18 Movement. And in
Kavada’s Chapter 10, we are given a sense of how the transgression of the
public/private divide, the collectivisation of ‘the commons’ and the extension
of relations of care into the public realm, are core to the feminist-imbued
model of ‘project democracy’ that Kavada gleans from her fieldwork in
various protest camps.
In addition, the chapters show that camps can be highly unequal and
differentiated spaces. In this regard, Yang deploys a revealing spatial
metaphor in her discussion of the 3/18 camp, mapping how men occupied
the leadership and performance roles at centre stage, while women were
largely relegated to work behind the scenes. Moreover, Eschle’s analysis of
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Occupy Glasgow and Faslane Peace Camp intimates that shifting ostensibly
private and intimate aspects of life such as socialising and sleeping into
public space can also have negative effects. It may actually make it harder
for some overlapping groups of women to participate –those with caring
responsibilities, precarious jobs, disabilities, or in an insecure relationship to
the state. Worse, this dimension of camp life may intensify the possibility of
sexual violence and systemic insecurity for women and other marginalised
groups. As both Montoya and Gómez Nicolau warn (in Chapters 2 and
7), feminist spatial strategies to combat that insecurity by providing ‘safe
spaces’ within camps can also reproduce exclusions, hinging on expectations
of (White, cis, heterosexual) normative femininity. The gendered spatiality
of protest camps is thus complex and context-specific: it may enable the
entry of feminists and their allies into public space and discourse, through
the creation of ‘brave spaces’ as Ahia and Johnson call them (Chapter 3);
or it may reinstate or even exacerbate the spatial boundaries and exclusions
of wider society.
A more obvious spatial aspect of protest camps is evident in the broad
range of geopolitical locations for case studies in this volume. While the
famously muddy, cold and wet common of Greenham in the 1980s discussed
in Chapter 15 by Kate Kerrow et al occupies a somewhat iconic position in
the collective imaginary of feminist protest camps, the very idea of recreating
a domestic space is transformed when it moves to the Australian desert
(Bartlett, Chapter 12), the Brazilian countryside (Motta et al, Chapter 11),
or a logging site on Vancouver Island (Moore, Chapter 13). The specificities
of every region and their local politics in relation to globalisation impacts
what the camps look like, how they are organised and how they intersect
with gender and feminism (see also Eschle, 2017). This contextual specificity
has temporal as well as geopolitical dimensions, with both camps and gender
politics differing over time as well as place.
Yet as Chapter 8 by Haran and Chapter 13 by Niamh Moore argue,
camps also often escape their immediate time and place, with their traces
and effects spiralling outward and onward through movements, networks,
individuals, archives and cultural memories. In these two chapters, we find
another reworking of the concept of camp infrastructures that has been
so influential in social movement scholarship to try to capture this spatial
and temporal extension: Haran pointing to the shared labour of passing on
group rituals and Moore arguing that the ongoing construction of camp
archives should be considered an important element of communicative
infrastructure. Both contributors also turn to feminist metaphors: to the
weaving and webs so prevalent at Greenham, and also to Donna Haraway’s
thinking through the collective web work of cat’s cradles. In such ways,
we are shown how camps, and the feminist politics within them, might
ultimately refuse confinement to their particular time and place.
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Body
Gender and feminist politics have always been about bodies, and it is thus
no surprise that this book pays close attention to the racialised, gendered
and sexualised bodies that inhabit camps, insisting that what Motta and
colleagues (Chapter 11) call ‘enfleshed’ embodiment is key to how camps
are organised and what political tactics are deployed, and to their symbolic
and concrete effects. As argued elsewhere by Orna Sasson-Levy and Tamar
Rapoport, ‘analytical questions raised by the “protesting body” of men and
women have been mostly neglected’ in social movement theory (2003: 379),
but there is much to learn on this point from feminist scholarship focused
on the gendered production and disciplining of bodies, and the body as a
site of individual and collective resistance (2003: 382). The chapters in this
book contribute to such scholarship in several ways.
First, they show how gendered and racialised bodies are mobilised in
and through protest camps to create spectacles of defiance. Take Yang’s
account in Chapter 5 of 3/18 Movement activists deliberately dressing up
in hyperfeminine clothing in order to confound expectations about who
can physically defy the police (a strategy she shows to be open only to
women who were from the dominant Chinese ethnic group, and straight),
or Arat’s description of the women of Gezi Park (Chapter 6) wearing t-shirts
emblazoned with slogans poking fun at the Turkish leader Erdoğan’s latest
pronouncement about women’s reproductive duties. These are instances
where women deployed their bodies in ways that both drew upon and
undermined the association of women with the private sphere and its caring
roles, and that played with or subverted norms of racialised and feminine
comportment and dress.
Second, the chapters show camps to be important sites for the
transformation of embodied subjectivities. In the women-only camps
discussed in this volume by Mackay, Bartlett and Kerrow et al (Chapters 4, 12
and 15, respectively), repeated confrontation with authority and new modes
of interaction with other women can lead to radical shifts in not only how
bodies are clothed but more generally in how they are comported, labelled,
loved. Mackay’s chapter makes particularly clear that what it means to be
a woman is thus a site of political contestation in women-only camps, not
their fixed foundation. For Motta et al (Chapter 11), resistances in mixed-
gender protest camps and other spaces in Northeastern Brazil are about the
‘reoccupation’ of the body as much as land and territory: both are landscapes
of the emergence of political possibility and of a more fully flourishing life.
Third, the chapters underline how the feminised, racialised and otherwise
non-normative body is not only a conduit for resistance in camps, but also a
site of vulnerability. This has a negative dimension in that particular bodies
in camps constitute a target for shaming, marginalisation and violence, as
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indicated earlier. Sasson-Levy and Rapoport with reference to the Israeli

Women in Black have shown how, when female activists use their bodies as
sites of protest, the slurs and aggression directed at them by opponents are
likely to target those same bodies (2003: 395), a phenomenon that has already
been well documented in relation to Greenham Common Women’s Peace
Camp (for example, Cresswell, 1996: Ch. 5). Our chapters make clear that
such hostility can also emanate from other activists in mixed-gender protest
sites. Those whose bodies can fit more easily into the pre-existing mould
for the activist, whether as rational tactician, rhetorician or heroic warrior
for justice, have consciously targeted or unconsciously marginalised bodies
that fail to fit this mould, as illustrated in this volume by Montoya, Ahia
and Johnson, Yang, and Eschle (Chapters 2, 3, 5 and 9; see, more generally,
Coleman and Bassi, 2011; Eschle, 2017). However, these chapters and
others show that bodily vulnerability within protest camps also has a positive
dimension, because activist recognition of it is key to mutual flourishing
in camps and in life more generally: ‘our vulnerability and precarity “do
not contain us but expose us to a world without which our living is not
possible”’ (Butler cited in Fotaki and Daskalaki, 2021: 1269). In different
ways, this insight underpins both Kavada and Gómez Nicolau’s theorisation
of the potential of protest camps (see Chapters 10 and 7). For Kavada,
acknowledgement of bodily vulnerability and interdependence underpin the
attitudes and relations of care that are crucial to what she calls the ‘project
democracy’ that camps can facilitate. For Gómez Nicolau, recognition of
the differential embodiment and experience of others is essential in order
for camps to become spaces for the manifestation of diverse political subjects
(following Butler, 2011). Either way, feminist theorisation puts the body
centre stage in analysis of both the limitations and possibilities of the protest
camp form.
Language
We turn next to the discursive dimension of protest camp politics: to who
gets to speak in or about camps, and to which languages and discourses carry
authority. As in society more generally, men from the dominant ethnic,
class and sexual groupings in society tend to assume more power to speak
in camps. Thus, in Chapter 5, Yang draws attention to how male students
from the top universities dominated relations with the media during the 3/
18 Movement, partly because they fitted both activist and media expectations
of what a leader should look and talk like. Yang and other contributors also
show how the political discourses that circulate in mixed protest camps
frequently default to misogynistic or homophobic colloquialisms. This
is evident in Yang’s description of the street ‘cursing-stage’ in the 3/18
Movement, where sexist slurs dominated, and in the accounts of both Arat
299
and Gómez Nicolau, in Chapters 6 and 7, of exclusionary language in the

