ABSTRACT

This volume presents and interrogates both theoretical and artistic expressions of the revolutionary, militant spirit associated with "1968" and the aftermath, in the specific context of gender.

The contributors explore political-philosophical discussions of the legitimacy of violence, the gender of aggression and peaceability, and the contradictions of counter violence; but also women’s artistic and creative interventions, which have rarely been considered. Together the chapters provide and provoke a wide-ranging rethink of how we read not only "1968" but more generally the relationship between gender, political violence, art and emancipation.

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 |12 pages

Introduction

When (and how) is violence emancipatory?

part I|48 pages

On the (gendered) political legitimacy of violence

chapter 1|15 pages

On the legitimacy of violence as a political act

Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag, Ulrike Meinhof, and Bernadine Dohrn

chapter 3|15 pages

‘But what about our fury?’

Political violence as feminist practice

part II|50 pages

Creative resistance

chapter 4|13 pages

1968, take two

The militancy of Nina Simone

chapter 5|19 pages

Women, words, and images, 1968

Textual/sexual politics in Helke Sander’s The Subjective Factor

part III|47 pages

The contradictions and limits of emancipatory violence

chapter 7|16 pages

Aggression and peaceability

Masculine drives and feminist visions in the writings of Alexander Mitscherlich and Margarete Mitscherlich-Nielsen

chapter 8|13 pages

Serious harm to bodies

Contradictions of anti-masculinist violence in the 1970s

chapter 9|16 pages

Anti, anti, anti!

Counterviolence and anti-sexism in Hamburg’s autonomous Rote Flora culture centre