Strategic Narratives and Essentialising Visualisations: A Decade of the Affective, Embodied Activism of FEMEN

Abstract

Activist organisations worldwide have long struggled with attaining recognition. Feminist activists, in particular, struggle with attaining recognition without essentialisation. Female activists, especially those arguing for women’s rights and equality amidst other civil and human rights arguments, are often grouped together and essentialized, allowing women’s voices to build strategic coalition narratives but simultaneously defining and limiting their identities as “feminine” (Arfaoui & Moghadam, 2016; Moghadam, 2014a, 2014b; Newsom, 2004). Significantly, this type of activist strategic essentialism is often coopted within larger nationalist and international strategic narratives as a type of commodification of soft power. A recent example of this is the promotion of women’s “new” rights to drive in Saudi Arabia by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as a means of gaining international, particularly US support for his “moderninsation” efforts, while simultaneously still remaining one of the most oppressive regimes for women (Newsom, 2018) and while still arresting many of the leaders of the women’s right to drive movement within that nation (El Sirgany & Clarke, 2018; Yaakoubi, 2018). Feminist activists are therefore challenged to create narratives of femininity and resistance