Introduction

From a feminist perspective, one of the most striking aspects of the protest camp as a political form is how it combines protest acts with the creation of activist living space. In this chapter, I shine a light on this distinctive dimension of camps. I am responding primarily to the magisterial overview of protest camps published in 2013 by Anna Feigenbaum, Fabian Frenzel and Patrick McCurdy. Feigenbaum and her colleagues broke new ground in their theorisation of camps as a social movement tactic, in part by underscoring how protest camps are ‘at once protest spaces and homeplaces’ (2013: 42, emphasis added), an evocative concept they take from Black feminist bell hooks (2001). Concerned more particularly with the work of African American women ‘to construct domestic households as spaces of care and nurturance in the face of the brutal harsh reality of racist oppression, of sexist domination’ (hooks, 2001: 384), hooks’s original reflection underlines how homeplace has enabled healing and renewal among Black communities while simultaneously fostering resistance to hegemonic norms. Feigenbaum et al use this as an analogy for how protest camps too can be nurturing communities of resistance, in which activists together engage in radical ‘acts of social reproduction’ in ways that subvert neoliberal capitalism (2013, 12: emphasis in original).

I find Feigenbaum et al’s approach to be highly suggestive but frustratingly incomplete, because it largely sidesteps a rich and diverse feminist literature on social reproduction and ultimately underplays the implications of hooks’s claims. In the first part of this chapter, I explore Feigenbaum et al’s analysis in more depth, before bringing Marxist and Black/anti-racist feminist literature on social reproduction to centre stage. This literature informs the case study I develop in the second part of the chapter of two protest camps in my locality, Occupy Glasgow and Faslane Peace Camp, in which I draw out the differing strategies for social reproduction in the camps and their impacts. I conclude by returning to hooks’s argument about homeplace and its implications for the theorisation of protest camps.