Could the peace camp have survived a pandemic like the one we're experiencing now (March/April/May 2020)? Or, rather, could it have survived the measures taken against it, social distancing in particular? I started off by mulling over these questions and then stumbled on a postcard I really want but can't afford (online) and (in a printed book) an embarrassing scene set in a public library.
Postcard: When a grid (maybe) becomes a fence
CATHERINE OPIE, JUST SMILE WHILE YOU TRY TO BREATHE. GOUACHE AND COLLAGE ON PAPER, A6 (10X15CM), 2019. Art on a Postcard, Lot 37,
Rather than Covid-19, I assume that this postcard-sized work stems from the artist's preoccupation with global warming as seen in her latest exhibition of landscape photographs and animated collages Rhetorical Landscapes, Regen Projects, Los Angeles (Feb-June 2020). Considered in our current post-Covid context, Just Smile While You Try to Breathe vibrates with the possibility of other interpretations, including, for instance, a commentary on the naive and privileged middle-class insistence to flout the lockdown in favour of physical exercise and the enjoyment of the outdoors, to which some of us assume to be entitled. [The assumption of 'our' right to access the outdoors or 'nature' for fun and well-being is of course not disconnected from colonialism, nor from environmental destruction for profit.]
The hand-painted square grid in the background also appears in the animated collages included in the exhibition Rhetorical Landscapes, where, according to the gallery's press release, they 'reference modernism with their simplistic structural form'. To me, they also evoke extreme close ups of the pixel structure of digital screens and, of course, fences. Although not thematically tied to the art and visual activism at Greenham Common, Opie's work deploys the motif of the grid/fence in its simplest form, as something on which to pin things, which in the Greenham peace camp universe is elevated at times into a Pathosformel, namely an emotionally charged visual trope, and at others into a pictorial Denkraum, a grid-like space for contemplation (cf. Becker 2013). Were I to take further liberties and spot the uninvited Greenham woman in Opie's work, I'd bet on the figure in the hazmat suit. It is also relevant that postcards were a preferred format for the circulation of photographs of the peace camp and documentation of artworks in support of/about/made at the peace camp, as well as a means of expanding and sustaining the Greenham network beyond the camp.
On Speculation: Greenham 2020
I have long wondered whether and how the Greenham Common peace camp addressed trans issues and feel frustrated that I haven't been able to find any information on the subject (although I'm still working through the many hours of oral histories at IWM, the British Library, and the Greenham Women Everywhere project). I was relieved to read that although Greenham woman and scholar Sasha Roseneil is not aware of any specific cases of transwomen at the peace camp either, she has given the matter some thought. In Common Women: Uncommon Practices (Cassell, 2000), Roseneil writes:
"Imagining the arguments and how they would have developed at Greenham had the issue arisen has occupied many a spare hour for me in recent times. Ultimately, in the spirit of Greenham's strong streak of anarchism and believing that this would have been much more influential than radical feminist arguments, I think that a decision would have been reached that anyone who chose to call herself a woman should be treated as such" (p. 184, note 6).
In their article "Laboratories of gender: Women’s liberation and the transfeminist present" (2019), D-M Withers responds to blanket dismissals of the British Women's Liberation Movement as inherently trans-exclusive by pointing out that not only do we, in the present moment, owe the earliest theorisations of gender outside psychiatry to the WLM and specifically to Ann Oakley's early sociological scholarship, but also that so-called cultural feminisms of the 1970s and 1980s created radical spaces in which "nature" was boldly questioned and re-configured, "expanding what the female sex could ‘be’" (p. 5) in both theory and, crucially, in practice. Withers takes Greenham Common as an example of a women-only space that could be (and has been) co-opted into a revisionist (mis)understanding of the historical WLM as inherently and wholly trans-exclusive: on the contrary, Greenham Common has been repeatedly recognised by peace camp women and scholars alike as a site of gender and sexual experimentation with lasting sociopolitical and cultural legacies, while its very constitution as a woman-only space happened for largely practical as opposed to ideological reasons, and against "the specific kind of separatism promoted by revolutionary feminism" (p. 8, note 17).