Gezi Park and 15-M protests respectively.
In addition, the chapters reveal how alternative political discourses are
articulated and reclaimed within camps. See, for example Arat’s playful
description of when sex workers in Gezi Park responded to the use of the
epithets ‘son of a whore’ being hurled at President Erdoğan by insisting
that he was no son of theirs. As well as contesting specific phrases, other
chapters suggest particular forms of feminist knowledge production emerge
from and about camps, whether it be oral history interviews or personal
reflections, that situate knowledge in time as well as place (Haraway, 1988)
and that offer a method of theorising from narrative or anecdote (Gallop,
2002). More broadly, the cases show how intersectional feminist research
into protest camps can move subordinated movement discourses into the
spotlight, whether these are the poems of Afro-Brazilian women’s collectives
in Motta et al in Chapter 11, the ecofeminist lineages traced by Haran and
Moore in Chapters 8 and 13, or the activist discourses of care untangled by
Kavada in Chapter 10.
Particularly notable in this regard are the contributions by authors who
write to decolonise the structures and epistemologies that often prompt social
movements and yet remain embedded in their praxis. Ahia and Johnson’s
Chapter 3 is a political act of bringing Indigenous Hawaiian language into
the protest camp archive; similarly, Bartlett in Chapter 12 brings the language
of Indigenous Australian feminists to her account of the Pine Gap/Quiurnpa
protest, as well as actively re-naming Anglicised locations as First Nations’
country. In parallel, Motta et al in Chapter 11 employ Brazilian Portuguese
to describe forms of resistance that they feel are not directly translatable into
academic English, and to thereby maintain a kind of conceptual dissonance
for the Anglophone reader refused their expected political categories. These
decolonising methods and gestures are critical forms that often require going
against the expected grammar of academic essays.
To unpack this a little: Ahia and Johnson’s linguistic specificity in
describing and analysing the Mauna Kea camp and its context is a form of
self-determination in the face of continued colonial imposition in Hawai’i,
hence their insistence on readers doing some work to connect with this
culture and heritage through active translation of the Hawaiian language.
Their chapter brings new conceptual idioms into the study of protest camps,
vivid as their account is with reference to the land on which the camp was
held and the plants that grow there. In this conceptual framework, the camp
was sustained through metaphors of working the ground, of roots, growth
and fecundity, as well as of constructing a shared house and home. Moreover,
Ahia and Johnson’s chapter does not ossify Indigenous idioms but reveals
their porousness with international feminist and queer narratives about
dignity and respect, even in the face of internal opposition. This valuable
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approach is echoed by Motta et al, who insist on the relation of land to

body through the reoccupation of tierra and through a partial re-imagining
of language and onto-epistemologies in terms of what they call escrevivência
and the gramáticas da dor e alegria. Motta et al’s linking of macro-level social
structures with the micro-specifics of grammar suggests an intersectional and
multilinguistic vision of occupation by particular bodies in time and place,
protesting the terms of their dispossession and asserting their right to live
and express themselves differently. In sum, these chapters share a discursive
strategy that troubles and begins to unravel the colonial legacies that shape
protest camps, not only in terms of the political languages that are articulated
within them, but also in the analytic writing about them available to readers.
Rethinking feminism
We want now to reverse the direction of our analysis to consider how a
focus on protest camps might enable a rethinking of feminist theory and
activism. As several of the chapters have shown, protest camps are frequently
sites of deep feminist engagement and of diverse feminist tactics. These are
strategically innovative and aesthetically interesting, and worthy of study
in their own right, as well as of wider political resonance. In this section,
we suggest they constitute an important and under-recognised element of
contemporary feminist mobilisation, in many contexts around the world
and that acknowledging them can complicate well-established narratives –
what Moore, in Chapter 13, calls ‘cultural memories’ about feminism –as
well as making new contributions to feminist archiving. We begin by
examining how protest camp involvement fits in wider discourses about
feminist movement.
For many years, the dominant narratives about feminism in the West have
focused not on the street, park and square but rather on demobilisation, in
the form of increasing institutional integration (Ferree and Martin, 1995;
Krook and Mackay, 2010), co-optation by governments and corporations
(Eschle and Maiguashca, 2018), the move to the digital sphere (Baer, 2016;
Mendes and Ringrose, 2019), and the erosion of community organising,
particularly by women of colour, in decades of neoliberalism and austerity
(Bassel and Emejulu, 2017; Emejulu and Bassel, 2021). These shifts
register the changing status of women amid broader economic and cultural
transformation, and also chime with a widespread discourse of postfeminism,
which has both incorporated and disavowed feminism since the 1980s (for
example, Henderson and Taylor, 2020). Perhaps surprisingly, a focus on
protest camps can affirm these dynamics in some contexts. In Chapter 5
on the 3/18 Movement, for example, Yang points to a misidentification by
young women protestors of feminism in Taiwan as firmly located in the past
and of women’s equality as fully achieved. Consequently, these protesters
301
distanced themselves from women’s organisations and responded to the

sexism and misogyny they faced with individualised strategies that Yang
suggests were at best ambivalent in their impact.
It is, however, recent accounts of the revival, remobilisation or ‘fourth
wave’ of feminism that are more frequently given succour by the case
studies here. Drawing on examples including the US Women’s March,
the ‘green tide’ in Latin America and the ‘black protests’ of Poland,
such accounts tend to emphasise the role of young women or a new
generation, the interconnection of street protest and online campaigning,
and a shared focus on defending bodily integrity and rights in the face of
a resurgent anti-feminist Right (see, for example, Carpenter, 2019; Chira,
2020; Molyneux et al, 2021). The chapters in this volume show how the
involvement of young women in the ‘global wave’ of mixed protest camps,
otherwise known as the ‘movements of the squares’, may have helped to
sustain or accelerate feminist mobilisation in some of these contexts. Arat’s
account of the Gezi Park camp in Chapter 6, for instance, argues that
Turkish feminists embedded their values, wit and organisational tactics into
the protest, thus drawing in a new generation. Gómez Nicolau argues in
Chapter 7 that feminists have continued to mobilise in Spain since the 15-
M movement upsurge, suggestively characterising feminism in this context
as ‘slow-cooked’ rather than instant sustenance. And Hurwitz and Kumar
in Chapter 14 resituate the Women’s March, Black Lives Matter and other
contemporaneous US movements in the context of the Occupy protests
that radicalised many across US cities in 2011.
How do these chapters help to conceptualise the relationship between
feminism-in-m ovement and protest camps in more general terms?
Hurwitz and Kumar draw on the work of Jo Reger (2012) to describe
contemporary feminism as both everywhere and nowhere, taking fleeting
shape in protest camps as it twines through other movements. Haran in
Chapter 8 further theorises this phenomenon through the metaphor of
a mycelial network: a fungal root system that spreads underground and
occasionally erupts through the soil to be seen. Perhaps we can extend
this metaphor to Moore’s Chapter 13, which is grounded in an enduring
cultural memory of Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp that takes
her to the Clayoquot logging protest in Canada, and also to Chapter 15
by Kerrow et al, where Eschle and Rebecca Mordan both describe their
mothers taking them to Greenham, and imply a direct lineage between
this experience and their professional work. Those contributors immersed
as activists in historic protest camps, like Moore, Mackay and Jill (‘Ray’)
Raymond, or in more recent camps, like Gómez Nicolau and Ahia and
Johnson, offer a particular kind of authority in their reflective writing which
those of us researching without the memory of experience try to find in
extant remnants of events. Such accounts could themselves be seen as the
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spores of the mycelial network, which spreads not only through protest
camps but also through feminist retellings of them.
In such ways, we suggest, a focus on protest camps narrates feminism
differently. Specifically, it draws attention to past mobilisations, both women-
only and mixed-gender, that are at risk of being forgotten in stories that
focus on movement over situated resistance, or on institutional dynamics
over protest, or on feminism as a distinct struggle over feminist diffusion
through other mobilisations. We note, for example, that Chapter 13 by
Moore and Chapter 4 by Mackay both use the terminology of ‘women’s
peace camps’ rather than of protest camps (at Clayoquot Sound in Canada
and ‘Womenwith Hill’ in the UK respectively). This naming not only resists
the flattening of the feminist specificities of their case studies within the
conceptual framework provided by social movement scholarship, but also
locates them within a genealogy of western feminist theory and practice that
spirals outward from Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp. Haran’s
Chapter 8 further elaborates on this genealogy, focusing on the persistent
figure of the ecofeminist Starhawk to illuminate the multidirectional threads
linking feminist peace and permaculture activism to very different camps
over time and space. In such ways, these chapters not only offer a feminist
recontextualisation of the particular camps with which they are concerned,
but also make feminist theory and practice central to the contemporary
protest camp landscape, particularly in the British and North American
contexts. In so doing, they collectively insist on some significant continuities
around the substantive values and practices associated with feminist peace
activism and what Haran names eco/feminist lineages that thread between
feminism and other movements. Close attention to the perennial tactic of
making camp together draws these continuities, and their contemporary
legacy, into the light.
This brings us to the fact that several of the chapters in this book,
particularly in Part IV, are concerned with how best to ensure that feminism
involvement in protest camps –often a relatively fleeting and ephemeral
phenomenon –remains in the collective, public memory of feminism. In
this vein, Moore, Hurwitz and Kumar, and Kerrow et al (in Chapters 13, 14
and 15) are all preoccupied with (re)making archives as a form of political
intervention, in order to extend the life of feminist thought and activism into
contemporary protest culture and also to challenge ‘who gets to remember
radical activism, and with what consequence’, as Moore puts it. Hurwitz
and Kumar make the case for a radical digital archiving strategy that draws
on institutional support even as it subverts institutional standards of archive
construction and dissemination. The authors see this strategy as essential
if the feminist presence in ‘big-tent’ social movements is to remain alive in
subsequent popular memory of those movements, and of feminism. There
are parallels with the subsequent collaborative conversation between Kerrow
303
and her colleagues about their ‘Greenham Women Everywhere’ project.

