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Resolute Presence, Fugitive Moments, and the Body in Women’s Protest Performance

Contemporary examples of activist performance often exploit anew the contentious signifying possibilities of women’s bodies in public space. Recent women’s activism displays remarkable similarities to earlier examples in terms of the gestural strategies employed: a historical analysis reveals the repeated, problematic, but nevertheless resolute presence of the woman’s body as a cultural marker in women’s activism. Understanding these examples as existing side by side, across time, resists the need for a critical ‘position’ whereby one paradigm is simply replaced by another and also acknowledges the historical as not simply a linear projection. This article, therefore, explores examples of women’s protest performance from the Suffragettes to Pussy Riot and including the singular artist activist, Margaretta D’Arcy, using the idea of ‘second looks’ and ‘fugitive moments’ to interrogate the repetition of motifs connecting one generation of Western women’s bodily protest gestures to another. We have to read the gestural potential of women’s activist bodies as occurring in public spaces in which those bodies are not socially, politically, or economically equal. Feminist scholar Sandra Lee Bartky, drawing on Iris Marion Young, identifies the concept of the ‘loose woman’ as useful for understanding how a woman’s body interacts with public space. For a woman,