Finding the Movement: Sexuality, Contested Space, and Feminist Activism (Radical Perspectives) - Softcover

Enke, A. Finn

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822340836 ISBN 13: 9780822340836

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

In Finding the Movement

, Anne Enke reveals that diverse women’s engagement with public spaces gave rise to and profoundly shaped second-wave feminism. Focusing on women’s activism in Detroit, Chicago, and Minneapolis-St. Paul during the 1960s and 1970s, Enke describes how women across race and class created a massive groundswell of feminist activism by directly intervening in the urban landscape. They secured illicit meeting spaces and gained access to public athletic fields. They fought to open bars to women and abolish gendered dress codes and prohibitions against lesbian congregation. They created alternative spaces, such as coffeehouses, where women could socialize and organize. They opened women-oriented bookstores, restaurants, cafes, and clubs, and they took it upon themselves to establish women’s shelters, health clinics, and credit unions in order to support women’s bodily autonomy.

By considering the development of feminism through an analysis of public space, Enke expands and revises the historiography of second-wave feminism. She suggests that the movement was so widespread because it was built by people who did not identify themselves as feminists as well as by those who did. Her focus on claims to public space helps to explain why sexuality, lesbianism, and gender expression were so central to feminist activism. Her spatial analysis also sheds light on hierarchies within the movement. As women turned commercial, civic, and institutional spaces into sites of activism, they produced, as well as resisted, exclusionary dynamics.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Anne Enke is Associate Professor of Women’s Studies, History, and LGBT Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

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"In places like softball fields, church basements, and dance floors, Anne Enke locates a cast of compelling characters who don't usually make it into history books. The result is a startlingly original history of second-wave feminism. Enke forces us to think freshly about the 1960s, political mobilization, and the ways that people change the world around them."--John D'Emilio, coauthor of "Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America"

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Finding the Movement

Sexuality, Contested Space, and Feminist ActivismBy Anne Enke

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2007 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4083-6

Contents

About the Series.....................................................................................................................ixAcknowledgments......................................................................................................................xiIntroduction Locating Feminist Activism.............................................................................................1One "Someone or Something Made That a Women's Bar" Claiming the Nighttime Marketplace..............................................25Two "Don't Steal It, Read It Here" Building Community in the Marketplace...........................................................62Three "Kind of Like Mecca" Playgrounds, Players, and Women's Movement..............................................................105Four Out in Left Field Feminist Movement and Civic Athletic Space...................................................................145Five Finding the Limits of Women's Autonomy Shelters, Health Clinics, and the Practice of Property.................................177Six If I Can't Dance Shirtless, It's Not a Revolution Coffeehouses, Clubs, and the Construction of "All Women".....................217Conclusion Recognizing the Subject of Feminist Activism.............................................................................252Notes................................................................................................................................269Bibliography.........................................................................................................................335Index................................................................................................................................357

Chapter One

"Someone or Something Made That a Women's Bar"

Claiming the Nighttime Marketplace

One January night in 1972, the historically straight, predominantly white Poodle Club bar on East Lake Street in Minneapolis refused entrance to two white women. Within two days, gay men and lesbians formed an action group, Gay Political Activists, specifically to take over the bar in protest. They entered in heterosexual pairs, but once inside, regrouped as gay and lesbian couples to occupy the dance floor. Bar management allowed them to stay, later explaining, "business was slow that night anyway." Less than a week later, the bar again denied entrance to two white women. In response, Goldflower Feminist Newsletter organized a mass picket that drew over 100 protestors on February 4. The women who had created Goldflower a mere month earlier were well practiced at this: Shirley Heyer, a self-identified "old bar dyke" tapped faithful connections she had made over years at gay bars, and younger women brought countercultural resources to what was advertised as a feminist demonstration. Far from enlightening bar managers, the feminist picket drew a hostile response: male bouncers and managers yelled, shook their fists in women's faces, and physically tore the picket signs away from women's backs and hands. The picketers left, never to return. It was worth making a statement at the bar, but the bar itself was not worth fighting for. The event was significant, however, in that straight women, lesbians, and gay men collectively sought to challenge the sexism and homophobia that organized public, commercial space.

The bar's discrimination policies made plain some of the ways that all women were excluded from conventional commercial social spaces. Poodle Club managers defensively avowed that women were always welcome there; indeed, women's patronage was critical to a business that literally capitalized on heterosexuality. At the same time, the managers openly discriminated against homosexuals, claiming that gays and lesbians disrupted the normal functioning of the bar. Though men who arrived in all-male pairs or groups were rarely denied entrance, women without male "escorts" were often turned away at the door-usually on the grounds that they were "unable to prove their age," even when they presented legal id cards. What legal ID cards actually could not prove was a woman's heterosexuality: only a man could produce that appearance. Bouncers and bar owners thus turned "unescorted" women away for failing to abide by heteronormative restrictions on women's autonomy and mobility. The protest action at the Poodle Club offers a snapshot of the influence of "bar dyke" activism on emerging feminist activism, their interdependence, and their combined impact.

Feminism found itself in part through struggles such as these. Bars acted as mainstays of public space; whether conventionally heterosexual or queer, bars organized sociality, social status, and social norms. As such, they became key sites of women's activism around public space itself, and they therefore provide windows into the emergence of publicized feminist challenge. Through the 1960s, lesbians-butches, fems, studs, ladies, gay women, and women seeking women-provided the driving force behind demands for leisure spaces in which women could openly congregate, particularly at night. Though bars were the most public meeting places that non-normative women could call "home," that space had to be won, too. Rules prohibiting "unescorted women" mandated against the visibility of lesbianism and prostitution; and virtually all bars, including gay bars, prohibited lesbian dancing and other obvious homosocial intimacy. In response, women protested straight-appearing bars for requiring escorts, and they protested gay bars for not welcoming women enough. Inadequately served by conventional venues, women also built alternative spaces for nonsexist, queer-friendly, and racially affirming commerce that supported their own emergent communities. As they did so, they became a constituency capable of making collective political demands on the public landscape.

By the early 1970s, much of this activism became explicitly associated with feminism. Some women who had long fought for bar space began to consider themselves feminists, and-as a glance through just about any feminist periodical of the early 1970s will show-many feminist-identified women began to protest women's exclusion not only from gay bars but also from straight bars, lunch grills, and other normative public accommodations. Taking inspiration not only from civil rights efforts to desegregate public space but equally from queer demands for a nonhomophobic landscape, feminist activism emerged partly in a nighttime marketplace structured around gender and race hierarchies. Feminist-identified women increasingly politicized their demands on commercial spaces: they fought to maintain and create presence in gay bars, they attempted to racially desegregate gay bars, they published feminist evaluations of bars, and they organized women's economic influence on bars. This aspect of feminist emergence is too easily overlooked, and it is altogether lost when historical analyses separate "gay liberation" from "women's liberation" or assume that feminists dismissed gay bars as vital social spaces. Feminism was not disconnected from other struggles over queer public space, but grew in part from them. It should not be surprising, then, that...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822340836
• ISBN 13: 9780822340836
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 386
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar