Seeing (in)security, gender and silencing: posters in and about the British women’s suffrage movement

ABSTRACT

Feminist Security Studies focuses on expanding the referent object to individuals and non-state collectives, looking beyond the military sector to include questions of identity, and uncovering (in)security in unexpected places. An important part of this debate concerns silence, particularly how certain individuals are silenced and how this might be challenged through images. This article looks at the ways images can be used to make gender-specific security problems visible. It holds that text, images and practices interact to construct (in)security and outlines a tripartite text-image-practice model for analyzing these interactions. Through a case study of the British women’s suffrage movement it illustrates the potential of the text-image-practice model. The suffrage movement leveraged visuals, militancy and practices like hunger-striking to resist attempted silencing by the government across textual, verbal and visual planes. Using this case, it shows how posters were used to try to silence Suffragettes and how Suffragettes resisted silencing. Thus, it demonstrates that images are important sites of feminist resistance and security politics that can communicate a politics of the body. The article also offers an illustration of how historical cases of gender insecurity and resistance as well as their visualization can be brought into Feminist Security Studies.

KEYWORDS:

• Feminism
• critical security studies
• silencing
• Suffragettes
• visual politics

Acknowledgements

I owe many people many thanks. Faye Donnelly and Karin Fierke encouraged and gave feedback on this project in its earliest stages; without them this would be but an idea. The ‘Imagers’—Rebecca Adler-Nissen, Megan MacKenzie, Michael C. Williams, Iver B. Neumann, Constance Duncombe and Simone Molin Friis— from the Images and International Security project in Copenhagen gave incredibly useful comments on various versions of this paper. Fanny Hye-Knudsen provided fabulous proof-reading. The IFJP editors and two anonymous reviewers were enthusiastic and gave very thoughtful suggestions. I am grateful to you all. My utmost thanks go to my inspiring mentor Lene Hansen who has given incredible advice, support, and detailed feedback on numerous versions of this paper. Finally, it would be remiss of me not to thank my grandmother, Helen, for helping me find feminism early in life—even when I didn’t yet know it.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dean Cooper-Cunningham is a Ph.D. Fellow at the University of Copenhagen working at the intersections of visual politics, feminist and queer theories, and security studies. His current research focuses on the ways that sexual orientation- and gender- specific (in)securities are constituted by images. It examines the articulation of (in)security by queer individuals and groups, as well as the ways that queer individuals have been constructed as dangers to society and politics by government and societal actors in Russia and the United States of America.

ORCID

Dean Cooper-Cunningham http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6043-2911

Additional information

Funding

Research for this article was carried out as part of two projects funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark: “Images and International Security” [Grant number DFF – 1327-00056B] and “Bodies as Battleground: Gender, Images and International Security” [Grant number DFF – 7015-00093B].