Fearing that Greenham was being forgotten and its model of feminist activism
lost to a younger generation, Kerrow et al created an independent online
archive of oral history interviews with Greenham women and have since
devised a range of creative strategies, from immersive virtual environments to
museum installations and online shows, as well as writing a book, in order to
animate the interview material in multisensory ways that substantially enrich
audience encounters with it. It is clear from all three of these chapters that
the point is not to preserve the feminist past (can it ever be preserved, when
new readers come to it?), but to reanimate it for contemporary political
purposes. Notably, Chapter 15 by Kerrow et al also demonstrates what
Moore refers to as the ‘radical potentials of oral history’ to create adjunct
or ancillary forms of publicly accessible counter-memory that can disrupt
congealed narratives of feminism.
Concurrently, there are chapters threading through the entire book that
contest the kinds of feminism that are remembered, implying that particular
forms of 20th-century feminism are too easily discarded nowadays as ‘old-
fashioned’, essentialist or racist. These chapters propose that feminist attention
to protest camps brings the continuing political valency of such theories and
praxis to the fore. The numerous references to Claire Hemmings’ (2011)
book Why Stories Matter, in which she shows how feminism is narrated
through discrete decades in ways that are invested in developmental stories
of progress and loss, are testament to the perceived need to revisit earlier
feminisms and their legacies. For example, Bartlett’s Chapter 12 demonstrates
that the archive must be actively worked over and supplemented to find
Indigenous commentary, and the ways in which non-Indigenous feminists
engaged with Indigenous women and culture in 1980s Australia. Several
other chapters persuasively argue that 20th-century protest camps in
Europe, North America and the UK, along with their archival traces, offer
potent philosophical and epistemological foundations for ongoing feminist
theorising and praxis around gender identity, climate crisis, democracy,
mobilisation and civil disobedience, to name a few. In sum, tracing feminist
movement and memory through protest camps recovers a wider range of
feminist voices to help us think through feminism in the here and now.
In concluding, we anticipate further work on protest camps and
feminism will be called for as discontent intensifies with authoritarian,
xenophobic, misogynistic and rapacious governments, and connectedly
with the desecration of forests, overconsumption, economic exploitation
and austerity, militarism and war-mongering, the erosion of women’s and
migrants rights, and the climate crisis –among other myriad problems.
This book has established that feminism is a cornerstone of protest camps in
many contexts, just as protest camp involvement has been a perennial feature
of feminism. More than this, the chapters have shown collectively that the
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practice of camping in the place of protest often brings gender politics into
the open, inviting both reinvestment in and contestation of private/public,
male/female distinctions. The salient features of gender, sexuality, ethnicity
and race, and class are likely to prove enduring trajectories for reflection
and analysis, but we hope this book will also invite future contributions
from other disciplinary perspectives and legacies of reading. For example,
research by feminists invested in the disciplinary traditions of geography,
migration studies, law, literature, fine arts, history or linguistics might offer
further rich and creative angles from which to interrogate the relationship
between feminism and protest camps. As some of the less conventional
chapters in this volume inaugurate, the development of a broader range of
methodologies and narrative approaches to protest camps would also be
welcome, and is likely to bring with it yet more reorientations of feminism
and feminist stories. Finally, while this book includes diverse international
examples, there are entire continents missing from our conversation
(reflective partly of the limitations of our networks, and partly of the
political economy of knowledge production), that would bring important
new perspectives. At the same time, close attention to the specificities of
place will be significant for resisting homogenisation in our accounts of
both feminism and protest camps, and the erasures entailed by a desire to
find commonalities across locales.
Protest camps as a distinctive form of social movement practice entail the
creation of micro-communities that prefigure alternative modes of daily
living and ethical practice; they are sites of experimental, embodied ways of
being and relating; and they aim to provoke and inspire structural change.
While they are contorted by wider power relations, including gender, they
are also sites in which gender can be undone and remade. As such, their
affinity with feminism is palpable and they are fertile ground for further
feminist reflection and analysis. There is much undoing and remaking yet
to be undertaken.
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307
Index
References to figures appear in italic type.

References to endnotes show both the
page number and the note number (231n3).
A aloha ʻāina 40, 57

3/18 Parliament Occupation Movement 7, anarchism 70, 170, 145, 186, 189, 266, 267
78–84, 85–94, 295, 296, 298, 299, 301 ancestor 37, 38, 43, 44, 48, 53, 58, 196
see also Sunflower Movement animal 46
15-M Movement 7, 8, 116–23, 129, 177, rights 66, 284
182, 295, 300, 302 anti-austerity 3, 115, 118
see also Indignados see also 15-M Movement, Indignados
Abalone Alliance 136, 150 anti-Media Monopoly Campaign 78, 86
abolitionist 39, 40, 286 anti-nuclear 8, 138–9, 150–1, 167, 219–25,
Aboriginal 218–29, 230–1 285
abortion 102, 105, 120, 123, 125, 222, 227 anti-roads 66
accountability 21, 31, 32, 47, 62, 185, 267 antisemitic 166, 167
activism 1–8, 10, 17–19, 22, 25–9, 38, APY (Arrernte, Pitjantjatjara,
43–49, 52, 58, 62–72, 74n1, 78–82, Yankuntatjara) 218, 224, 226, 230
85–94, 116–23, 128, 129, 135–51, 152n5, Arab Spring 2, 118, 176
157–60, 163, 167, 171–3, 176–90, 198–9, see also Tahrir Square
202, 205, 210, 219–32, 235–51, 252n4, archival turn 6, 221, 240, 241
256–68, 274, 275, 276, 284, 289, 290n13, art 46, 48, 103, 198, 200, 251, 257, 261,
291n17, 294–304 265, 276, 284, 291n14
Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP) 100, 101, assault 18, 22–32, 40, 55, 92
105, 108 Athens 3, 177, 184
advertising 69, 71 see also Syntagma Square
African American 7, 27, 157, 160, 163, 172 Atomic Weapons Establishment
Afro-Brazilian 6, 9, 195–7, 200, 206–10, 300 (AWE) 64, 291n21
ageism 19, 126 see also Aldermaston
agribusiness 197, 202, 203 Aunty Twinkle Borge 38, 49
agroecology 196–9, 202, 204, 210 austerity 3, 115, 118, 120–2, 162–4, 167,
ʻAha Kiaʻi Aloha 39, 42, 44, 45, 53, 54 170, 171, 301, 304
Ahia, Noelani 41, 54 see also anti-austerity
aikāne 49, 57 Australia 3, 9, 61, 102, 140, 152n6, 196,
akua 46, 57 199, 217–32, 295, 297, 300, 304
akuahine 46, 57 authoritarianism 99, 100, 105, 109, 110,
Ala Kupuna 51, 57 149, 150, 178, 191, 260, 304
alcohol 165, 166, 167, 183 autonomy 8, 9, 25, 94, 119, 127, 129, 140,
Aldermaston 64, 74, 291n21 142, 159, 164, 167, 170, 171, 208, 223
see also Atomic Weapons Establishment Awakening Foundation 79, 81, 83, 90–3, 94n1
(AWE)
Alevism 100, 101 B
Alice Springs 218–19, 224–30 babysitter 86, 87
Al Jazeera 3 backlash 8, 48
308
Index
Ballistic Missile Defence 61 civil rights 103, 256, 262

