The Sartorial Symbolism of Dissent, From Petticoat Tyranny to Pussyhat Protest

• In Event: Corporeal Dissent: The Flesh, Clothing & Tattoos

Abstract

The pussyhat is the headwear-of-choice for thousands of women who participated in the Women’s March on Washington and in other sister marches around the country on January 21, 2017. The brainchild of activists Krista Suh and Jayna Zweiman, The Pussyhat Project developed patterns for knitting or crocheting the hats and a strategy for distributing them to participants in the Women’s March. With two points sticking out from either side of the wearer’s head, Suh and Zweiman explain, the pussyhat puns on both the pussycat and the slang for women’s genitalia that President Donald Trump used in an infamous recording, where he bragged about his ability to “grab” women without their consent. The pussyhat therefore represents demonstrators’ efforts to reclaim a term used abusively. Moreover, I note the historical connection between the pink pussyhat and the red liberty cap, or Phrygian cap, worn by patriots of the American revolution. Looking at literary representations of the liberty cap, the mission statement of The Pussyhat Project, and theories of the national symbolic, this paper explores the evolution of a discourse of citizenship, cultural belonging, and political legitimacy in moments of revolution or resistance, especially as that discourse is associated with curious, colorful headwear.

This paper attempts to locate the pussyhat, and the movement it symbolizes, in the evolving national symbolic. Lauren Berlant theorizes that the national symbolic generates a fantasy of integration and inclusion through which the individual is linked to and identifies with the nation. Historically, that identification associates belonging with citizenship, the full, willing participation in the national life. In the revolutionary period, that citizenship is symbolized by the liberty cap. In Washington Irving’s story “Rip Van Winkle,” the appearance of the liberty cap atop a pole in the center of the town signals the triumph of democracy over tyranny. But the story questions the viability of democratic citizenship by linking it to the “despotism” of “petticoat government.” Contemporary demonstrators reject the misogyny at the heart of this view of democracy. Informed by theories of intersectionality, they demand women’s full inclusion in the cultural body, unimpeded by violent and political efforts to silence, marginalize, and delegitimate their participation. Significantly, the organizers of The Pussyhat Project emphasize the significance of the hats’ being handmade, a quality that links them, their makers, and their wearers to a tradition of women’s labor and society. They evoke a past in which women are excluded from the civil public sphere—an exclusion that the movement seeks still to overcome. Like the liberty caps, the pussyhats symbolize their wearers’ connections to a transhistorical American community of exclusion and resistance, and out of this thread they knit their case for citizenship.

Author

• Bonnie C O'Neill, Mississippi State University