Feminist Protest and Cultural Production at the Pine Gap Women's Peace Camp, Australia, 1983

Abstract

This article reflects on the creative cultural production so politically integral to second-wave feminist protest and seeks to position it in the field of material culture. The commitment of the women's movement to transforming social conditions, and their representation, meant creating new cultures: of literature, sexuality, work, parliament and protest. The author uses examples of cultural production from a particular protest—the Pine Gap women's peace camp held in Australia in 1983—as emblematic of such cultural creativity through its politics, performativity and aesthetics. Reflecting on how such apparently ephemeral, spontaneous and site-specific productions might be remembered and represented, part of the politics of this article is to mobilize feminist methods that mimic the performative aspect of the protest and, at the same time, invest significance in such cultural production by theorizing it as material culture.

Keywords:

• feminist activism
• protest culture
• women's peace camps
• material culture
• aesthetics