Suffragetto! Materializing Social, Corporeal, and Political Feminism through Game

• In Event: 106 - Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 18. Tactics and Repertoires

Abstract

The militant British Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) formed in 1903 in response to what members saw as the slow-moving pacifist tactics of other suffragette groups. Facing police violence they countered with attention-getting strategies including disruption, occupation, and hunger-strikes. The WSPU also created a thirty-woman bodyguard battalion to protect its members. Trained in jiu-jitsu, they promoted women’s physicality internationally creating the modern women's self-defense movement, as something "every woman should know."

The WSPU’s physical feminism reflected both their imagined and idealized relationship to the world. Seeing the body as a critical site where gender and power are inscribed, they aimed to transform normative conceptions of femininity as vulnerable through physical prowess. Corporeal techniques were thought to empower women and challenge the status quo. Grounded in this philosophy, the WSPU created the board game Suffragetto, which features encounters between the Suffragettes and police. Based upon archival research, I contextualize and theorize the game’s impetus and examine Suffragetto as emblematic of the WSPU’s focus on physicality. Suffragetto materializes the real and imagined through domestic game play drawing new audiences to the WSPU’s physical feminism, This game remains salient today as it offers feminist ideology in a hybrid fantasy-real world environment allowing players to experiment with alternative forms of political resistance in a pre-digital form.

Author

• Renee Marie Shelby, Georgia Institute of Technology