Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Pussy Hats, Politics, and Public Protest

2023; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 136; Issue: 539 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/15351882.136.539.09

1535-1882

Cristina Benedetti,

Historical Gender and Feminism Studies

Pussy Hats, Politics, and Public Protest presents several grounded accounts and analyses of the 2017 Women's March on Washington through a folkloristic lens. Alongside its six peer-reviewed essays, it incorporates many pages of large, full-color photographs of protestors and their signs—an important documentation project in its own right. Edited by Rachelle Hope Saltzman, this volume was published in 2020 at a time of escalating state violence and political maneuvering designed to bewilder and exhaust the public. Precisely because so much has happened in the few years since the Women's March, we are fortunate to have this thoughtful documentation of a decisive moment in the recent past: the lead-up to the 2016 United States presidential election and the wave of popular resistance that grew between Donald Trump's win in November 2016 and his inauguration in January 2017.The collection foregrounds marches outside the largest women's marches in the United States (those in Washington, DC; New York City; and Los Angeles). By examining marches in Portland (Oregon), Chicago, Lancaster, Philadelphia, and Raleigh (along with survey responses from marchers in other cities in Patricia Sawin's essay), Pussy Hats, Politics, and Public Protest reaches beyond the March's primary hubs of media attention to present geographically varied accounts of this mass national event. Because the dispersed nature of the Women's March was one of its most notable aspects, documenting marches outside large coastal cities is a crucial contribution.Essays by Saltzman and Jack Santino set up our reading of the Women's March through the lens of folkloristics. Saltzman describes the Women's March as an example of charivari (pronounced and written elsewhere as shivaree), a loud and mocking form of protest that enacts popular censure in the absence of legal or parliamentary recourse. Her essay includes pages of photographs of Portland marchers’ handmade signs—folk-art objects that embody the multivocal nature of the March. Both Saltzman and Santino identify the aesthetics of the Women's March as intensely carnivalesque. The central inversion is the overtaking of the physical and discursive public sphere by women, their traditions, and their concerns—a space that dominant culture continues to construct as by and for men. They argue that this inversion manifested aesthetically in the widespread adoption of the pussy as a focal point (a word popularly used in the United States to refer to the vagina). The Women's March brought this taboo signifier into the streets materially with the handmade pussy hat, as visual rhetoric depicting cartoonish or monstrous vaginas, and as verbal art on protest signs.Susan Eleuterio's and Andrea Glass’ essays focus on the material culture of the Women's March and how made objects helped protestors build connections in March spaces and elsewhere. Eleuterio writes about the phenomenon of the pussy hat—the often pink, usually knitted or crocheted, homemade hats that many marchers wore, made possible by the circulation of free patterns on the internet and women's practices of hand-making and gift-giving. Eleuterio documents her and other marchers’ experiences wearing pussy hats before, during, and after the March. She helpfully highlights ambivalences and variations around donning the pink pussy hat, while describing its ability to create community in March spaces. Glass’ essay documents and analyzes how jewelers Erica Millner and Mai Orama Muñiz—master artisans and owners of Mio Studio art gallery in Lancaster, Pennsylvania—built community and created a space of refuge before and after Trump's election. Their custom jewelry became part of a local feminist and lesbian aesthetic that circulated through the making and giving of metal charms stamped with words of solidarity during the presidential race and its aftermath. After Trump's election, the gallery became a space to gather, process, and plan—serving as a hub for the Lancaster Women's March and LGBTQ+ gatherings in the following months and years.Adam Zolkover's and Patricia Sawin's contributions use narrative and rhetoric as frames to analyze the March. Zolkover's essay examines conspiracy narratives circulated by Trump supporters that March protestors received payment for their activism from liberal billionaire George Soros, a commonly invoked conservative boogeyman. Zolkover situates these narratives as the latest in a history of such stories, which cast those in power as victims, portray resisters as inauthentic, and frame resistance movements as sites of political puppeteering rather than collective social action. Zolkover counters these conspiracy narratives with the words of two sisters who participated in the Philadelphia Women's March, showing the genuine feeling, action, and risk shared by two protestors.Sawin's final chapter examines rhetoric on protest signs at the Raleigh, North Carolina, Women's March. Attuned to the intergenerational nature of the protest, Sawin analyzes trends in the stances adopted by generational cohorts (children, maidens, mothers, and crones) and notes that the multivocal nature of the March allowed it to address multiple audiences. As both a rejection of Trump and a joyful assertion of values, the March was a space where an intentional act of collectivity seemed to temporarily diminish the generational differences among feminists that might be felt in other arenas.Pussy Hats, Politics, and Public Protest's most valuable contribution lies in its thoughtful documentation of this tumultuous time and place in the recent past. Although the essays provide a variety of lenses through which to interpret the March, I found myself missing a grounded voice of dissent or ambivalence in the mix. Many of the authors reference critiques of the March made by fellow activists, but the volume lacks an author writing directly from that perspective.For me, the book's weakest moments occur when unity of action becomes synonymous with unity of feeling. Conversely, the most important and richest moments occur when examining the March through the positionalities of the authors and interlocutors. As a project of documentation, these accounts will become even more important as the Women's March fades into historic memory, which will inevitably flatten our understanding of it. Perhaps what most excites me about this volume is the idea that future readers will pick it up and experience the complexity of fresh emotions and analysis that its authors share, which unfold alongside vivid primary source images.