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- Title
War & Peace: A Case of Global Need, National Unity and Local Dissent? A Closer Look at Australia's Greenham Common.
- Authors
Kelham, Megg
- Abstract
Australian women's 1983 contribution to the autonomous international women's peace movement that emerged in the Cold War is remembered by nonlocals as a transformative feminist event, which created bonds of political and personal intimacy amongst diverse groups of Australian women. Local recollection, participant and non-participant alike, ranges from cautious praise for the protest organisation to scathing disbelief that anyone could be proud to be part of the 'mob rule' of those 'disgusting women', as the protesters are still called. How did these connections and disconnections come to be? This paper finds explanation in the camp's geographical location, which catapulted participants into that highly contested and still largely uncharted region, where the politics of race and gender, pan-Aboriginal political and culturally located Indigenous identities do and do not meet. Radical difference, at the heart of the protest's connections, also explains its dialogic discontinuities, which produced a polarity of conflicting regional assessments about the protest's political power. This disabled the creation of a functionally coherent racially gendered political theory able to deal with the real politic in Australia's centre, to the detriment of Australian political thought, alternative and mainstream alike.
- Subjects
AUSTRALIA; PEACE movements -- History; FEMINISM; 20TH century feminism; GREENHAM Common Women's Peace Camp; WOMEN political activists; AUSTRALIAN politics &; government; TWENTIETH century
- Publication
Lilith (08138990), 2013, Issue 19, p76
- ISSN
0813-8990
- Publication type
Article