Marching Dykes, Liberated Sluts, and Concerned Mothers : Women Transforming Public Space

From the Women in Black vigils and Dyke marches to the Million Mom March, women have seized a dynamic role in early twenty-first century protest. The varied demonstrations—whether about gender, sexuality, war, or other issues—share significant characteristics as space-claiming performances in and of themselves beyond their place in any broader movement. Elizabeth Currans blends feminist, queer, and critical race theory with performance studies, political theory, and geography to explore the outcomes and cultural relevance of public protest. Drawing on observation, interviews, and archival and published sources, Currans shows why and how women utilize public protest as a method of participating in contemporary political and cultural dialogues. She also examines how groups treat public space as an important resource and explains the tactics different women protesters use to claim, transform, and hold it. The result is a passionate and pertinent argument that women-organized demonstrations can offer scholars a path to study the relationship of gender and public space in today's political culture.| Cover Title Contents Preface Acknowledgments Introduction: Regendering Public Spaces Part I. Responding to Danger, Demanding Pleasure: Sexualities in the Streets 1. Safe Space? Encountering Difference at Take Back the Night 2. Enacting Spiritual Connection and Performing Deviance: Celebrating Dyke Communities 3. SlutWalks: Engaging Virtual and Topographic Public Spaces Part II. Gendered Responses to War: Deploying Feminities 4. Demonstrating Peace: Women in Black's Witness Space 5. Uncivil Disobedience: CODEPINK's Unruly Democratic Practice Part III. Engendering Citizenship Practices: Women March on Washington 6. Embodied Affective Citizenship: Negotiating Complex Terrain in the March for Women's Lives 7. Participatory Maternal Citizenship: The Million Mom March and Challenges to Gender and Spatial Norms Conclusion: Holding Space: The Affective Functions of Public Demonstration Notes Works Cited Index | "This book is a much needed volume reflecting on feminist movements of the past to inform the future. As we face our contemporary era, Currans's volume is urgent and pressing."—Kath Browne, coauthor of Lesbian Geographies: Gender, Place and Power "As we enter a new era of public protest, Currans offers a feminist and queer guide to holding public space. Her beautifully rendered and theoretically sharp ethnography illuminates the effect of organizing, the ways that witnessing, marching, lobbying, and demonstrating transforms lives in the process of developing counterpublics."—Eileen Boris, coauthor of Caring for America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State "Empirically rich, and boasting extensive quotations from protest participants, the main strength of Curran's account—from a cultural geographer's perspective—is that it examines how space can be transformed via embodied performance: she turns to queer, feminist and critical race theory to emphasize the performance force of counterpublic spaces." — Cultural Geographies | Elizabeth Currans is an associate professor of Women's and Gender Studies at Eastern Michigan University. "This project examines the ways in which women's public protests in the 21st century create spaces for involvement in cultural and political publics focused on a range of timely issues including gender identity, sexuality, war, corporate greed, and reproductive rights. Based on participant observation, interviews, and analysis of archival and published sources, this interdisciplinary study blends feminist, queer, critical race and performance studies with explorations of public space in order to explore what public protests do, and why they are culturally important. The public demonstrations examined include Take Back the Night marches, Dyke marches, CODEPINK direct actions, Women in Black vigils, the 2004 March for Women's Lives, and the 2004 Million Mom March. Key to this project is the argument that these demonstrations share significant characteristics as performances in their own right, and are not simply one feature of the broader social movements they're a part of. The author suggests that an analysis of these women-organized demonstrations offers a distinct opportunity to explore the relationship of gender to public space in contemporary U.S. political culture"-- Provided by publisher Preface Acknowledgments Introduction: Regendering Public Spaces Part I. Responding to Danger, Demanding Pleasure: Sexualities in the Streets 1 Safe Space? Encountering Difference at Take Back the Night 2 Enacting Spiritual Connection and Performing Deviance: Celebrating Dyke Communities 3 SlutWalks: Engaging Virtual and Topographic Public Spaces Part II. Gendered Responses to War: Deploying Femininities 4 Demonstrating Peace: Women in Black's Witness Space 5 Uncivil Disobedience: CODEPINK's Unruly Democratic Practice Part III. Engendering Citizenship Practices: Women March on Washington 6 Embodied Affective Citizenship: Negotiating Complex Terrain in the March for Women's Lives 7 Participatory Maternal Citizenship: The Million Mom March and Challenges to Gender and Spatial Norms Conclusion: Holding Space: The Affective Functions of Public Demonstration Notes Works Cited This book examines how women’s public demonstrations claim and transform public space. Focusing on seven examples--Take Back the Night Marches, Dyke Marches, SlutWalks, Women in Black Vigils, CODEPINK direct actions, the March for Women’s Lives, and the Million Mom March--the book explores the ways that women use gender to physically and affective transform public space, through a process of “holding space” for each other. __Marching Dykes, Liberated Sluts, and Concerned Mothers__ is organized into three sections addressing key foci of feminist public demonstration: sexuality, war and militarism, and citizenship norms and practices. Each section includes multiple, related chapters along with an introduction providing a brief overview of the issue and contextual links between the chapters. Throughout, the analyses emphasize the utopic impulse of public demonstration. In this work, Elizabeth Currans examines how women's public demonstrations claim and transform public space