This paper provides a revisionist account of the authority and power of the criminal mugshot. Dominant theories in the field have tended to focus on the ways in which mugshots have been used as a way of disciplining criminal bodies and rendering them docile. It is argued here that additional emphasis could usefully be placed on stories of resistance in which the monological production site of the prison or police station transforms into a dialogical site, in which the objects of (...) police photography can acquire agency. These issues are explored with particular reference to a set of photographs of English suffragettes acquired by the police for surveillance purposes. The suffragette’s refusal to comply with requests to have their photographs taken is used as a case study through which to examine the ways in which conventions about the form of the mugshot can be subverted, ideas about the types of people who were the object/subject of mugshots disrupted and the assumption of documentary neutrality undermined. (shrink)

Review of the film Suffragette, written by Abi Morgan and directed by Sarah Gavron, considering its use of fiction to explore women’s history, comparing it to other dramatic treatments of the suffrage campaign, its historical accuracy and its portrayal of the legal and social position of women, and wives, during the early twentieth century.

This article discusses the work of Dr Mary Louisa Gordon, who was appointed as the first English Lady Inspector of Prisons in 1908, and remained in post until 1921. Her attitude towards and treatment of women prisoners, as explained in her 1922 book Penal Discipline, stands in sharp contrast to that of her male contemporaries, and the categorisation of her approach as ‘feminist’ is reinforced by her documented connections with the suffragette movement. Yet her feminist and suffragist associations also resulted (...) in the marginalisation and dismissal of her work, such that Mary Gordon and Penal Discipline are virtually unknown today. Nevertheless, her insights into the position and needs of women prisoners retain a striking contemporary relevance. (shrink)

In 1913, the British suffragette Emily Wilding Davison was killed when she ran onto the race course at Epsom Downs during the running of the Derby. Davison's goals are unclear, but she was immediately hailed as a martyr to the women's cause by her comrades in the Women's Social and Political Union. Others denounced her as a suicidal fanatic. This article evaluates Davison's death by examining the WSPU's emphasis on self-sacrifice, the actions of other women who risked their lives for (...) the right to vote, and Davison's political writings and activities. Combined, these features of the militant suffrage movement support the WSPU's identification of Davison as a martyr. They also raise questions about the ideological integrity of the concept of secular martyrdom. (shrink)

American feminism’s anti-Black racism is often presented as a failure of white feminists to integrate Black women into their movement. This historiographic approach presumes that feminism was a progressive movement that merely suffered from blind spots in its approach to women’s rights due to the biases of some white women. Unlike previous research which has pointed out the individual racism of suffragettes and mid-twentieth-century feminists, this chapter argues for an understanding of the theories created and endorsed by feminists from (...) 1860 to 1980 as the consequence of feminism’s dependence on racist theories predicated on research from ethnologists and evolutionary theorists in the nineteenth and criminologists in the twentieth centuries. By looking at the primary racial target of feminist thought and activism over the centuries, the Black male, I argue scholars can more accurately trace the theories feminists used to derail Black American’s struggle for civil rights. (shrink)

En 1685, le Code noir défendait « aux esclaves de porter aucunes armes offensives ni de gros bâtons » sous peine de fouet. Au xixe siècle, en Algérie, l'État colonial français interdisait les armes aux indigènes, tout en accordant aux colons le droit de s'armer. Aujourd'hui, certaines vies comptent si peu que l'on peut tirer dans le dos d'un adolescent tout en prétendant qu'il était agressif, armé et menaçant. Une ligne de partage oppose historiquement les corps « dignes d'être défendus (...) » et ceux qui, désarmés ou rendus indéfendables, sont laissés sans défense. Ce « désarmement » organisé des subalternes et des opprimés au profit d'une minorité jouissant d'un droit permanent à porter des armes et à en user impunément pose directement, pour tout élan de libération, la question du recours à la violence pour sa propre défense. Du jiu-jitsu des suffragettes aux pratiques insurrectionnelles du ghetto de Varsovie, des fusils des Black Panthers aux patrouilles queer, Elsa Dorlin retrace une généalogie philosophique de l'autodéfense politique. Derrière l'histoire officielle de la légitime défense, il est ici question du récit des « éthiques martiales de soi », ces histoires ensevelies où le Sujet ne préexiste pas à sa propre défense, où le fait de se défendre en attaquant apparaît à la fois comme la condition de possibilité d'un soi et la matière des mythologies politiques. Cette histoire – une histoire de la violence – conditionne la définition même de la subjectivité moderne. Elle s'écrit à la lumière d'une relecture critique de l'histoire de la philosophie politique, où Hobbes et Locke sont à confronter avec Franz Fanon, Michel Foucault ou Judith Butler. (shrink)

