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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, confusion, excitement and apathy. The aim of this book is to take these oversaturated, affective icons and to make them strange again through a memory lens. After all, both the Edwardian suffrage campaign and women’s role in the war effort are highly anachronistic legacies for today’s political struggles.

Everyday Movement Archives

In thinking activist memory differently, and with some risk—not solely as the property of social movement actors, and as unbound from the driving concerns of identity and narrative —a different archive is needed. In this endeavour, the queer cultural theorist Judith Halberstam is instructive. Halberstam (2011) invites us to consider silly archives, informed by Laurent Berlant ’s (1997) notion of the counter-politics of the silly object. Following Berlant, this archive involves “a mode of criticism and conceptualization that reads waste materials of everyday communication” (1997, 12).

Traversing the everyday as a contested, multi-scalar site in which activist memories can be encountered and made sensory, 5 the archive assembled in Feminist Afterlives brings together the banal (an image deposited on Wikipedia, a T-shirt, a postcard, a personal blog post) and the institutionally and economically curated (a memorial statue, a news broadcast, a UNESCO bid, an Olympic Games opening ceremony). The silly archive is both the provocation and the art of bringing together materials and ideas that do not seem to belong to each other. This is evidenced in Feminist Afterlives by weaving together assemblage theories and stories. Informed by continental political theory, these theoretical resources are used to conceptualise activist memory as an everyday and spectacular manifestation, encountered and negotiated through both mundane normalcies and heightened moments. As elements that make up the “construction, experience, and rhetoric of quotidian citizenship”, the “very improvisatory ephemerality” (Berlant 1997, 12) of the ‘everyday movement archive’ makes it worth examining.

An assemblage approach transgresses a neat set of communicative binaries such as grassroots and mainstream, activist and non-activist, do-it-yourself and commercial, vernacular and official, public and private, and offline and online, which characterise studies of media and social movements to date (see Mattoni 2013; Reading 2011). As Anna Reading reminds us, such “established dichotomies are rendered more porous and hyperconnected” in what she terms the ‘globital memory field’, where the synergetic forces of digitalisation and globalisation “produce an ecology of immersive connective memory on the move”, travelling unevenly through people, material things and mediated memories (2016, 42, 46).

An assemblage approach further redresses the lack of attention to the role of the visual , and of cultural memory, within social movement research (Doerr et al. 2013; Doerr 2014). Visual and communicative practices play a vital and vitalising role in the diffusion of protest assemblage memories, creating modal points capable of shaping wider activist discourses and practices. The analytical focus of this book is then to understand feminist activist memories that have gained considerable public attention in the present and to read their mnemonic practices, forms, ideas and symbolic content diachronically (across time), synchronically (in time), and transversally. In doing so, this study links the examination of movement memories with wider political subjectivities and fields of social action.

As an ethical rejoinder, the term ‘silly’ does not signify an intention to trivialise social movement memories; I recognise that grassroots political struggles are energetically consuming and at times brutal. By bringing together ‘silly archives’ I wish to exceed the normative limits imposed on what can count as an authentic and useful movement memory, as I discuss in Chapter 2. This book aims to understand a multiplicity of movement mediations, whether desirable or not, and whether deemed as socially progressive or not. Such materials constitute the horizons and ‘stuff’ that facilitate or erode political imaginations in their multiplicities as well as their commonalities. An assemblage approach brings these frictions into the analytical fold.

A Note on Method

This book sketches the condition of feminist afterlives : the agile, contradictory, sometimes vital, sometimes banal, extensions of feminist ideas and materials into time frames not of their making. 6 By evoking afterlives this project acknowledges what the historian Kristin Ross (2002) has artfully explored in the context of the political histories of representations of May ’68 in France: that political events and imaginations can endure, even under conditions of amnesia and proprietorial tellings by key activists and stakeholders. 7 As Ross suggests, political upheavals and movements generate processes of memory and forgetting that take material and medial forms and can be traced over time. In turn, an assemblage approach enables the researcher to move beyond ‘snapshots’ of particular generations , media or single units of analysis, to see longer resonances and cross-fertilisations at play.

My approach of ‘following the memories’ through ethnographic, archival and digital research has enabled an expanded view of popular feminist memories. By using ‘afterlives ’ as an analytical framework, as the cultural memory researcher Ann Rigney (2012) makes clear, the researcher can track cultural artefacts and expressions longitudinally, as memory texts and figures move across cultural spheres, media, and constituencies to establish effects on social relations. 8

This framework further aligns with what has been termed a transcultural approach within memory studies. A transcultural approach is directed toward understanding mnemonic processes and memories as unfolding “across and beyond cultures ” (Erll 2011a, 9; Bond and Rapson 2014). In this book, this includes communities of practice that are self-designated as feminist and not, as activist and not, and within grassroots and professional memory contexts. A transcultural approach examines the transformations of personal and shared memory across time, space, contexts and political borders. Movement memories are productive and affective: they make things happen in the world and are used to legitimate and support wider claims to power. Long a tool within advocacy and social movement struggles, memory, due “to its capacity to relate past, present, and future –envisioning alternative trajectories through a recourse to the past, activating forgotten knowledge in the present, making sense of the new by comparing it to the old…is the very apparatus that enables change” (Erll 2011b, 174). The manifestation and restlessness of movement memories now need to be critically grappled with, for their disruptive as well as potentially sedimenting properties.

Book Outline

In outlining a new analytical and methodological framework of assemblage memory, this book is arranged in four sections to guide the interested reader and researcher through a full consideration of what ‘assemblage memory’ may mean both theoretically and in practice. Part I, ‘Assemblage Memory’, outlines the book’s analytical model and situates this framework within its companion studies of social movements, cultural and mediated memory, political philosophy, cultural and media studies, and feminist theory. Part II, ‘The Militant Suffragettes’, explores mediated and embodied memories of suffragette protest within heritage and activist settings in a UK context. Part III, ‘Rosie the Riveter/We Can Do It!’, diagrams the ‘Rosie the Riveter’ memory constellation attached to the WWII labour management poster, ‘We Can Do It!’, and in association with feminisms transnationally. Part IV, ‘The Assemblage Researcher’, brings together the key characteristics and methodologies of assemblage memory research.

Assemblages must be examined through their particular social and political contexts. Chapter 2 discusses the role of collective action within postfeminist socio-economic orders in the west (McRobbie 2009) and in doing so, engages with ideas of the radical imagination (Haiven and Khasnabish 2014). As a counter-theorisation to the dominant tropes of ghosts and spectres invoked within postfeminist analysis, I propose the affirmative approach of assemblage memory to bring questions of materiality and agency into greater focus. 9 This creates an intervention in the conceptual apparatus of contemporary feminist theory.

Chapter 3 details the unique capacities of an assemblage approach to activist memory, to foreground how assemblages are emergent, connective, temporary, stratified and based on ethico-political thinking. This chapter argues that assemblage memories are composed across four co-existent trajectories, which I name the discursive, embodied, material and the affective, and tracked across the axes of duration and intensity. The assemblage memory perspective is positioned within calls in contemporary memory studies to broaden its analytical focus from a canon of trauma, war and suffering, to bring legacies of nonviolent protest and resistance into the fold.

Chapter 4 examines how militant suffragette legacies galvanise around material objects and are arranged around memory scripts. Among other institutional memory texts, I examine both failed and successful bids for the 2011 UNESCO Memory of the World UK inscription in relation to artefacts from the British women’s suffrage movement. Interview data with key archivists bring hidden memory practices into view. This chapter grapples with how feminist and nationing discourses of suffragette militancy are negotiated as a risky resource and how legacies of the right to vote, rather than revolt, are articulated in governmental realms.

Chapter 5 interrogates how suffragette assemblages move out of the archive to take place in contentious politics. A cluster of anti-austerity protest actions organised around the global media event of the London 2012 Summer Olympic Games is the object of analysis here. This chapter demonstrates how embodiment serves as a technique of protest and how media commentators and feminist media producers navigate authorised suffragette pasts in light of current political concerns. With a critical lens, I attend to the travels, or not, of anti-imperialist and imperialist knowledge in connection to the British women’s suffrage movement as affective ‘good’ and ‘bad’ memories that require negotiation.

