If they’re protesting silently, are they still militant?
What does this say about the emotions work they do?
Women’s militancy is a highly debated issue.
In the first place, what is defined as militant? Raging aggression? Violence? Silent protest?
Secondly, are women and men equally accepted as political militants?
By way of starting a response to this:
We accept that vociferous feminists – those sporting placards angrily demanding an end to crucial issues like male-on-female violence – are angry and militant. We know that they use emotions – like anger – to inspire their militancy. We certainly know that they invoke emotional responses – again like anger – from onlookers.
Sometimes that emotional response takes the form of violence – certainly and historically, this has been so when the militants are female (just look at public reactions to the British suffragettes and the American Silent Sentinels).
But, does the range of political activities adopted by women protesters expand what is commonly thought of as militant?
What about those women who risk their lives to protest silently? (Argentinian Mothers of the Disappeared, Wednesday demonstrators in Seoul, Women in Black?)
These female protesters adopt political tactics that are not seen as emotionally straightforward (if, indeed, any protest tactics are straightforward with regards to the emotional work they set out to perform).
In our book on Sources for the History of Emotions – with my amazing co-editors, Peter N. Stearns and Katie Barclay – we look at how you use sources (including where do you even find them in the first place?!) to understand the whole history of emotions. One chapter addresses the emotions of protest:
Whereas many protest movements harness the power of negative or aggressive emotions, others have strategically deployed more positive emotions, including a patient display of dignified protest; those aimed at eliciting a complex assemblage of emotional responses from targets and spectators or onlookers alike, whether that response consist of more active affective reactions like outrage or more muted emotions like anxiety or frustration. Often, but not always, these protests have taken on a gendered dimension. For example, silent vigils staged by female bodies – protesting militarism, sexual violence and death – have attracted worldwide publicity.
This raises a lot of questions for historians of emotions and of women’s protest.
Let’s take a slightly closer look at the Wednesday demonstrations of the ‘grandmothers’ (since 1992, survivors of wartime sexual abuse at the hands of the Japanese military during World War II, and their supporters hold placards in Japanese, Korean, or English across from the Japanese Embassy in Seoul, Korea, demanding an apology from the Japanese government).
Right: The Peace Memorial, Seoul, February 2013. Photograph by Vera Mackie.As I argue in my chapter on protest emotions – and as Vera Mackie and I explore in great detail in our book, Remembering Women’s Activism –
…the tactics and tools of the Seoul grandmothers’ Wednesday protests are strategically employed in the attempt to elicit feelings of shame on the part of those who continue to deny redress to the elderly survivors. The use of elderly women’s bodies patiently occupying stools across from the Embassy – and the placement of the Peace Monument, a commemorative statue in the form of a young woman seated on a chair, facing the Embassy, with an empty chair beside her – are also intended to generate public sympathy. The statue of the seated young woman represents the young Korean woman before her ordeal, while the shadow cast of an older woman – rendered via a mosaic ‘shadow’ on the ground behind the statue – depicts the old survivor who refuses to forget.
Accessing onlookers’ emotional responses to these tactics is a difficult project – it is easier for us to ascertain the protesters’ intended emotional outcomes.
How, then, do we understand the power of silent and gendered protest? Would we expect the same emotional responses from men’s performance of a silent vigil? Or is this a particularly female form of protest? How do we understand and factor in the implicit physical threat (accounting for the greater prevalence of threat against female bodies)?
Such questions open up new vistas on the emotions of politics and the tactics of gendered activisms.