Demonstrating Peace Countertopographically: Women in Black’s Solidarity at a Distance

Abstract

Demonstrating Peace Countertopographically:Women in Black’s Solidarity at a Distance Elizabeth Currans (bio) Just before 5:30 p.m. on a sunny Wednesday afternoon, five women gathered outside the central Manhattan Public Library where Forty-First Street meets Fifth Avenue. All wore black, some head to toe, some with bare shoulders and arms. They formed a silent line facing rush hour pedestrian and automobile traffic holding a large black banner reading, “Women in Black Against War.” At one edge of the small group a woman handed fliers to passersby. The first lines of the handout asserted, “Women in Black New York stand in silent vigil to protest war, rape as a tool of war, ethnic cleansing and human rights abuses all over the world. We are silent because mere words cannot express the tragedy that wars and hatred bring. We refuse to add to the cacophony of empty statements that are spoken with the best intentions yet may be erased or go unheard under the sound of a passing ambulance or a bomb exploding nearby.” Over the course of an hour a few more women joined the group. At one point the group numbered eight—all participants over thirty, most over fifty, and all white save for one Black woman appearing to be in her fifties. Most onlookers were also silent. Some took fliers. Others nodded in agreement. Many kept walking, some giving the silent women a quick glimpse. One younger woman en route to somewhere else spontaneously stopped and stood for a few minutes. Passengers on commuter buses observed the vigil from the comfort of air-conditioned seats. A few people verbally asserted their support. Still fewer made disparaging comments. This small group transformed a tiny section of concrete in Manhattan’s vast urban landscape into a site for quiet contemplation in the midst of [End Page 103] late afternoon busyness. Their attire marked them as separate from locals in business suits and fashionable black, and tourists in summer tank tops and shorts. Together, their silence, immobility, and monotonic black outfits, along with the seriousness of their demeanor, lent a ritualistic tone to their presence. Despite the surrounding bustle, they stood, rupturing the ordinary chaos around them and demonstrating solidarity with people far away. From a wealthy city in a prosperous and militarily aggressive nation, they silently used their gazes and bodies to evoke faraway events and refuse complicity with war-making. By reworking the silence expected of them as women in a male-dominated society, they sought to transform socially prescribed passivity into an active refusal to support or engage in violence. I approach this Women in Black (hereafter WiB) vigil, and another I discuss below, from a feminist perspective that emphasizes the transgressive potential of public disidentification, in José Esteban Muñoz’s sense of the term, with patriarchal expectations of women. For Muñoz, disidentification inhabits something differently, in ways that maximize the potential for reworking toxic ideals, such as those that see politics as masculine and women as passive supporters of war-making (Muñoz 1999). WiB’s strategic deployment of silence demonstrates their astute analysis of gendered spatial conventions and their awareness of the limits of loud, often angry chanting to demonstrate a political position. Given the gravity of the situations they vigil to remember and contest, these public enactments are necessarily limited; nonetheless their limitations do not obliterate their possibility for intervention. On the contrary, their public performance of their solidaristic feelings demonstrates the shared humanity of participants and those suffering and dying during war and occupation. Using theoretical approaches to solidarity from Sandra Lee Bartky, Jodi Dean, Carol Gould, and Chandra Mohanty, this essay explores how WiB groups in the United States and United Kingdom express, in Barkty’s terms, their “feeling-with” others, especially other women, experiencing war and occupation. In exploring one type of feeling-with, Bartky explains that “emotional infection as a builder of solidarity is promiscuous; its utility rests precisely in its capacity to unite feeling persons from a very wide spectrum of social locations” (2002, 76). While her focus is on mass gatherings, including demonstrations, emotional infection can stem from a variety of sources, including watching...