Women’s Lives Matter: Deconstructing BLM’s toppling down actions from a feminist perspective

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Monuments and Statues to Women: Arrival of an Historical Reckoning of Memory and Commemoration", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

In Spring 2020 we witnessed radical acts of public engagement with cultural heritage: political activists from the Black Lives Matter-movement tumbled down monuments and statues of eminent men due to their racist colonial past. The actions were a bustle about the deep-rooted structural racism and its neglected divisive in cultural heritage. However, a feminist analysis might also notice that these statues are perfect representation of white and male normativity. Among critical heritage scholars, the Black Lives Matter performance raised many discussions on the appropriateness of toppling public monuments glorifying colonial pasts, but little, if none, of the arguments given angled the controversy from a feminist perspective. This is precisely the purpose of this paper: to argue that these statues do not anymore reflect today’s society ideals in relation to genders, and therefore they are also opened to become contested spaces for a hypothetical Women Lives Matters-movement.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023   •
• Monuments and Statues to Women: Arrival of an Historical Reckoning of Memory and Commemoration

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow