In 2018, feminism is everywhere and nowhere at once. Women, we are told, can now be CEOs, and entrepreneurs and other iterations of our culture’s monolithic avatars of professional success. One of our fastest-growing dating apps, Bumble, offers a self-avowedly feminist romantic experience; its billboards urge young women to “be the CEO your parents wanted you to marry”. Last year a widely publicised ‘radical women’s club’ launched in New York, its marketing trading in the iconography of card-carrying communists Frida Kahlo and Angela Davis. Membership at the glossy SoHo-based club, ‘The Wing’, starts at $3,000 a year. It has a partnership deal with Chanel.
Within this politically confused landscape, the words of the strong-willed Maeve Sweeney in the eponymous 1981 film by Pat Murphy sound like a sobering shot in the dark: “When women put themselves behind male politics, the result has not been a recognition of our rights but a moderation of our aims.” Yet Maeve’s warning, issued during an argument with her Irish separatist ex-lover, perhaps did not go far enough; she did not foresee the imminent unfolding of a global capitalism so strong that it would hollow out the basic aims of revolutionary freedom entirely. It was a mere six years after the release of Maeve, after all, when Margaret Thatcher told a magazine called Women’s Own (of all titles) that “there is no such thing as society”. In this fractured, un-social state of affairs, what can liberation really mean, aside from being your own girl boss?
Maeve played as part of ‘Revolt, She Said: Women and Film after ’68’, a 2018 film series curated by UK-based queer feminist collective Club des Femmes. The series looks at the multifaceted history of feminist revolution within America and Europe against the backdrop of the student-led countercultural revolution in France in 1968. Alongside Maeve, ‘Revolt, She Said’ also features Věra Chytilová’s Daisies (1966); Mai Zetterling’s The Girls (1968); Ula Stöckl’s The Cat Has Nine Lives (1968); Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s Riddles of the Sphinx (1977); Agnès Varda’s One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1977); Beeban Kidron and Amanda Richardson’s Carry Greenham Home (1981); Greta Schiller’s Before Stonewall (1984); and Pratibha Parmar’s A Place of Rage (1991), with additional short films from 1968–1992.
Tying this diverse selection of films together is a collective concern with ‘revolt’ that extends the idea beyond the standard definition of ‘political protest’. Club des Femmes takes their cue from Julia Kristeva: “Revolt, as I understand it – psychic revolt, analytic revolt, artistic revolt – refers to a permanent state of questioning, of transformations, an endless probing of appearances.”1 Kristeva’s revolt finds a convenient home in cinema, a medium to which the “endless probing of appearances” has always come naturally. In their filmic lives, the women of ‘Revolt, She Said’ are all questioning, trying to work out what it means to forge a self in a world that is all too ready to assign them a narrative from above.2
Their revolt can take many forms. The two young Maries of Věra Chytilovà’s Daisies (Marie 1 and Marie 2, pictured above) mix nihilism with hedonism in a New Wave romp around nightclubs, luxe restaurants and Edenic gardens. The world, they’ve decided, has gone bad, so the only way forward is for them to be bad too. They gorge on the most expensive items on the menu during dinner dates with their sugar daddies, steal spare change from bathroom attendants, and get into raucous food fights in elegant dining halls; theirs is a revolt of surrealist excess against the austere directives of Soviet-era communist Czechoslovakia. In Mai Zetterling’s The Girls, three women actors imagine fantastical revenge scenarios against their philandering – or just deeply unsatisfying – husbands. The emotionally charged, surrealist scenes that play out in their own heads come in stark contrast to the mind-numbing performative niceties of their middle class womanhood. The women in Ula Stöckl’s The Cat Has Nine Lives and Agnès Varda’s One Sings, the Other Doesn’t negotiate revolt alongside romance in their dalliances with men, learning the hard but unavoidable truth that structural imbalances can never quite leave even the most intimate of relationships. Peace camp activists sing anti-war songs and gleefully play tricks on security guards in Beeban Kidron and Amanda Richardson’s Carry Greenham Home. Kidron and Richardson joined the women’s camp at Greenham Common in the early 1980s, and their documentary offers a rare insider’s view of the anti-nuclear protests at the weapons site.
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This same diffusive spirit of revolt animated the protests across France in May 1968, when a group of disgruntled students from the University of Nanterre first took to the streets on the third of May in Paris’s Latin Quarter, the heart of the university district. They were unhappy with the conservative, slow-moving bureaucratism of the university’s staff, having previously protested against strict rules governing mixed-gender interactions at their dormitories. What may have seemed like a domestic grievance spiralled in a nationwide cathartic outpouring against the stifling, nose-to-the-grindstone socioeconomic ethic of President Charles de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic, and – for some – the regime’s unyielding acceptance of the rise of globalised American-style capitalism. Students raised a communist flag over the Paris Stock Exchange; workers in Nantes shipyards stopped loading freights in informal strikes; millions marched in the streets.
Today the memory of ‘68 is overwhelmingly discussed through the lens of failure. It’s said that the revolts, rather than destabilise de Gaulle, helped him emerge stronger than ever: at the election the following June, his party secured the largest majority in French parliamentary history. And we all know what happened next: the laissez-faire years of the 1980s, the globalisation of the 1990s, and financialisation of our economies in the 2000s. Today, France is governed by a youthful publicity-hawk technocrat who vows to make his country “move like a startup”.3
The only thing we love more than indulging in the romance of youthful idealism is receiving reassurance of its inevitable failure. It’s easier, after all, to live in the knowledge that a better world isn’t possible. And yet all the grand narratives in the world can’t suppress a unshakeable intuition that something isn’t quite right. It’s the nagging sense felt by women everywhere that there’s something fundamentally wrong about the world and their place in it; a powerful but untraceable feeling that almost lies beyond articulation. It’s an anxiety that you carry within your body practically from the day you become self-conscious; something that marks the tenor and content of your speech before you even begin to speak.
To be a woman in the world is to navigate a landscape of otherness, to live with the persistent reminder that you lie outside the regular, masculine/neutral halls of power. This is the central tenet of Laura Mulvey’s Riddles of the Sphinx (1977), which explores the mythical beast who guards the gates to Thebes, whom Mulvey deems the “forgotten character in the myth of Oedipus”. Dwelling outside the city, the Sphinx founds her livelihood on the persistent inscrutability of her riddles to passersby; when she is finally bested by Oedipus, she throws herself off her rocky pillar and meets her death. Mulvey sees her as a symbol of the persistent ‘otherness’ of women, observing that “the Sphinx is outside the city gates, she challenges the culture of a city, with its order of kinship and order of knowledge”; hence, “to the patriarchy, the Sphinx as women is a threat and a riddle”. But the Sphinx, no matter how threatening, is cut off from access to dominant forms of power. “We live in a society ruled by the father”, Mulvey continues. “The Sphinx can only speak with a voice apart, a voice off.”
Women can nominally speak, be and do; but we must do so within a symbolic order predicated on our exclusion. When the very fabric of life casts you as a subordinate, what can revolt really look like? The women of ‘Revolt, She Said’ demonstrate that revolt is not just about bodies marching in uniform and coherent political protest (though it is that, too), but is also a rejection of the fundamental orders of life. This is the meaning of its “permanent state of questioning”. It plumbs, rather than denies, the darker, more mysterious elements of our humanity. So long as the western masculine ‘I’ is predicated on the public protestations to know everything, on the denial of all doubt, and on the eradication of all the softer lenses of our basic vulnerabilities, womanhood – in all its supposed Sphinxian inscrutability and capacity for endless questioning – will remain a threat to it. Or, as Marie 2 notes in Daisies, reflecting on the exhausting predictability of her conversations with infatuated men, “I don’t understand. Why does one say ‘I love you’? Do you understand? Why can’t one say, for example, ‘egg’?”
The road to the feminist revolution is paved with the inevitability of men. To discuss womanhood is to incur its gendered opposite – it was Simone de Beauvoir, after all, who observed that ‘woman’ as cultural ideal “is determined and differentiated in relation to man, while he is not in relation to her … He is the Subject; he is the Absolute. She is the Other.”4 Ongoing relationships with men are a significant concern for the women of The Cat Has Nine Lives, Maeve, and One Sings, the Other Doesn’t, who all try to find meaningful and fulfilling intimacy with their politically engaged boyfriends and husbands, and to overcome the asymmetry of power that marks the gendered symbolic order. It is easier said than done. Free-spirited Pomme becomes disillusioned with the ultimately conventional politics of her former student-revolutionary husband in One Sings, finding that, in spite of all his pretensions, he ultimately wants a wife who can stay in the house, cook, and clean. In The Cat Has Nine Lives (pictured below), spacey and introverted Anne has confused conversations about communism with male revolutionaries dressed in turtlenecks. She just doesn’t know why, when it comes down to it, these high-minded men care so much about women’s beauty.