Chapter 6 charts the intensification of Rosie the Riveter invocations in connection to feminism in recent decades. This iconic image is tracked transculturally across media, heritage, commercial and activist sites since the 1980s to show its intensities and economies of re-use. This chapter demonstrates that the graphic has had its feminist histories retrospectively projected onto it in light of a present-day popularity, operating as a “technology of the presumed” (Hemmings 2011) for the narration of second wave feminist histories. Here the ‘event’ of feminist activist pasts is a fabrication as the poster graphic takes on vivid new afterlives. 10

Chapter 7 draws on interview data with feminist media producers from the ‘second’ and ‘third’ waves to demonstrate how the We Can Do It! image has been mobilised and remixed in analogue and digital cultures for feminist concerns. The contradictory investments in this assemblage will be made clear. This includes the postfeminist practice of nostalgic whiteness, and, following invitations within memory studies to attend to commercial elements, market forces such as copyright and intellectual property practices. The travels of this assemblage in relation to anti-austerity protest will be made clear.

Chapter 8 critically unpacks an autobiographical activist memory made in contact with the suffragette assemblage to demonstrate this book’s approach in a microcosm, and to offer a reflection on my location as an academic-activist. The appendix provides a reflexive account and documentation of the book’s methodological process, to aid future assemblage researchers and to connect this perspective to wider challenges within the field of memory studies research.

The assemblage memory approach developed in Feminist Afterlives is both critical and creative. The reader will find memory figures introduced and then re-encountered in later scenarios and chapters; suffragette assemblages will collide and recombine with Rosie the Riveter assemblages. The empirical case studies are viewed from multiple perspectives to highlight their internal productivities and their exclusionary acts. 11 This book examines memory constellations, texts and practices that are still unfolding in the present. There is no final or definitive take on the assemblages under analysis; they are always emergent and travelling. An essential property of any assemblage is its ability to intermingle and co-join with wider assemblages and articulations, as this book demonstrates.

Notes

  1. 1.

    There is a growing academic interest in the activism-media-memory nexus. For memory scholars, this means moving beyond the trauma paradigm emblematic of a field that has its conceptual foundations in theorising collective memory following conflict, war and genocide (see Reading and Katriel 2015; Rigney 2018). In turn, social movement researchers take their main theoretical resources from the sociology of memory of Maurice Halbwachs (1992) and their analytical objects as narratives . As Priska Daphi suggests in relation to the Global Justice Movement, “[n]arratives creating a sense of collective history are very powerful in forming collective identity ” (2017, 111). Collective identity processes, working through narratives that stir the imagination, and social frameworks that instruct citizens in what to remember and what to forget, generate the emotional and cognitive ties necessary to forge a common cause (Daphi 2017; della Porta et al. 2018; Zamponi 2018). Memory then becomes a tool for mobilisation. This book considers popular feminist memories in their widest social and cultural compositions, including their articulation in heritage, protest, counter-cultural and commercial settings, in the present and across political generations.

  2. 2.

    Astrid Erll (2011b, 113) defines cultural memory as “the construction and circulation of knowledge and versions of a common past in sociocultural contexts”. This is a broad, umbrella definition and one that analytically draws attention to the role of cultural and mediated practices and texts in acts of personal and shared remembrance.

  3. 3.

    To invoke a model of assemblage memory is to call into question the conditions and forces that compose a particular memorial entity or constellation. It is to question who the agents of memory are in any given context, and the duration and intensity of the memory formation over time and space. Crucially, it is to remain critical about what political, economic and cultural work the assemblage does, and how it relates to operations of power.

  4. 4.

