ABSTRACT

This volume analyses and historicises the memory of 1968 (understood as a marker of an emerging will for social change around the turn of that decade, rather than as a particular calendar year), focusing on cultural memory of the powerful signifier '68' and women’s experience of revolutionary agency.

After an opening interrogation of the historical and contemporary significance of "1968" – why does it still matter? how and why is it remembered in the contexts of gender and geopolitics? and what implications does it have for broader feminist understandings of women and revolutionary agency? – the contributors explore women’s historical involvement in "1968" in different parts of the world and the different ways in which women’s experience as victims and perpetrators of violence are remembered and understood.

This work will be of great interest to students and scholars of protest and violence in the fields of history, politics and international relations, sociology, cultural studies, and women’s studies.

chapter |15 pages

Introduction

1968 – the year that rocked whose world? 1

part I|50 pages

Gender and cultural memory

chapter 1|14 pages

Remembering 1968

Feminist perspectives

chapter 2|17 pages

Despite or in debt to 1968?

Second-wave feminism and the gendered history of Italy’s 1968

chapter 3|17 pages

Transnational memories and gender

Northern Ireland’s 1968

part II|48 pages

Violence and/as counterviolence

chapter 4|15 pages

On liberated women in an un-liberated society

Ula Stöckl’s The Cat Has Nine Lives (1968)

chapter 6|17 pages

Murder is a (lesbian) feminist issue

The Ihns/Andersen case and its impact on the New Women’s Movement

part III|71 pages

Women as violent actors

chapter 7|18 pages

Coherence in contradiction

The spectacle of the female terrorist

chapter 9|17 pages

‘The mood was an explosion of freedom’

The 1968 movement and the participation of women fighters during the Lebanese civil war *

chapter 10|18 pages

Women of Jihad