Feminist heritage walks: materialising the feminist past in Perth, Australia and Glasgow, UK

Abstract

Alison Bartlett has been researching the ways in which post 1970s feminism can be remembered as a material movement, investigating the role of objects, museums, archives, and sites of feminist events. Her most recent book on this topic is Things That Liberate: an Australian Feminist Wunderkammer, edited with Margaret Henderson. She is an Associate Professor in English and Literary Studies at The University of Western Australia, and has published widely on Australian feminist protest, Australian literature, maternal cultures and feminist pedagogy. Her forthcoming book is Flirting in the Era of #MeToo: Negotiating Intimacy, with Kyra Clarke and Rob Cover.This article proposes the idea of feminist heritage sites as a way of remembering feminist intellectual and activist legacies in situ. Sites of feminist activism offer global positioning with longitude and latitude, somewhere to drop a Google Maps pin, and also offer tangible locations of intangible heritage that arguably shape civic life and citizenship. The article canvasses literature from interrelated disciplinary areas to propose two case studies as sites of feminist memory: a feminist tour from 1980s Perth in Western Australia where the author lives, and the Glasgow women’s heritage walks in Scotland. The idea of walking proves to be significant as a way of moving through sites and producing knowledge, and is investigated as a feminist methodology and epistemology embodying a critical process of thinking through the recent feminist past.