Baltimore 21–8 Clayoquot Lives 236, 237, 238, 245–8,
BaRRosas 195, 197, 205, 206 252n5, 259
BBC 167, 289 Clayoquot Sound ecofeminist peace camp 9,
beauty 89, 90 139, 235, 238, 242, 248–50, 303
Beijing 78 see also Friends of Clayoquot Sound (FOCS)
Big Tent 10, 256–62, 267, 303 climate change 3, 248
biological essentialism 68–70 clothing 64, 67, 71, 72, 89, 104, 161, 298
bisexual 80, 81 CNN Türk 108
see also LGBTQIA+ Cold War 2–5, 68, 91, 294, 295
Black 5, 6, 8, 9, 49, 51, 52, 57, 158, 161–3, collective identity 2, 70, 73
195–7, 200, 206–10, 218, 221, 222, 226, colonialism 6, 40, 45, 47, 52, 53, 225–6,
230, 285–6, 299 235–6, 242–3, 259–60
community 49, 50, 157, 171, 172 colonisation 6, 37, 40, 45, 47, 52, 53, 225,
feminist thought 5, 9, 157, 161, 163 226, 235–6, 242–3, 260
liberation movement 83, 172 Combahee River Collective 5
Black Lives Matter 30, 43, 262, 284, 302 commoning 188, 190, 191
blockade 38, 39, 66, 136, 142, 143, 148–50, Common Justice’s restorative justice
235, 236 programme 21
body shape 71 Communist Party 91
Bolsonaro, Jair 198 communities of care 179
Boston 21, 24, 26, 31, 176, 177, 219 consent 29, 45, 47, 54, 66, 224, 277
brave spaces 7, 45, 47, 48, 125, 297 Conservative Nationalist Party see
Brazil 6, 9, 195–210, 211n1, 211n4, 295, Kuomintang (KMT)
297–300 consumerism 100
see also Fortaleza contraception 49, 227
Breitbart 23 cosplay 89, 94n2
Bulgaria 3 counselling 29
Butler, Judith 71, 115–18, 124, 127, 128 counter-memory 9, 248, 304
COVID-19 3, 56, 264, 276, 281, 288
C Cre8 Summit 142, 144
California 20, 21, 136, 137, 139 crime 19, 21, 92, 103
Campaign for the Accountability of criminal damage 65
American Bases (CAAB) 62, 74n1 criminal justice 66
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament Critical Resistance and INCITE! 21, 31
(CND) 62, 64, 281, 285 critical Whiteness theory 6, 52, 221–2
Campbell, Jane 2, 10n1 Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement 78,
campesino 195–6, 209 81–3, 243
Canada 9, 145, 235, 243, 302, 303 Cruise missiles 273, 285, 290n4
see also Vancouver Island cyborg 149, 241
capitalism 40, 71, 129, 145, 151, 157–63,
163, 171, 178, 189, 197, 202–5, 296 D
caravan 64, 66, 67, 74, 168–70, 279, 282 dance 24, 48, 139, 149–50, 152n5, 152n10,
care ethics 9, 87, 89, 180, 182, 186 184, 198, 200, 228, 230, 231, 248
cat’s cradle 149, 150, 241–8, 297 see also spiral dance
charity 186 death 70, 147, 180, 200, 207, 229, 239,
childbirth 37, 42, 46, 147 290n2
childcare 159, 202 decolonisation 6, 45, 198, 210
children 29, 40, 42, 50, 52, 66, 68–70, 79, deforestation 235, 237, 243, 252n7
105, 108, 161, 165, 166, 169, 181, 201, Democracia Real ¡Ya! 120
202, 204, 222–7, 280 democracy 8, 9, 17, 78, 99, 109, 110, 119,
China 78, 82, 90, 91 122, 129, 135, 176–88, 190–2, 257,
see also Beijing 266–7, 296, 299, 304
Christianity 230–1 Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) 82
cis 4, 5, 29, 52, 118, 121, 124, 125, 297 demonstration 67, 78, 84, 92, 100, 117, 120,
cisheteropatriarchy 42, 43, 50–4, 210 123, 126, 129, 219, 223
citizenship 125, 162, 176, 179, 182, 187, 190 descendant 37, 39, 58, 142
Civil Code 92, 103 Diablo Canyon 136, 142, 143, 150
civil disobedience 235, 249, 304 Encampment 149
309
FEMINISM AND PROTEST CAMPS
digital archive 9, 10, 137–8, 237, 246–9, farming 64, 92, 144–5, 180, 195, 202–5
257, 258 far Right 128, 302
disabled 30, 159, 278, 279 Faslane Peace Camp 9, 158, 163, 167–71,
disruptive behaviour 29, 30 282, 297
Dissent! Network of Resistance 142, 145, 149 father 48, 93, 188, 208, 299
divorce 104 fear 18–20, 28, 46, 52, 128, 129, 165,
domestic abuse 46, 92, 103 170, 177
domestic violence see domestic abuse Feigenbaum, Anna 3, 69–73, 157, 158–60,
drag 49, 50, 52 163, 168, 170, 172, 179–80, 241, 291n14
Dreaming the Dark 149 feminist
drone 61 archiving 6, 258–60, 262, 274, 290n3
drugs 27, 166 Democratic Theory 176, 182, 187–91
dualism 242–3, 249 General Assemblies 17, 23, 32, 181, 183, 262
history 220, 232, 237, 239, 241, 244,
E 248–51, 273
Earth Activist Training (EAT) 138–40, 141, lens 2–6, 9, 158, 171, 262, 263
142, 144, 145, 147, 155, 252n4 literature 83, 156–8, 161, 162, 171, 242,
Reader 140, 142, 144 257, 263, 296, 305
earth mother 55, 68, 72 mobilisation 4, 8, 129, 262, 301
ecofeminism 69–70, 136, 140, 147, 242–51, organisation 116, 243, 257, 261
252n6, 252n7 theory 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 63, 68, 72, 161, 169,
Egypt 2 176, 188, 191, 192, 195, 196, 217–22,
elderly 108, 126, 161–2 231, 246, 252n7, 291n20, 294, 301–4
Embrace the Base 87, 92, 117, 243, see also ecofeminism
280, 290n6 femininity 3, 71, 72, 80, 89–90, 94, 297
employment 46, 242 fertility 222, 227
Regulation Order 117 Fifth Sacred Thing, The 137–9, 143, 149
see also unemployment see also Starhawk
Enlightenment theory 69 financial crisis 120, 167, 171
