“We kind of created our own scene”: a geography of the Brixton Rebel Dykes

Abstract

The ‘Rebel Dykes’ scene broadly refers to a network of punk anarchist feminists who first came together in the 1980s and were primarily based in squats in the south London neighbourhood of Brixton. As literature on lesbian urban geographies has demonstrated, lesbian identities, histories and communities are brought into being, negotiated and resisted in complex, shifting and specific spatial and temporal ways. Considering ‘lesbian’ and ‘dyke’ together while holding them in tension, this article contributes to this literature. Drawing on interviews with Rebel Dykes and their associates, this article assembles a geography of the Rebel Dykes by attending to spatial, material and infrastructural processes through which the Rebel Dykes—as a scene, a collective, a project—came to be. Formulations of dyke, lesbian and feminist, this article argues, make place and space and are themselves made in and through place and space; it is thus imperative to consider them in relation to and as contingent on the broader, specific histories, relations and spatialities in which they unfold. Further, in exploring anarchist feminist spatialities in 1980s London, this article engages with locations, histories, dynamics and political lineages under-explored in academic literature on British feminism and on squatting in England.