In the 1910s, New York suffragette Electra Sparks wrote a series of essays in theMoving Picture Newsthat advocated for cine-therapy treatments for pregnant women. Film was, in her view, the great democratizer of beautiful images, providing high-cultural access to the city's poor. These positive ‘mental pictures’ were important for her because, she claimed, in order to produce an attractive, healthy child, the mother must be exposed to quality cultural material. Sparks's championing of cinema during its ‘second birth’ was founded upon (...) the premise of New Thought. This metaphysical Christian doctrine existed alongside the self-help and esoteric publishing domains and testified, above all, to the possibility of the ‘mind-cure’ of the body through the positive application of ‘mental pictures’. Physiologically, their method began best in the womb, where the thoughts of the mother were of utmost importance: the eventual difference between birthing an Elephant Man or an Adonis. This positive maternal impression was commonplace in New Thought literature; it was Sparks's innovation to apply it to cinema. Investigating Sparks's film theory, practice and programming reveals her to be a harbinger of the abiding analogy between mind and motion picture that occupies film theorists to this day. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reading The Second Sex Sixty Years LaterJulia KristevaTranslated by Timothy HackettPublished in 1949, today The Second Sex is a youthful sixty-year-old woman who has created a scandal, but also a school of thought: She marks a decisive stage in women's liberation and continues to accelerate it.Let's try to place ourselves in that year, 1949: The world has barely dressed its wounds from World War II and onto the scene (...) steps a young French woman—from an aristocratic and Catholic background, enjoying a liberal lifestyle and endowed with philosophical tenacity, pedagogical talents, and contagious style without precedent—who announces to her dumbfounded readers that the second sex is free. To be sure, she immediately issues the following qualification, "the free woman is just being born" (Beauvoir 2010, 751), and this remains the case today. It is, however, already a global phenomenon, one that has not yet finished leaving its effects, since what is at stake is a veritable anthropological revolution: I say "anthropological revolution" for, beyond the freedom of choice with respect to maternity and the right to social, economic, and political equality, what is at stake is a new form of assuring the continuity of the human species along with the bold definition of transcendence as freedom. What becomes of humanity if birth, freedom, and the spectacle are put in the hands of women? Obscurantists, fundamentalists, and puritans of all stripes become alarmed and decry the scandal. If the future is hereby opened up—with all the risks that this entails—does it welcome and offer new possibilities?This anthropological revolution has been in preparation since the beginning of time. The British suffragettes inscribed it in their political agenda and feminist movements after May '68 intended to deepen it. But this revolution [End Page 137] [elle] only became conscious of its magnitude and took the world by storm, thanks to the experience and the pen of Simone de Beauvoir.Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) is already a well-known philosopher and writer by 1949, when she begins to create something of a scandal: she has already published She Came to Stay, Pyrrhus and Cineas, The Blood of Others, Who Shall Die?, All Men Are Mortal, The Ethics of Ambiguity, and America Day By Day. Along with Jean-Paul Sartre and in the wake of the burgeoning (naissant) existentialist movement (whose genesis she would intimately describe in Les Mandarins, 1954), Simone de Beauvoir pursues an experience that is at once personal and political, as well as a philosophical project whose central theme and absolute objective is freedom, which she understands as a form of revolt and non-consent. It remains important to emphasize this today as we begin the third millennium, a time in which freedom, revolt, and non-consent tend to disappear in favor of other concerns that reflect a globalized world: fear, security, adaptation, and integration."Freedom" lies at the heart of the life and the work of the one whom the hostile press disparagingly calls "Sartrean." The freedom of Madame Roland, who acknowledged, "Oh what crimes are committed in thy name," is the same freedom whose risks Simone de Beauvoir downplays in The Ethics of Ambiguity, a work that denounces the ambivalent fascination with communism found in other existentialists.Freedom nevertheless; above all and at all costs: For Simone de Beauvoir, freedom (elle) remains and will remain the inextinguishable star that has incessantly guided philosophical inquiry since Socrates; inspired the noble heights of Christian thought, particularly in Pascal (who deemed man more noble than the universe that crushes him, for he knows that he dies while the universe doesn't). It is the same freedom that fueled the rebellious bodies and spirits of the Enlightenment; that forged the style of great European literature; it is the same freedom that animates Hegel's dialectic and even modern phenomenology, which existentialism takes as its support. So many references and experiences resonate in the work of this forty-year-old author as she sets out to write The Second Sex.Her first novels recount the relentless struggles that women undergo (jealousy, abandonment, solitude, violence, various injustices) in order to extricate themselves from their... (shrink)

