THAT’S WHY WE CAME HERE

Abstract

This paper argues for a feminist genealogy of anti-nuclear protest art, around the nucleus of the women’s camp at Greenham Common, 1981–87, a coherent account of whose significance is missing from both feminist film history and left protest history. Drawing on Adrienne Rich’s poetics as a thread connecting the larger anti-nuclear and non-violent/anti-military feminist movement specifically to aesthetic and political formations that informed films made at and about Greenham, the paper constellates a number of experimental works in relation to the well-known observational documentary Carry Greenham Home (Beeban Kidron and Amanda Richardson, 1983). Their legacy, and the concept of a Greenham genealogy, is apparent in Sally Potter’s anti-nuclear Cuban Missile Crisis-set drama Ginger & Rosa (2012), whose imbrication of poetry, politics, and experimental film techniques argues for a Greenham poetics. In particular, this paper considers a feminist poetics of attending to the nuclear, re-visioning the atomic, molecular and core as both an ecopoetics and a refusal of heteropatriarchal structures, both necessary to a viable alternative political formation. In their granular detailing of both world and work, these feminist texts offer a rich and continuous history, practice and analysis of anti-nuclear protest art that demands the same attention as they enact.

Keywords:

• Greenham Common
• feminist film
• non-violence
• protest art
• Adrienne Rich

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Sophie Mayer http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0647-8000

Notes

With thanks to Selina Robertson, Sarah Wood, and Alex Thiele, my co-curators in Club des Femmes, and our intern Jenny Clarke, for the research collaboration on our 2016 screening programme Bringing Greenham Home, which not only brought many of these ideas to the fore but also enabled me to see these films on the big screen. Thanks also to our speakers across the two screenings: Greenham women Jo Blackman, Christine Clarke, Anna Reading, and Sasha Roseneil, whose stories, theories, and activism have informed this paper. I am particularly grateful to Sally Potter for our interview about Ginger & Rosa.