    A politics of memory approach often emphasises top-down constraints and repressive forces. Jacques Derrida’s oft-cited maxim suggests there “is no political power without control of the archive , if not of memory” (1996, 4). Michel Foucault warns that “Memory is actually a very important factor in struggle…if one controls people’s memory, one controls their dynamism…It is vital to have possession of this memory, to control it, administer it, tell it what it must contain” (1975, 25–26). An assemblage approach questions what can be understood as an archive in this moment of networked databases and remediated repositories, as well as deploying a wider poststructuralist understanding of the archive as a horizon of thought and the conditions of the thinkable. An assemblage perspective brings into focus histories of mnemonic labour from activists themselves. Such acts of labour take place in various censorious terrains. See Ibrahim (2016) for a consideration of the repressed histories of Tiananmen Square by the Chinese state and the creative attempts that citizens and activists undertake in order to circulate mediated memories online in social media networks.

  5. 5.

    To take a note from Latour (2005), scales of memory do not move from the personal-local-national-global, getting increasingly larger and more complex. Instead, multiple scales and sites occupy and inhabit every assemblage as forces that work in concert, proximity and conflict with each other.

  6. 6.

    I define feminist memory here as personal, cultural, mediated and digital invocations of the past that have been publicly apprehended and enacted under the sign of feminism. This broadens the definition of feminist memory from movement-curated resources and attends to the materials and meanings that are reproduced in broader social contexts around contentious feminist pasts.

  7. 7.

    How social movements remember their pasts has been discussed through commemoration (see, for example, Armstrong and Crage 2006; Hajek 2013) and public performances of memory which draw on past struggles and their mnemonic symbols, slogans and icons. In this way, memory operates as part of a movement’s ‘repertoire of contention ’ of inherited tactics and texts (see Eyerman 2016; Price and Sanz Sabido 2015; Tilly 2008).

  8. 8.

    An ‘afterlives ’ analytic, as Rigney elaborates (2012), embraces a Saussurian-inspired focus on the ‘life of texts in society’, the ‘social life of things’ (Appadurai 1986), and the ‘practices of everyday life’ (de Certeau 1984). It also resonates with the ideas of Aby Warburg (2000) and Walter Benjamin (1999) and their focus on the movement and migration of symbols across time and space, whereby “memory lives in and through its movements”, as mnemonic forms, contents and practices “are filled with new life and new meaning in changing social, temporal and local contexts ” (Erll 2011a, 11).

  9. 9.

    Feminist theory has long approached political memory through the frame of amnesia and erasure. Take Gayle Greene’s survey of the pulse points of feminist thinking in the US about feminist memory at the close of the twentieth century:

    Nancy Cott refers to the ‘disremembering process’ by which ‘feminism is aborted and repressed’; Adrienne Rich refers to the ‘erasure of women’s political and historic past’ wherein the ‘history of women’s struggle for self-determination has been muffled in silence over and over’; Elaine Showalter notes that ‘each generation of women writers have found itself…without a history, forced to rediscover the past anew, forging again and again the consciousness of their sex’…Feminism is a re-membering, a re-assembling of our lost past and lost parts of ourselves. (1991, 298, 300, emphasis added)

    The model of assemblage memory in this book is not the same assembling as invoked in Greene’s account. An assemblage memory is not strictly about historical recovery nor reclaiming; although this can form part of an assemblage’s work. I expand the concept of feminist memory beyond the concerns of protected movement knowledge and generational lineage. Rather, assemblage memory seeks to name the very acts of attachment and circulation; it theorises how movement memories emerge, cohere, become consistent or break apart. Activist memories are composed across expressions, things, bodies and feelings; this book offers a theory and a methodology for investigating this phenomenon.

  10. 10.

    This book’s assemblage approach (especially in the Rosie the Riveter case study) holds some affinities with mnemohistory. Proposed by Jan Assmann (see Tamm 2015), this is a branch of memory studies that does not study the past as it was—the domain of history proper—but of how it is remembered.

  11. 11.

    Memory, history, and imagination are necessarily tangled (Sturken 1997). I maintain that cultural memory (as a different epistemology to historical memory, which is based more closely in historical knowledge) flourishes and spreads when it participates in re-imaginings, leans into history, sometimes with the lightest of touches, and unfolds new infidelities and movements. There is still the thorny question of what is pushed out of the frame and repertoire of remembering practices. Studies of feminist memory and feminist imaginations have long been concerned with issues of amnesia in the public sphere, as I now attend to in Chapter 2.