Reclaiming space: enacting citizenship through embodied protest during the British suffragette movement

Abstract

The British suffragettes are remembered for their dramatic and visually striking protests, such as their act of chaining themselves to public railings. However, this paper argues that the suffragettes’ protests were embodied acts of citizenship that disrupted the existing political order and laid claim to full participation in the Edwardian polis. Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s work, this paper argues that Edwardian women used their embodied protests to lay claim to political space and stage a scene of ‘dissensus’ and rewrite the political common sense and gendered norms of political participation at the time. Extrapolating on Judith Butler’s performative theory of assembly and Rancière’s performative theory of rights, this paper frames the suffragettes’ protests as attempts to lay claim to political rights and citizen status through the enactment of these rights. In order to contest their gendered exclusion from the political realm, the suffragettes forcibly inserted themselves into masculinised political space through political techniques like heckling politicians, public speaking, and petitioning the king. Nonetheless, while the suffragettes actively laid claim to their own political rights, they also attempted to act for others, specifically other women who they saw as downtrodden, vulnerable, and oppressed. Although the suffragettes’ attempts to act for other women demonstrated a degree of gender-based solidarity, it also illuminated the complicated class politics of the movement, and the tensions inherent in laying claim to rights on behalf of others.