It feels energising and not unjustified to think of Greenham as a historical instance of proven resilience through inclusivity. Despite assumptions of essentialism, radical feminism had not yet been co-opted by trans-exclusion. While gender identity may not have been explicitly critiqued in terms with which we are familiar today, operative understandings of what/who is a woman were far from straight-forward. For the most active 9 (1981-1990) out of its nineteen years (1981-2000), the peace camp coincided with the premiership of Britain's first of only two female prime ministers to date (1979-1990). Not only were Margaret Thatcher's politics entirely antithetical to feminism and disarmament, but her self-fashioning knowingly exploited deep-set military tropes and iconographies, as Marina Warner has eloquently illustrated in Monuments and Maidens. Clearly to be a woman was not enough, even while the women-only peace camp relied on 'being a woman' as shorthand for a particular ethico-political orientation and social positionality combined. As I have argued elsewhere, Greenham's implicit understanding of what it means to be a woman in a nuclear world was so radically de-essentialised that Ann Pettitt comes very close to casting Mikhail Gorbachev as an honorary (Greenham) woman, thanks to his earthy pragmatism, his emotional intelligence, and a willingness to de-escalate inter-personal tensions by putting a good face on things, as he is said to have done at the Reykjavík summit of October 1986. Rather than women’s peace movements making an impression on him, Pettitt suggests that confluence and affinity might better describe the relationship between Gorbachev and the Greenham women.
"A Decorated ‘Bender’", 1980s. Bender decorated with the spider web motif. Photograph by Astra Blaugh. Greenham: A Common Inheritance, http://www.greenham-common.org.uk/ixbin/hixclient.exe?a=query&p=greenham&f=generic_largerimage_postsearch.htm&_IXFIRST_=472&_IXMAXHITS_=1&m=quick_sform&tc1=i&partner=greenham&tc2=e&s=WHMskpfBiKO [Strange that the photograph is faintly watermarked in the bottom right corner with a logo that also resembles a web!]
Encouraged by Roseneil's speculation, I wonder: would a pandemic such as Covid-19 -- and its management by obeying the instruction to ‘stay home’ -- have meant the end of the peace camp had it happened in 1990 as opposed to 2020? I think not. Greenham successfully unsettled both the site and situation of ‘home’. One of Greenham Common’s most radical interventions, as Sasha Roseneil among others have persuasively argued, was to queer domesticity, first by liberating it from its heteronormative bonds but also going as far as questioning its familiar architectural repertories. Just as Greenham benders, super-mobile makeshift shelters that leave little trace behind, stood in semiotic, material, and political opposition to bunkers, the peace camp hauled living outside of living rooms and chosen intimacies out of structures of kinship. It exploded the boundaries of the ‘household’ to encompass all women gathered on the common, bound together by their determination to survive and to secure the survival of others.
A Sneezing Fit in the Library
The first chapter of the novel Mud by Nicky Edwards opens with a scene of social awkwardness and embarrassment. Jo, who is back from Greenham and researching a play about WW1 (and eventually developing an unlikely friendship with the 80-something year old widow of a veteran) is in the library leafing through a copy of 'a popular magazine' which must be John Bull. Jo thinks she much be 'allergic to Horatio Bottomley' (John Bull's editor, Financial Times founder, convicted fraudster, and MP), as she succumbs to the loudest sneezing fit, resonating through the high-ceilinged reading room. 'Everyone turns to stare, the air is thick with glares, tutting and the heavy frown of sprouting eyebrows' (p. 1).
It's hard to tell whether it was the dust from the hardbound back issues of John Bull or its jingoism that triggered Jo's sneezing fit, and the novel offers no further explanation. I am intrigued that a novel that reflects on the peace camp from the perspective of a lesbian feminist ex-camper opens with an instance of public embarrassment and, to a small degree, public shaming. Shame and shaming are revisited throughout the novel in reference to Greenham actions and opposition to the camp from the men at the airbase and others.
The disruptive force of Jo's sneezes is of course contextual: she broke the conventional silence of a public library, and there are sadly not many of those left in London, where the novel is set. A sneezing fit in a public place at this time would be cause for alarm and could provoke yet more alarming reactions.
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