‘My Dress Is Not a Yes’: Coalitions of Resistance in SlutWalk and the Fictions of Sarah Waters

Abstract

This chapter suggests parallels between the discursive tactics used by contemporary feminist protest movements, such as SlutWalk, and the representation of women’s experiences, relationships and bodies found in the historical fictions of Sarah Waters. There is little precedence for establishing a critical dialogue between contemporary fiction and contemporary political agitation. This chapter, however, proposes that Waters’s novels, like SlutWalk, function as a declamatory shout from the queer body while mimicking feminist discourse in calling attention to the restrictive patriarchal structures that repress and restrict non-normative gendered and sexual identities. Waters’s playful approaches to the historical novel are often categorised as ‘queer historical fiction’, ‘postmodernist texts’, or ‘postmodern historiographic metafiction’. Consequently, critical attention has focused on the queer acts and postmodern practices found therein. In this context, a feminist examination of Waters’s novels—in which gendered identities and sexual orientation are very much stable and uncontested—often takes a back seat. But there is considerable overlap between Waters’s fictions and the recent wave of feminist protest in the early twenty-first century. Critics invariably cite Waters’s doctoral credentials when considering her novels, almost never citing her activist tendencies. As a novelist she wears her politics lightly, but in interviews she is unequivocal about the fact that she writes “women’s stories”. Waters has walked over hot coals for the Fawcett Society and described her youthful excitement at participating in ‘the strength marches, and everything politicised’. Most recently she condemned a British government ban on sending books to prisoners.