But importantly, not all of the films in ‘Revolt, She Said’ focus on heterosexual relationships. Greta Schiller’s Before Stonewall looks at the history of the gay and lesbian community in America before the 1969 Stonewall revolts. Women’s sexuality, the documentary reveals, has historically been subject to a stifling and often violent regulatory regime; any meaningful empowerment of women must come with a fundamental challenge to the demands of heteronormativity. Sarah Turner’s short film She Wanted Green Lawns offers a beatific vision of two women at a gay bar, projecting a sublime queer fantasy that makes no concessions to the ubiquitous heterosexual gaze. Angela Davis, June Jordan and Alice Walker reflect on how they have encountered homophobia and racism in their own activism in Pratibha Parmar’s A Place of Rage, which celebrates the achievements of black and minority women involved in the 1960s civil rights movement and 1980s LGBT rights movement in the United States. June Jordan, notably, finds within the Left a troubling tendency to relegate sexuality and race to the status of ‘minor issues’: “freedom cannot be qualified,” she asserts; “the sphere of your heart should not be a peripheral issue.”
The films of ‘Revolt, She Said’ are more interested in depiction than prescription; we do not necessarily come out of them with a greater sense of how to emancipate ourselves from the patriarchy, but they help us to understand its functions, and to see how these structural inequalities affect the lived experiences of everyday women. But an indirect kind of answer comes in the form of the films’ depiction of relationships between women, in all their messy, liberating, frustrating glory.
Throughout the series, bonds of female solidarity are thrillingly potent. Carry Greenham Home offers moving scenes of women standing en masse, singing folk protest songs, while an emotionless, largely male police force looks on. But this is not some toothless Kumbaya sisterhood. The film offers a candid glance into the often heated arguments that accompany the project of revolt. There are disagreements among the peace camp participants about how to run the revolution – one camper registers her disapproval with keeping their funds in Lloyd’s Bank, while others question the extent to which their decisions are truly collective. Seasoned activists speak about the usefulness of anger as a galvanising call to arms in A Place of Rage: “When you don’t rage”, Jordan says, “you turn against yourself.” The women actors in The Girls encounter skeptical, pearl-clutching matriarchs as they tour Sweden and try to engage audiences with the sexual politics of their play. The show in question? Aristophanes’s Lysistrata, the antiwar comedy in which women across the Greek city states band together to take a vow of abstinence until their warring husbands end the Peloponnesian War.
From Ancient Greece to Paris’s Latin Quarter in 1968, history has a way of talking back to us. Viewed today, the films of ‘Revolt, She Said’ are compellingly stark in their depiction of feminism as a project inevitably fuelled by conflict, disagreement, and open struggle, even within groups ostensibly united under one banner. It’s a far cry from the bloodless bootstrap feminism pushed on us today, marked by relentlessly positive calls to empower and support other women without any material considerations of what such empowerment looks like, and whose heads need to fall in order to get there. 40 years on from the marches of ‘68, feminism is no longer a ‘dirty word’, but its popular acceptance has often come at the cost of its radical aims.
Still, while it’s easy to be cynical about the future, we shouldn’t be. There are two lies that often come with the stories of revolt. First, that revolt is always pursued by the hopelessly naive; second, that the revolters’ projects are always doomed. The women of ‘Revolt, She Said’ are in fact cannier and shrewder than their hopelessly uncurious and tedious patriarchs. They know that the world operates on a logic that is less rational, linear, and self-assured than the hegemonic masculine ‘I’ purports. These women play, dance, and laugh in the world, con the unwitting, and sing defiantly in unison – what might come across as self-indulgent trivialities are in fact powerful outbursts of self-affirmation in a world that, when it comes down to it, seems to really hate women.
And even if these small acts of rebellion, play, and revolt may not have an immediate effect – the contention, at least, of the ostensibly ‘disinterested’ critics who hasten to predict the inevitable futility of any protest – small acts of courage have their way of coming together to produce, well, revolution. In the words of one activist who was present the night at Stonewall Inn on 27 June 1969: “There was no one thing special about it. It was just everything coming together, one of those moments in history where, if you were there, you just knew that this was it. This is what we’ve been waiting for.”
1 Julia Kristeva, Revolt, She Said, Semiotext(e), 2002, p. 120. 2 Kristeva, Revolt, She Said. 3 Harriet Agnew, ‘Emmanuel Macron inspires entrepreneurs with start-up nation vision’, Financial Times, June 2017. 4 Simone de Beauvoir, trans. Constance Borde & Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, The Second Sex, Vintage Books, 1949 (republished 2011), p. 26.
Rebecca Liu is a freelance writer living in London. She is an editor for Kings Review, and one of Another Gaze’s staff writers.
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