environment 22, 40, 91, 100, 101, 136–9, First Nations 9, 221, 235, 243, 300
141, 143, 144, 152n3, 166, 173, 177, 184, Five Flowers 90
223, 235, 237, 242–4, 276, 291n17 Five Tiger Generals 90
Epstein, Barbara 136, 150 food 22, 47, 64, 67, 103, 123, 135, 139,
equity 21, 92 144, 148, 161–4, 170, 180, 219, 257,
Erdoğan, Tayyip 104, 107–10, 298, 300 266–7, 278
escrevivência 195, 197, 200, 201, 206, 208, forest 158, 236, 242, 243–4, 245, 250, 304
210, 301 see also rainforest
essentialism 63, 68–70, 118, 244–7, 251, 304 Fortaleza 195–6, 199, 207–10
see also biological essentialism Fort Meade 61
ethnicity 5, 21, 83, 87, 120, 305 Foucault, Michel 160
European Central Bank 177 Fox News 22, 27
European Commission 177 France 51, 176–8
European Union 151 see also Nuit Debout
Evaristo, Conceição 197, 200 Francoism 122
eviction 17, 21, 27, 30–2, 67, 79, 121, 164, free trade 78, 82, 145
167, 169, 290n5 Freire, Paolo 211n1
exclusion 4, 19, 20, 22, 30–2, 63, 72, 83, Friends of Clayoquot Sound
85, 101, 107, 115–18, 125, 126, 160, (FOCS) 235, 243–4
178, 186, 188, 196, 207, 210, 268, 295, fugitive democracy 8, 99, 110
297, 300
exploitation 40, 67, 161–3, 172, 178, 203, G
227, 304 G8 Summit 135–7, 142–9
Extinction Rebellion 3, 284 garden 106, 142, 147, 180–1, 219
F gender 2–10, 20–9, 29–32, 39–47, 52–6, 63,
Facebook 189, 190, 257, 275 68, 71–4, 82–4, 87, 91–3, 108–9, 116–18,
Fairy Creek 250–1 120–7, 130n1, 158–63, 166–9, 171–2,
family 29, 47, 48, 52, 59, 64, 86, 89, 104, 182, 187, 200–2, 210, 220, 227, 230, 236,
105, 161–2, 169, 171, 202–4, 222–3, 243, 250, 252n7, 257, 266, 267, 286, 291n20,
280, 284 294–9, 303–5
310
Index
equality 7, 8, 80, 61, 79, 94, 105, 161, Haraway, Donna 149–50, 217, 241–2, 248,
167, 256 297, 300
hierarchies 7, 79, 295 see also cat’s cradle
imbalance 61, 83, 84, 90, 256 Hawaii 7, 37–41, 43, 45, 47, 49–59, 300
wars 63 see also Kanaka Maoli
see also power, gendered; violence, gendered health care 135
General Assembly 22, 121, 178–9, 184, He Kumulipo 42–3
261, 266 Hemmings, Claire 6, 63, 220, 244–5, 251, 304
geography 19, 138, 195, 198, 296, 305 see also Why Stories Matter
geopolitics 10, 297 Heroine Collective, The 273–7
George Square 164, 165, 166 heteronormative 4, 90, 94, 220
Gezi Park 2, 3, 8, 10n2, 90, 93, 99–110, 296, heterosexuality 4, 7, 69, 79, 80, 85, 90, 92,
298, 300, 302 106, 108, 121, 124, 297
Gill, Rosalind 90 High Council for the Preservation of Cultural
Glasgow 8, 121, 142, 158, 163–72, 297 Heritage 101
Women’s Activist Forum 4 HIV/AIDS 49, 262
Women’s Library 251, 252n10, 282, Hollaback! 24
290n3 Hong Kong 3
see also George Square; Occupy Glasgow see also Umbrella Movement
Gleneagles 135, 137, 145 honua 19
globalisation 8, 297 Hoʻohōkūkalani 47, 55–8
Global North 162, 237, 244 hooks, bell 5, 157–63, 171–2, 173n1
Global South 162, 244 HoriZone Ecovillage 8, 135–8, 141–51
global wave 2–6, 10, 118, 122, 129, 209, housewife 103–4, 159, 161, 162, 286
257, 294, 297, 302 #HuelgaFeminista 123
Goddess 46, 68–70, 73, 139, 143, 147, humiliation 107, 121, 204
151, 241 humour 73, 74, 99, 103, 108
Graduate Theological Union 137 Hurricane Katrina 144
graffiti 99, 103, 106 Hurricane Sandy 186
gramática da dor 197, 201, 203, 206–10 see also Occupy Sandy
grassroots 92, 239
Greece 3, 177, 184 I
see also Athens identity 4–8, 19–23, 47, 58–9, 70–3, 81, 83,
Greek Indignant movement 176 104, 109, 116, 122, 125, 140, 151n1, 200,
Green Bloc 145–6, 151 291n20, 291n22, 304
Greenham Common 65, 67, 273, 281, 285, politics 4, 122
288, 297 shared 259
Women’s Peace Camp [sometimes Ihumatao 53
abbreviated to ‘Greenham’] 2, 7, 9–10, Ikle, Maj see Campbell, Jane
10n1, 63–5, 67–70, 73–4, 150, 218–9, imaginactivism 137–9
231, 238–41, 243–4, 251, 252n3, 268, immigration 20, 231
273–89, 290n1, 290n13, 291n14, 291n19, see also migration
291n20, 291n22, 297, 299, 302–4 inclusivity 4, 22, 124, 184
Greenham women [or woman] 10, 62, 70, Indigenous peoples 6–9, 39, 43, 49, 50, 79,
273–5, 278–9, 281, 284, 288–90, 291n21, 82, 83, 90, 92, 183, 195–6, 199, 209, 217,
291n22, 304 222, 229, 230–5, 243, 250, 286, 295–304
Greenham Women Everywhere 10n1, 250, see also First Nations
273–88, 304 Indignados 2, 8, 115–16, 120, 129, 135
Grindr 49 see also 15-M Movement; anti-austerity
Grosz, Elizabeth 248–9 individualism 79, 80, 92, 94
grunge 72 inequality 4, 7, 8, 17, 20, 83, 118, 161
infiltration 27, 44, 63, 67, 162
H informal network 7, 79, 80, 83–8, 93
hairstyle 72 institutionalisation 31, 117, 122, 123, 239,
Hale Kūkākūkā 48 276, 279, 285, 291n17
Hale Mauna Māhū 39, 42, 44, 49–53, 56 International Monetary Fund 177
Hale Mauna Wahine 39, 42–4, 56 International Women’s Day 115–18, 123
harassment 4, 17, 19, 20–32, 53, 66, 90, 92, intersectionality 5, 83, 122, 124, 129, 130,
104–9, 116, 121, 127 223, 268, 295
311
interview 6, 9, 10, 21–7, 80–4, 88, 90, Līlīnoe 41, 46

