Abstract
In October 2017, the #metoo hashtag emerged on social media to denounce sexual assault and harassment. Within days, it had been tweeted over half a million times, with the campaign quickly gathering momentum in the wake of a range of distressing sexual assault and harassment cases affecting women worldwide. On 25 October, Members of the European Parliament held up placards detailing their own experiences of sexual harassment, arguing for a new directive against violence on women. The same month, thousands marched in Paris to draw attention to the same issue, while in November, hundreds of #metoo survivors marched on Hollywood armed with placards and signs. In India, an open list of alleged sexual abusers within academia was published, while in Turkey, women broke the state of emergency to gather publicly to show solidarity for victims of sexual violence. By the end of the year, women had mobilised both on social media and in public spaces in unprecedented numbers, coming together to share stories of sexual assault and to expose those responsible.
#metoo clearly represents an important moment in women’s ongoing struggles for sexual and gendered rights. But while it has widely been heralded as unprecedented, Curran reminds us that there is a long and powerful tradition of women mobilising against patriarchal violence which needs to be acknowledged. Indeed, she suggests that the seemingly leading role women now play in public protest in the 21st century is a direct legacy of the women’s movements of the 1970s and 1980s which fought for sexual and gendered freedoms in a variety of spheres. Focusing on public protests organised and mainly attended by women, Curran’s book charts well over 20 years of Reclaim the Night marches, anti-war protests, slutwalks and LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) parades to demonstrate the evident power that women can assert via the transformation and occupation of public space in moments of protest and transgression. Central to Curran’s ambition is to show that ‘holding space’ is a powerful tactic to ensure specific issues are given publicity. Crucial to her account is the idea that the occupation of the streets by ‘disobedient’ women represents an affective transformation of everyday relations that can involve the formation of a new embodied collectivity. To these ends, she draws on her participation in, and observation of, numerous protests in North America (and one in the United Kingdom) to explore how women-led mobilisations work to both articulate the rights of women while also allowing cultures of difference to emerge. Examples such as Minneapolis’ Take Back the Night, the New York Dyke Parade, Toronto’s slutwalks, the anti-gun Million Moms March and anti-war Women in Black vigils are thus served up as contrasting space-claiming performances which sometimes appear to exclude specific forms of feminism, but which Curran argues ultimately allowed for collective interests to be negotiated and articulated.
Curran’s work is hugely welcome, connecting sometimes disparate protests and mobilisations through a strong connecting thread which emphasises questions of appearance and encounter. 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 emphasise the performative force of counterpublic spaces. At times, however, her engagement with spatial theory is rather frustrating: the work of many geographers is cited, but only lightly engaged with, and while the notion of women ‘holding space’ is a central thematic, it remains a little underdeveloped in a book that oftentimes tries to determine if protests were effective rather than questioning how affectivity of protest is related to the inherent visibility, publicity and spatiality of the spaces where it occurs. That said, Curran’s book is of immense value for highlighting how women have marched, lobbied and mobilised in public space to open-up public dialogues, and it explores the ambivalent politics of such protests, many of which sadly only succeed in gaining publicity by attracting voyeurism and backlash.
