On the streets and in the halls of power:

spatial metaphors and social movement studies

Mapping the Australian Women’s Movement

Kirsty McLaren (kirsty.mclaren@anu.edu.au)Australian National University

How have spatial metaphors shaped women’s movement events and tactics?

How do spatial metaphors shape our understandings of social movements?

• Literature on space and social movements• Contests over space• Using space to represent power and position• Spatial metaphors and scholarship

“With rare exceptions, the literature has treated space as an assumed and unproblematized background, not as a constituent aspect of contentious politics that must be conceptualized explicitly and probed systematically.” (Sewell 2001: 51-52)

Contentious politics:“episodic, public, collective interaction

among makers of claims and their objects when (a) at least one government is a claimant, an object of claims or a party to the claims and (b) the claims would, if realized, affect the interests of at least one of the claimants.

Roughly translated, the definition refers to collective political struggle.”

(McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly, 2001: 5)

Women dressed as men and men dressed as women moved into the public bar of the Petersham Inn to protest at the exclusion of women from drinking in public bars.

"The women posing as men were easy to pick-they had an artistic arrray of pencilled moustaches that would have left Salador Dali green with envy. The men ..were equally as conspicuous- they were the ones in min--dresses with hairy legs and chests”.

(SMH 21 Nov 1970)

Public space: the realm of dissent

Photos from The Tribune

Using space to symbolise power and exclusion

The Age 2 May 1973

(Salisbury)

“The women halted the senators progress by linking arms around them and humming. “It mightn’t sound like much, but it was very creepy,” said Senator [Jocelyn] Newman”

(SMH, 21 Oct 1986)

“Opposition MPs lining up to be personally affronted by this on national television”

(SMH, 22 Oct 1986).

Conclusion

• Space – the conventions of certain spaces, and the control of space – is itself contested.

• Space is a canvas and a medium through which positions can be represented.

• The imagined public sphere overlays public space, and is the setting for protest events.

• Spatial metaphors are powerful, and unavoidable, as we try to understand social movements.