106, 108, 116, 126, 128, 137, 138, 150, Livermore Action Group 150
152n5, 163–9, 176, 178–90, 203–5, 237, logging 235–7, 238, 243–50, 297, 302
238, 244, 246–50, 261, 273–87, 290n7, see also deforestation
300, 304 London 3, 30, 64, 69, 176–8, 183, 243, 259,
Islam 100–7 275, 277, 290n3
see also mosque Feminist Network 291n16
Istanbul 2, 10n2, 99, 101–8, 296 see also Occupy London
Feminist Collective 105–6 love 40, 41, 49, 51, 57, 128, 170, 190, 201, 208
see also Gezi Park
Italy 102, 276 M
Madrid 117, 120–1, 177
J see also Puerta del Sol
Jasper, James M. 119, 128 Main Chamber 79, 82, 84, 86–9
Jewish 167 make-up 72, 90
John, Helen 62, 64, 276, 290n2 male domination 23, 25, 181
journalist 84, 100, 222, 247, 257, 288 male gaze 90
justice 19–24, 31, 43, 57, 66, 88–9, 100, Mansbridge, Jane 181, 185, 187, 188
108, 119, 130, 136–8, 141–3, 147, 182, Mãos que Criam 195–7, 201, 204
200, 249, 256, 264, 266, 299 Maralinga 223
Juventud Sin Futuro 120 marginalisation 4, 6, 9, 19, 29, 49, 55, 130,
K 166, 172, 249, 256, 259–68, 297–9
Kanaka Maoli 7, 37–40, 49, 55–8 martial law 94n1
Kapu Aloha 42, 49, 51, 55, 58 Marxism 8, 89, 159, 161–3, 171, 189, 197,
Kelham, Megg 219–27 266, 267
Kemalism 100, 104, 107, 111n1 masculinity 46–7, 71, 74, 90
Kemal, Mustafa 107, 111n1 toxic 47
see also Kemalism maternalism 68–70, 104
Ketelaar, Eric 241 see also motherhood
Khartoum 3 Mauna Kea 7, 37–49, 55–8, 295–300
Kill The Bill 66 Maunakea see Mauna Kea
kinship 40, 50, 58, 195–9, 210, 221 Mauna Medics Lokahi Team 48, 54
Kropotkin, Peter 186 see also Hale Kūkākūkā
Kuomintang (KMT) 82, 91 Ma Ying-Jeou 78
Kurd 100–7 McKeldin Square 28
McRobbie, Angela 80, 91
L media 17, 18–22, 27, 28, 53, 66, 68, 70,
Laʻilaʻi 42–3, 58 71, 78, 82–90, 93, 101–3, 107, 159,
La Manada 123, 127 163, 179, 190–1, 218, 219, 238, 240–1,
Landless Movement 9, 295 257–67, 268n1, 274, 276, 284–7, 290n6,
see also Movimento Sem Terra (MST) 290n13, 299
land rights 218, 221–9, 231, 250, 286 memory 9, 99, 110, 223, 238–41, 249–51,
language 8, 9, 23, 59n1, 70, 106–10, 118, 273–4, 280–3, 302–4
121, 124, 140, 195, 198, 206–9, 211n4, see also countermemory
217, 220–6, 231, 232, 260, 283, 295–301 menstruation 46, 70, 128, 243–4
Latinx 49 mental health 54, 159, 169
law 31, 91, 92, 94n1, 105, 110, 123, 177, Menwith Hill 7, 61, 62, 63–5, 70, 71, 74,
224, 289, 305 291n22, 296, 303
enforcement 30 mestiza 199
Lee, Anne 62, 74 metadata 260–5, 268n2
Left-wing 91, 172, 177 #MeToo movement 47, 276, 284
lesbian 10n1, 63, 68–74, 80, 81, 90, 117, 121, Mexico 145
124, 222, 227, 228, 261, 279, 284–6, 295 microcosm 26, 27, 223
see also LGBTQIA+ migration 121, 127, 128, 162, 172, 295, 305
LGBTQIA+ 20, 24, 45, 49–53, 91–4, 101, militarism 3, 66, 220, 304
185, 259, 261 military 30, 38–44, 47, 50, 51, 61, 65, 67,
liberation 32, 39, 44, 45, 57, 70, 72, 83, 142, 122, 139, 218–28, 285, 290n1, 295
172, 197, 220 mining 223–4, 265
lifeworld 198, 200, 206 see also uranium
312
Index
Ministry of Defence (MoD) 62, 67, 291n21 weapons 69, 148, 168–9, 271, 279, 281,
Minnesota 136, 152n3 286, 290n4, 291n15
misogyny 22, 29, 104, 105, 208, 249, 304 see also anti-nuclear; Campaign for Nuclear
mixed camp [or mixed-gender camp] 4, 7, Disarmament (CND); Trident
8, 10, 62–3, 94, 121, 122, 294, 295, 298, Nuit Debout 176–8, 190
299, 302 Nuu-chah-nulth 235, 252n1
see also non-mixed camp
mobilisation 2–4, 17–22, 31, 32, 66, 92, O
128–9, 209, 265, 301–4 Oakland Occupy Patriarchy 24–5, 29
Moʻoinanea 46 Occupy 3, 7, 9, 10, 17, 18–23, 24–8, 31–2,
Moonbow Corner camp 64, 65 118, 121, 159, 177, 180, 182, 185,
moonscape 235, 237 256–68, 268n1, 268n2, 295, 302
Moreton-Robinson, Aileen 218, 222, 224, Archive 258, 260–8, 268n2
226, 229, 230, 232 Boston 24
mosque 110 encampment 17–22, 26, 32, 256, 263, 265,
motherhood 68, 93, 205, 279 268, 295
see also childbirth; maternalism; pregnancy Glasgow 8, 121, 158, 163–72, 297
Movimento Sem Terra (MST) 195, 196, London 178, 183, 190
199, 201–5, 209, 210, 295 Oakland 22, 24, 29, 30
see also Landless Movement Sandy 178, 186
museum 103, 251, 259, 282, 304 Seattle 178, 183, 184
Muslim see Islam Wall Street (OWS) 17, 21–9, 31, 176–9,
mutual aid 186, 206 180–9, 261, 264, 266
mycelial network 149, 302 see also Women Occupy Wall Street
(WOW)
N Octavia’s Brood 137
National Security Agency (NSA) 61 Open Knowledge 189
nation-building 39, 41 Open Science Framework (OSF) 263–8,
NATO 65 268n2
necropolitics 198 open-source 189, 257, 262–4, 282
Neoliberal Capitalism 8, 66, 126, 129, 157, oppression 5, 7, 17–27, 29, 32, 47–50, 58,
163, 167, 171 118, 122, 125, 130, 150, 157, 163, 172,
neoliberalism 94, 128, 221, 301 177, 184, 203, 242
New Age Traveller 72 oral history 9, 237, 244, 246, 300, 304
Newbury bypass 238 #OrditFeminista 123, 124, 126, 295
New Left 68, 262
new materialism 248–9, 252n6 P
New Orleans 144 paia 39, 43, 45, 49, 58
newsletter 66, 75, 163, 275, 282 Palestine 43, 51
New York 3, 21–5, 29, 69, 177–80, 186, pandemic 3, 264, 281
190, 257, 259, 261, 263–6, 268n1 see also COVID-19
see also Occupy; Zuccotti Park Papahānaumoku 37, 47, 55–9
New York Post 22 parliament 7, 78–92, 100–3, 110, 224
New York Times 69, 261 see also Main Chamber
No les Votes 120 participant action research (PAR) 199
non-binary 42, 49, 58–9, 117, 124, 291n22 password wars 190
nongovernmental organisation (NGO) patriarchy 23–9, 39–57, 68, 69, 105, 122,
78–86, 91 127, 158, 181, 197, 198–208, 210, 220–3,
non-mixed camp [no mixto] 8, 115–18, 259, 285–9
123–30, 295 peace camp 2–10, 10n1, 61–74, 139, 142,
non-violent direct action (NVDA) 62, 66, 145, 150, 158, 163–7, 168, 169–71,
73, 135, 138, 139–43, 148, 151, 218, 249, 217–21, 229, 231, 235–51
284, 290n13 see also Faslane; Pine Gap; Clayoquot Sound
Noongar people 217, 219 Peace Mothers 104, 108
nuclear 8, 62, 64, 69, 70, 73, 136, 138–9, peace song 64, 66, 73
142–51, 167–72, 220–5, 231, 271, 279, peacewomen 64, 65, 68, 70
281–6, 290n4, 291n15, 291n19, 291n21 pedagogy 138, 139–40, 150
arms race 223, 273 Pele 46
power 136, 224 Penal Code 103
313
People of Colour 51, 186, 261, 295 R

