Feminist Afterlives

Assemblage Memory in Activist Times

Red Chidgey

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319987378
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book interrogates why feminist memories matter. Feminist Afterlives explores how the images, ideas and feelings of past liberation struggles become freshly available and transmissible. In doing so, Red Chidgey examines how popular feminist memories travel as digital and material resources across protest, heritage, media, commercial and governmental sites, and in connection with the concerns and conditions of the present. Central case studies track repeated invocations to militant suffragettes and the We Can Do It! post-feminist icon over time and space. Assembling interviews, archival research and ethnographic accounts with provocative examples drawn from postfeminist media culture, a UNESCO heritage bid, protest at the London 2012 Olympic Games, and activist remembrance in zines and blogs, this is a broad-ranging study of 'restless' feminist pasts – both real and imagined. Richly researched and argued, this volume offers an original framework of 'assemblage memory' and sets out a new research agenda for the intersections between everyday activism, protest, and memory practices.

© The Author(s) 2018

Red ChidgeyFeminist AfterlivesPalgrave Macmillan Memory Studieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98737-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Feminist Afterlives

Red Chidgey¹

(1)

Culture, Media and Creative Industries, King’s College London, London, UK

Red Chidgey

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

In the now yellowing pages of my copy of Sheila Rowbotham’s book The Past Is Before Us: Feminism in Action Since the 1960s, there are two passages that keep pulling me back. The first is the evocative statement: “Ideas generated by a social movement do not present themselves in an orderly manner. They are thrown up by circumstances, shaken by destinies and left hanging in mid-air. Expressive of political tensions within the fabric of society, they are raw with interests” (1989, 294). The second passage relates to the conditions through which historical consciousness can be made and how this relates to political agency. As Rowbotham asks, “How do the bits hinge together historically?” (297).

These two provocations—that social movement ideas are ‘raw with interest’ and that historical memory is formed through a constellation of diverse elements—were formative in the thinking behind this book. Feminist Afterlives presents an open, generative model for examining social movement memories and their cultural and social afterlives , one that I call assemblage memory . This is an exploration of how the images, ideas and feelings of past liberation struggles become freshly available and transmissible in times not of their making.

In doing so, Feminist Afterlives offers a critical and creative framework that both contributes to, and offers a major re-orientation of, emergent academic engagements with the intersections between activism, protest and memory practices. ¹ As Donatella della Porta and colleagues note in the introduction to their volume Legacies and Memories in Movements: “the impact of historical legacies and memories on social movements has not been theorized very much” (2018, 1). As its main analytical concern, Feminist Afterlives brings into view the vitalities and movements of archival materials, images, sites and practices related to feminist activist pasts, and their interactions and entanglements. This book is not solely a social movement study, but a cultural memory one. ² Building on the assemblage theory of Deleuze and Guattari (2004), I propose assemblage memory as a new analytical and methodological framework to understand how mediated and personal memories of activism, and memories of movement pasts for activism, come to be. ³

Committed to an examination of social complexity, an assemblage approach, as I will come to detail throughout the book, maps the materialisation of activist pasts in successive presents as they endure, circulate and intensify. This approach is committed to tracking the use and re-use of protest pasts across a wide breadth of social phenomenon, tracking and critiquing activist cultures, mainstream media, commemoration and commodification in dialogue and in contact with each other. This innovative approach makes clear the durations and intensification of select movements pasts as they come to circulate across temporal and spatial borders. It also examines how these movement memories came to be and what values they perform in the present.

Activist Times and Digital Actions

A central claim in this book is that activist histories are restless. This corresponds in part to the increased communicative channels through which histories of dissent can travel within everyday realms and through the acts of consumption and production by everyday civic actors. What the memory scholar Andrew Hoskins calls the connective turn, comprised of interactive social media platforms, search engines, apps and devices, now contributes to “a massively increased availability of all-things past” (2012, 95). The materiality of the traditional artefact-based archive , and its collecting practices, are challenged by the reproducibility and transferability of digital data (Hoskins 2018; Ernst 2013). Remembrance of activist pasts and presents circulate with more speed and ease through new media ecologies . While movement knowledge and memories are certainly fragile and ephemeral, networked media assist in generating an unprecedented ‘long-tail’ of protest online. The indexing functions of the world wide web, and the resurgent interest in social movement pasts in popular culture and the media and creative industries, extend the temporality of a protest act, which sees new versions and imaginings of diffuse protest pasts circulating through the public realm. There are increased ways in which protest memory materials circulate and how they can be interacted with, for both profitable and political purposes.

The specifics of protest archives and their cultural gatekeepers are also changing. Traditional archives are based around principles of provenance, custody and central authority: these collections are deemed to have historical, cultural or evidentiary value and significance (Pietrobruno 2013). The rise of user-generated materials—accessed digitally through sites such as YouTube and Flickr and through retrieval methods based on metadata created by users and computer algorithms—create new forms of mediated memory that can be understood as social archiving. These sites offer no guarantee of long-term access yet play a significant role in the current dissemination of cultural materials, and individual and shared memory. In turn, traditional archives increasingly address the need of collecting digital materials—especially in relation to activist cultures and movements—and of migrating their existing collections online to social networking platforms through digitisation , to democratise their holdings and increase public engagement (see Gledhill 2012; Worcman and Garde-Hansen 2016; Withers 2015).

Such connective media and memory sites facilitate a surge in memory agency from below.

With reduced material, economic and time constraints to digitising protest materials, citizens and activists circulate available social movement mediations with greater ease via zines , blogs , Facebook pages, Twitter , YouTube, and across Tumblr in many, but not all, transnational media contexts (Chidgey 2012; Ibrahim 2016; Smit et al. 2018). ⁴ Voluntary and amateur memory workers re-assemble materials gathered from personal artefacts, popular culture, mass media and digitised archive collections. In turn, there is the practice of what Joanne Garde-Hansen calls the “lucrative re-purposing of historical, literary and cultural archives” in the media industries (2011, 43), to which remediations of protest pasts are increasingly being called forward.

With a commitment to understanding such scenes of “productive remembrance” (Rigney 2012, 58), Feminist Afterlives demonstrates how assemblages bring politically loaded pasts to bear in the present with new intensities. Assemblages operate as both normative and creative capacities, mobilised across activist, governmental, commercial and institutional sites, and with frictions, flows and blocks. These entities are messy, unruly and imperative to study if we wish to move beyond one-dimensional depictions of activist pasts, presents and futures. Such constellations can help us to read the current order, as we “understand nothing about the impasses of the political without having an account of the production of the present” (Berlant 2011, 4).

Feminist Assemblages

Two hypervisible assemblages which proliferate in attachment to discourses of contemporary feminisms are examined here. The first relates to the resurgence of cultural memories of the ‘militant suffragette’ connected to the British Votes for Women campaign of the early twentieth century. These invocations are tied to two iconic figures in particular, Emmeline Pankhurst (1858–1928), the leader of the notorious Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), and Emily Wilding Davison (1872–1913), one of the WSPU’s most infamous activists. How these iconic suffragettes travel across the century to be revived with such force, not only in heritage and entertainment settings but as an ethical reminder of protest within a time of austerity and increased inequities, will be grappled with here.

The second assemblage corresponds to the rise of the 1942 American World War II labour management poster, We Can Do It!, known in public discourse as ‘Rosie the Riveter ’. Curiously, this graphic operates as a persistent symbol for feminist identities and agendas across transcultural terrains in the new millennium. The sheer repetition of this wartime, non-activist, image in association with contemporary and past feminisms is both puzzling and worthy of investigation. For anyone with some familiarity with feminisms in the UK, the US and further afield, these iconic figures will be instantly recognisable. They may also generate a number of feelings, including pride, boredom, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Feminist Afterlives
• Part I. Assemblage Memory
• Part II. The Militant Suffragettes
• Part III. Rosie the Riveter/We Can Do It!
• Part IV. The Assemblage Researcher
• Back Matter