(Re)producing feminine bodies: emergent spaces through contestation in the Women’s March on Washington

Abstract

The Women’s March on Washington was an event organized to protest the erosion of women’s rights, and created a space where women in the United States (and beyond) could publicly voice their concerns. Yet the organization and effects of events surrounding the March seemed to be invoking conventional understandings of what counts as femininity. We conceptualized this tension as a practice associated with Foucault’s ideas about the politics of purification. We look at the construction of pure bodies to the detriment of unpure ones in three contested sites of the March: the erasure of Indigenous women and women of colour within the Women’s March on Washington-Vancouver organizing group, the use of the PussyHat to symbolize unity of all women, and the reclamation of the nasty woman meme. From our critical reflection on these productive processes, we suggest that new spaces have emerged as an effect of these acts that possess the potential to produce alternative notions of femininity that can challenge conventional, hegemonic ones.

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