People’s Party 123 racism 4, 20, 25–6, 31, 68, 83, 121, 125,
period see menstruation 130, 157–61, 167, 172, 206–9, 218,
permaculture 8, 136–51, 152n7, 303 221–6, 229, 231, 242, 257, 259, 285,
Pine Gap Women’s Peace Camp 9, 61, 304
217–30, 231 see also xenophobia
poetry 9, 10n2, 69, 195, 197, 201, 205–8, Radical Feminism 68
211n1 radome 61, 62, 218
Poliʻahu 41, 46 rainforest 235, 236, 237, 243–4, 250
police 7, 22, 43–5, 50–6, 62, 63, 66–8, 79, rape 4, 19, 20, 22, 27–8, 53, 121, 123,
85, 88, 89, 99, 101–9, 125–7, 148, 162, 127, 165–6
165, 170, 172, 177, 185, 208, 219, 220, Rebel Dykes 69
228, 229, 250, 269n3, 284, 285, 290n13, Reclaiming Collective 139
295, 298 Reclaiming WitchCamps 140
undercover 63–6 Reclaim the Night marches 284, 291n16
Policing, Sentencing and Courts Bill 66 see also Take Back the Night
see also Kill The Bill re-existencias 195–209
pollution 138, 202 reflexivity 6
polyamorous 43, 49, 57, 58 refuge 37–43, 49, 53, 56, 59
postfeminism 7, 78–85, 90, 91, 94, 301 religion 45, 47, 100–5, 110, 126, 139, 286
Post-Post Script Zine 266, 268 see also Christianity; Islam
post-structuralist theory 244–8 repression 28, 85, 109, 177
pou 43, 49 reproductive labour 122, 128, 160
poverty 162, 172 resistance 9, 21, 31, 39, 46, 69, 101–8, 115,
power, gendered 7, 30, 78–82, 85, 87, 90, 128–9, 130n1, 142, 152n3, 157, 160,
91–4 163, 167, 195–8, 200–9, 266, 273, 298,
pregnancy 37, 59, 68 300, 303
press see media Reuters 102
Pretarau 195, 197, 206–9 revolution 9, 40, 57, 63, 68, 100–1, 185,
Principles of Unity 140 189, 195–7, 205–9
prison 57, 62, 110, 220 riot 43, 66
privacy 146, 165, 166, 168 ritual 8, 37, 38, 45–50, 59, 70, 73, 139–41,
private property 168, 188–92 149–50, 297
privilege 5, 47, 58, 125, 130, 147, 183, 222, Rizzi, Nina 201, 207, 208
226, 229, 240 Roseneil, Sasha 3, 7, 68, 74, 252n3, 274,
project democracy 9, 176–9, 182–91, 296, 299 290n1, 290n5, 290n13, 291n20,
propaganda 78 291n22
prostitute see sex worker Royal Order of Kamehameha I 38, 56
protestor 3, 7, 9, 10n2, 63, 66, 74n1,
100–10, 146, 164, 219, 220, 228, 230, S
250, 301 safe space 7, 17, 22–31, 124, 130, 166, 220,
pseudonym 80–1, 94n2, 173n2 227, 228, 268, 297
public safety 27 Safer Spaces 29, 262
public space 19, 20, 24, 104, 110, 117, same-sex marriage 92
125–7, 148, 177, 209, 291n16, 296–7 San Francisco 138, 139, 152n5, 257, 261,
Puerta del Sol 120, 177 265, 268
Puget Sound 238, 244 sanitation 50, 145, 182
Puʻuhonua o Puʻuhuluhulu 38, 39–41, 42, see also toilets; water
43–4, 49–53, 57, 58 Santa Rita jail 149–50
Puʻuhuluhulu University 42, 46, 50, 56 satellite communications 61
Scary Little Girls 273, 275–7, 288, 290n12
Q school 63–4, 69, 108, 202, 276–8
Quaker 230, 285 Seamoon House 138
queer 4, 7, 8, 21, 24, 25, 29, 49–52, 58, 63, self-defence 29, 128
68, 69, 74, 115, 117–24, 129, 130n2, Sellafield 64
130n3, 257, 261, 262, 268, 287, 291n20, settler 6, 39–44, 50–6, 232, 235–6, 243
295, 300 see also colonialism
see also LGBTQIA+ Seneca 238, 244
Quiurnpa see Pine Gap Women’s Peace Camp sex education 49
314
Index
sexism 19, 26, 79, 88, 104–10, 117, 121–7, suffrage 188, 267, 285
130, 142, 157, 166, 172, 221, 257, 276, suffragette see suffrage
299, 302 Sunflower Movement 3, 78, 80, 83, 89
sex offender 22, 31 see also 3/18 Parliament Occupation
sexuality 4, 5, 20, 22–5, 54, 80, 83, 90, Movement; Five Flowers; Five
105–7, 220, 227, 284, 305 Tiger Generals
see also heterosexuality; LGBTQIA+ surveillance 44, 47, 48, 51, 125–7, 162
sexual violence 4, 18–31, 39, 42–8, 52–6, survivor 21, 28–32, 40, 42, 44–5, 48,
116, 121, 127, 156, 159, 171, 291n16, 56–7
295, 297 sustainability 4, 7, 38, 170, 295
see also harassment; rape symbolism 46, 90, 119, 128
sex worker 102–7, 300 sympathy 20, 163
shelter 19, 37, 39, 40, 58–9, 74, 105, 135, Syntagma Square 3, 177
144, 161
shooting 22 T
sibling 38, 47, 49, 50–8 Taipei 92
Silkwood, Karen 219, 228, 230 Taiwan 3, 6, 7, 78–80, 82–6, 90–4, 94n2,
Sintel 116–19 94n5, 295, 301
slavery 162, 186 Democracy Watch 78
slogan 66, 70, 86, 99, 103–7, 110, 117, Feminist Scholars Association 92
120–1, 167, 298 see also Sunflower Movement
SlutWalk 127 Take Back the Night 127
socialism 91–2, 94, 100–6, 189 see also Reclaim the Night
Socialist Feminist Collective 105–6 Taksim Platform 101
social media 17, 21, 24, 43, 82, 101, 190–1, Taksim Square 100, 101, 107, 110
257, 261, 267, 287 see also Gezi Park
see also Facebook; Twitter tampons 70, 244
social reproduction 8, 9, 80, 87, 157–67, see also menstruation
170–2, 191, 196–7, 203–10 tear gas 43, 105, 108–9
social sciences 264 tent 10, 19, 22–3, 45, 64, 67, 69, 71, 79,
software 189, 263, 281–2 101, 104, 105, 125, 128, 159, 164, 165,
soldier 66, 107, 290n13 166–8, 180, 219, 235, 257, 262, 268,
Sol Feminist Commission 121 281–2, 303
solidarity 2, 10n2, 17–23, 43, 51–2, 70, 73, terrorism 107
83, 92, 101–2, 107–10, 182, 189, 220, theatre 126, 219, 275–6
225, 257, 291n19 Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) 38, 39, 41,
song 64, 66, 69, 70, 73, 74, 184, 196, 201, 47, 51, 53, 55–7
230, 238, 280–2, 290n12, 291n14 tierra 195, 196, 301
see also peace song toilets 64, 126, 135–51, 159, 164, 168,
Spain 2, 8, 63, 115–29, 177, 210, 236, 243
290n22, 302 tourism 127, 243
see also Valencia transfeminism 122, 130
spiral dance 139, 143, 149–50, 152n5, transgender 29, 43, 68, 74, 122
152n10, 248 see also LGBTQIA+
spirituality 70, 136–43, 146, 149, 209, 230, 286 transphobic 4, 63, 69, 124, 130
stalking 53 trans women 7, 29–30, 73, 124, 287, 291n22
Standing Rock 3, 43, 53 trauma 7, 31, 41–9, 53–7, 166, 201, 207
Starhawk 8, 135–40, 141, 142–51, 151n1, Trident 284
152n3, 152n4, 152n5, 152n8, 252n4, trolling 28
252n7, 266–7, 296, 303 Trump, Donald 262
see also Dreaming the Dark; Fifth Sacred Thing, trust 53, 85, 87, 111n1, 182, 190, 267,
The; Webs of Power 278, 280
sterilisation 221, 227 Turkey 3, 6, 8, 93, 99–110, 111n1, 298,
stereotyping 4, 18, 68, 71, 87, 89, 93, 227 302
Stirling 8, 135–7, 145, 151 see also Gezi Park; Istanbul
storytelling 39, 45, 46, 48, 63, 183, 198, 211, Turkish Republic 111n1
241, 247 TV 88, 90, 91, 94n3, 94n4, 108, 167, 178,
Sudan 3 279, 289
see also Khartoum see also BBC
315
Twitter 24, 190, 257 water 58, 64, 89, 101, 102, 105, 136,
138–40, 144–7, 169, 202, 291n17
U Webs of Power 148
Umbrella Movement 3 see also Starhawk
unemployment 64, 120, 159, 170, 184 well-being 29, 158–9, 202, 204, 243
United States (US) 17, 21–2, 37, 61, 94, Whadjuk 217, 219
102, 138, 145, 172, 177, 189, 218–19, White supremacism 162
223, 257, 261–2, 295 Why Stories Matter 220, 244, 304
National Guard 39 see also Hemmings, Claire
uranium 223–4 wife 118, 161
utopia 26, 121, 136, 170, 198 witch see witchcraft
V witchcraft 70, 139, 148
Valencia 115–17, 120–3, 124, 126–30 womanhood 4, 73
Feminist Assembly 116–17, 127, 128 Women for Survival 218, 223–6
Vancouver Island 235, 244, 250, 297 Women Occupy Wall Street (WOW) 21,
veganism 67, 282 23
victim 20, 22, 31, 90, 104, 109, 125, 127 women of colour 5, 20–1, 27, 40, 161–3,
-blaming 31 171–3, 285–6, 301
violence 2, 4, 7, 8, 17–29, 31–3, 37, 39–47, women-only space 29, 72, 130, 206, 210,
48–59, 63, 66, 88–93, 101–9, 115–18, 227–8, 285, 295
121–8, 130, 136–9, 142, 152n5, 159, Women’s Environmental Network
162, 167, 171–2, 185, 198, 201–2, 206–8, (WEN) 243
220, 223, 229, 235, 243, 250, 268, 284, Women’s Liberation Movement 70,
290n13, 291n16, 295, 297, 298 72
gendered 7, 17–20, 31–2 working class 118, 161, 164
police 7, 88, 109, 229 workplace 80, 85
state 18, 20, 32, 39, 40, 47, 104, 109 World Trade Organization 143
virginity 107 X
virtual reality (VR) 274, 276, 281, 282 xenophobia 20, 304
visibility 3, 22, 71, 72, 100, 118, 169, 182, see also racism
192, 196, 198, 201–8, 243, 256, 296
Viva a Palavra 199, 205 Y
vulnerability 19, 20, 48, 78, 116, 127, 145, Yorkshire 61, 62, 74n1
162, 176, 182–7, 191–2, 240, 298–9 see also Menwith Hill
young people see youth
W youth 50, 82, 91, 100, 106, 120, 130n1
Waiau 46
Wākea 40, 45, 47–8, 55, 56, 59 Z
war 2–5, 37, 59, 61, 66, 68, 91, 105, 107, Zé Maria do Tomé 197, 199, 201–3
119, 223–4, 231, 242, 291n15, 295, 304 Zoom 196, 274
see also Cold War Zuccotti Park 22, 177, 179
316

Feminism and Protest Camps: Entanglements, Critiques and Re-Imaginings

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Feminism and

Bristol University Press

Details of international sales and distribution partners are available at bristoluniversitypress.co.uk

© Bristol University Press 2023

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

ISBN 978-​1-​5292-​2016-​2 hardcover

Bristol University Press works to counter discrimination on grounds of gender,

Cover design: Andrew Corbett

List of Figures and Tables v

1 Introduction: Feminism/​Protest Camps 1

PART I Gendered Power and Identities in Protest Camps

PART II Feminist Politics in and through Protest Camps

PART III Feminist Theorising and Protest Camps

PART IV The Feminist Afterlives of Protest Camps

16 Conclusion: Rethinking Protest Camps, Rethinking 294

Māhealani Ahia is a PhD student in English (Hawaiʻi/​Pacific Literature)

Claudiana Nogueira de Alencar currently works on the PhD Program

Yeşim Arat is Professor of Political Science and International Relations

Alison Bartlett is Senior Honorary Research Fellow in English and Literary

flirting in the era of #metoo, and edited volumes on Australian feminist

Sandra Maria Gadelha de Carvalho currently works in the Faculty of

Catherine Eschle is Senior Lecturer in the School of Government and

Emma Gómez Nicolau is Lecturer in Sociology at the department

Joan Haran is Honorary Research Fellow with the School of Social

held a Marie Skłodowska-​Curie Global Fellowship at the Centre for the

Heather McKee Hurwitz is Project Staff (faculty) in the Department

Kahala Johnson is a PhD candidate in Indigenous Politics and Futures

Anastasia Kavada is Reader in Media and Politics at the University of

Voices 1981–​2000 (History Press, 2021) which brings these testimonies

Anne Kumer is Interim Team Leader, Technical Services at Case Western

Finn Mackay is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of the West

Celeste Montoya is Associate Professor in Women’s and Gender Studies at

Niamh Moore is an interdisciplinary feminist researcher in the School of

Rebecca Mordan is Artistic Director of Scary Little Girls (https://​scary​

Sara C. Motta is a proud Mestiza-​salvaje of Colombia-​Chibcha/​​Muisca,

Vanessa Pini has 15 years’ experience of teaching drama and leading in

Mila Nayane da Silva holds a degree in Pedagogy and a Master’s degree

is currently studying curriculum design and teaching methods to integrate

Chia-​Ling Yang is Associate Professor at the Graduate Institute of Gender

Like freshly sharpened pencils, red rings painted on sleek white,

Love or its sister/​

This book asks feminist questions of protest camps. An increasingly important

personal experimentation, radical lifestyle innovation and muddy, colourful

Why a feminist book on protest camps?

and the mobilisation of anti-​austerity protestors in Syntagma Square camp

contemporaneous feminist movement. However, there has as yet been very

How is our approach to protest camps feminist?

European protest camps that have dominated social movement scholarship

Outline of the book

pushed to the margins, forced to resort to individualised strategies that often

Ağartan, K. (2018) ‘Politics of the Square: Remembering Gezi Park Protests

English, C. (2018) ‘Security Is No Accident: Considering Safe(r) Spaces in

Roccu, R. (2013) ‘David Harvey in Tahrir Square: The Dispossessed,

Gendered Power and Identities

Safe Spaces and Solidarity:

media outlets seized on the spectre of sexual assault as a means to delegitimise

Theorising sexual violence within the context of social

oppression (in any form) also represents an acquiescence to the ideologies

Data and method

The Occupy encampments and narratives of sexual

In Boston, similar accounts were given in a joint interview with several of

One of these participants (M from Boston) recalled “just hear[ing] these

ISBN 978-1-5292-2016-2 hardcover

List of Figures and Tables v

1 Introduction: Feminism/Protest Camps 1

PART I Gendered Power and Identities in Protest Camps

PART II Feminist Politics in and through Protest Camps

PART III Feminist Theorising and Protest Camps

PART IV The Feminist Afterlives of Protest Camps

Māhealani Ahia is a PhD student in English (Hawaiʻi/Pacific Literature)

held a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellowship at the Centre for the

Voices 1981–2000 (History Press, 2021) which brings these testimonies

Rebecca Mordan is Artistic Director of Scary Little Girls (https://scary

Sara C. Motta is a proud Mestiza-salvaje of Colombia-Chibcha/Muisca,

Chia-Ling Yang is Associate Professor at the Graduate Institute of Gender

Love or its sister/

and the mobilisation of anti-austerity protestors in Syntagma Square camp

Oakland Occupy Patriarchy formed as a feminist/queer bloc with a statement

areas –immediate necessities yet questionable strategically, since they

enthusiastically support women’s groups and women-designated safer spaces,

In this case, the tensions of inclusion/exclusion surrounding safe spaces

demand accountability, but that consider community-based and equitable

an eight-hour standoff against armed military and police forces. Together,

Invoking Hawaiian temporalities of the past-future and the future-past,

For Goodyear-K aʻōpua and Mahelona, the rise of Puʻuhonua o Puʻuhuluhulu

strong enough to hold our vulnerability and truth-telling. Because this

Most importantly, we collaborated with Noelani Ahia –co-founder

Source: Matt Crypto, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Menwith-hill-radomes.jpg,

seven. Coming from a largely poor, farming community in rural south-

half. As a permanent resident I got my own caravan, a tiny one-person van.

Making a home in women-only space

therapeutic and/or medical interventions for trans adults (particularly those

Lewis, S. (2019) ‘How British Feminism Became Anti-Trans’, New York