American suffrage history is dominated by white suffragettes; however, this essay aims to bring to light another vibrant dimension of the American women’s suffrage movement. Mabel Ping-Hua Lee turned tides when she marched horseback at a women’s suffrage parade at the age of sixteen, and further entrenched herself as a prominent Asian-American suffragette as she continued to fight for women’s suffrage throughout her lifetime, although the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred her and all Chinese people from voting or (...) obtaining citizenship until the act was repealed in 1943. This article explores many dimensions of Mabel through several of her primary environmental and personal influences, from Guangzhou, China to New York City’s Chinatown, which all shaped her into an admirable, and selfless social justice advocate that claims an unforgettable chapter in American and Asian-American political history. (shrink)

This article examines feminist agency in the light of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological account of the body subject. Stressing the importance of embodiment to feminist agency (without reifying an essential female body), I argue that bodies inhabit specific social, historical and discursive contexts which shape our corporeal experience and our opportunities for political contestation. Beginning with the assertion that we cannot think of agency without the body, I examine a historical instance of feminist agency in which women’s bodies were central to the (...) articulation of political dissent, namely the British suffragette movement. In particular, I focus on the suffragette career of Mary Leigh and argue that it represents a feminist agency derived from corporeal performance. Through daring acts of protest which drew attention to the comportment and capacities of their bodies, suffragettes like Leigh contested the constitution of the political domain and the nature of citizenship. (shrink)

Hunger striking is a form of nonviolent action of last resort. It is a tactic used by powerless individuals to challenge those in power and achieve change. Many authors have emphasized that hunger strikers are not suicidal, but when oppressed people run out of other ways to protest or demand sociopolitical change, some of them are willing to place their health and life at risk to achieve their goals. Hunger strikes have a long, widely diffused history, and studies reveal that (...) they are typically small, brief, and often successful. Some well-known examples are the fasts of the suffragettes in the UK, of IRA... (shrink)

This article opens with the questioning of a now established scholarly category, `French feminism'. It proposes that theoretical and polemical understandings of `French feminism' have been founded on an opposition to its counterpart, `Anglo-American feminism'. The measure of this opposition has been defined mostly as geographical, linguistic and cultural. But underneath such constructions often lies the old sameness vs difference debate that has captivated feminism since the suffragettes. The article argues for a less oppositional and less discounting definition of (...) the two strands of feminism. It proposes to read oppositional classifications as motivation for a dialogue addressed to the `other ' of theoretical constructs; questioning the likelihood of foregoing oppositional classification. (shrink)

This article considers Kate Walbert’s A Short History of Women (2009), a novel that tells the stories of a hunger striking suffragette and four generations of her female descendants. Tracing feminist history through female genealogy, Walbert’s historiographic metafiction helps us think through the perils and potentials of the generational methods that have long dominated feminist historiography. Critically engaging with what has arguably become a feminist family drama, the novel makes an invaluable contribution to contemporary feminist theory and feminist historiography, illustrating (...) of feminist genealogies as simultaneously fruitful and fraught, limiting and liberating and yet inescapable and useful. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue for craftivism as a form of social activism with a political depth reached through making. From Mary Wollstonecraft to the suffragettes, Betsy Greer to DIY, craftivism has had a place in feminist activism. The human tradition for making objects combined with the online possibility of documentation, has made craftivism a political weapon. But it is a soft weapon, where the power lies in the pain and suffering it reminds us off. This protest is often (...) performed by women and history shows that this is why craft has been seen as something other than art, and as a form of political protest today. This article ties the history of feminist craft to the current movement of craftivism, arguing for this art herstory to be part of the canon and part of a political solution. (shrink)

This article looks at the feminist activism of particular women in the ancestry of the eminent Canadian sociologist, Dorothy E. Smith, and at the archival data that confirm the traces of their influence found in her theory-building. Using the method of interpretative historical sociology and a conceptual framework drawn from Marx called the `productive forces', the article examines the feminist theology of her Quaker ancestor, Margaret Fell, and the militant suffrage activism of her mother and her grandmother, Dorothy Foster Place (...) and Lucy Ellison Abraham, respectively. The article argues that the household labour of the remarkable women in her family line became a `productive force' that facilitated her imagining of the feminist theory, `the standpoint of women'. (shrink)