Anne Enke

In Finding the Movement: Sexuality, Contested Space, and Feminist Activism, Anne Enke examines second wave feminism. Enke argues, “To understand the widespread and popular nature of the movement, we must also consider relevant activism and locations that did not always – at the time – earn the label ‘feminist’” (pg. 5). Enke primarily argues, “Between 1960 and 1980, women in the Twin Cities, Detroit, and Chicago constituted feminist activism by intervening in established public spaces and by creating new kinds of spaces” (pg. 5). She uses the techniques of the spatial turn to examine the place of lesbians in second wave feminism. To this end, Enke argues, “Feminism was not disconnected from other struggles over queer space, but grew in part from them” (pg. 27). In her examination, “the consolidation of identities” was “an effect of spatial practices” (pg. 9).
Examining access to space, Enke writes, “The desire for particular kinds of women-friendly, queer-friendly commercial space was an integral and constitutive component of feminist emergence” (pg. 100). She focuses a great deal on sport, writing, “Through the very effort to gain civic athletic space, women actually shaped the spatial contexts of softball; through that effort and in those spatial contexts, subcultures emerged and interacted” (pg. 148). From her examination of access to sporting facilities, Enke concludes, “Attention to historical and spatial contexts indicates that the performance and meanings of feminism, outness, queerness, and liberation were multiple, shifting, and at times contradictory; furthermore, feminist activism helped produce investments in particular constructions of race, class, and sexuality, even as it sought to challenge the social hierarchies embedded in civic space” (pg. 171).
Enke uses her spatial analysis to examine the creation of shelters. She writes, “Nothing so dramatically clarified the spatial dimensions of sexism and heteronormativity as women’s efforts to run shelters and sexual health clinics. The resistance women encountered while attempting to meet immediate needs revealed the multiple mechanisms and public institutions – from service agencies and medical facilities to real estate and banks – that constructed women as the property of father, husband, and the state” (pg. 180). In this way, “Spaces signified class, race, and sexual status together” (pg. 226). In order to complicate the historical narrative and demonstrate how this activism could be exclusive, Enke writes, “While white feminists and lesbians enacted and brought new visibility to white female sexual self-determination within certain women’s spaces, they maintained structures of cultural power that limited women of color’s ability to give presence and visibility to the sexualities of women of color in those same spaces” (pg. 236).
In her conclusion, Enke writes, “Feminism in fact was constituted through the historical connections between different sorts of spaces, and between people who eagerly identified as feminist, people who uncomfortably identified as feminist, and people who disavowed political identification altogether” (pg. 254). Finally, “The history of feminism, then, must seek to understand not only what was going on outside of feminist-identified arenas but, equally important, how feminists constructed and maintained borders around what counted as feminism in the story of the movement” (pg. 254).… (mehr)

This was a really, really fun read! It was an incredible telling of second-wave feminism and the way that space operated in making feminism manifest in people's day-to-day lives. The chapters on softball made me feel especially soft and wonderful, though Enke does an excellent job of making sure the reader knows none of those spaces are utopian or without trouble--they are really careful to trace the ways in which racism, classism, and homophobia played out in these spaces. I really think this book does some incredible things with considering the way that space plays out in feminism, and highlights the way that second-wave feminism played out actively in women's lives. The conclusion especially though was a great read. Enke really digs into the idea that women didn't (and don't!) know what constituted "woman" as a category and that creating woman-only spaces deliberately excludes some women (cis as well as trans.) It's a really good, fast read, and I strongly recommend it!… (mehr)