Protesting like a Girl: Embodiment, Dissent and Feminist Agency

Wendy Parkins’ 2000 article “Protesting like a Girl: Embodiment, Dissent and Feminist Agency” offers a compelling analysis of how the body functions as a site and instrument of feminist political resistance. Published in Feminist Theory, this article bridges phenomenological philosophy and historical analysis to demonstrate that embodiment is not merely a theoretical concern but a practical resource for feminist activism. Through careful examination of the British suffragette movement, particularly the remarkable career of Mary Leigh, Parkins shows how women used their bodies strategically to challenge the boundaries of citizenship and transform the nature of political protest.

Embodiment and Feminist Theory

Parkins begins by situating her argument within feminist debates about embodiment. By the late 1990s, the body had become a central concern in feminist theory, yet discussions often remained at an abstract or theoretical level. Parkins aims to bring embodiment down to earth, examining how actual women in historical contexts used their corporeal existence as a political resource.

Merleau-Ponty’s Body Subject

Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s “Phenomenology of Perception,” Parkins adopts his concept of the “body subject”—the idea that we are not minds inhabiting bodies but rather embodied subjects whose corporeal existence is fundamental to how we experience and engage with the world. For Merleau-Ponty, the body is not an object we possess but the very medium through which we encounter reality and act within it.

This phenomenological approach offers several advantages for feminist analysis. First, it takes the body seriously as a site of experience and agency rather than treating it as mere biological matter or social construction. Second, it recognizes that our bodily capacities and limitations shape what actions are possible for us. Third, it acknowledges that we learn to inhabit our bodies in particular ways through social and historical processes.

Bodies in Context

Crucially, Parkins insists that while Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology provides valuable insights, it must be supplemented with attention to the specific social, historical, and discursive contexts that shape embodied experience. Bodies are not universal; they are always gendered, raced, classed, and situated within particular power relations. What it means to have a woman’s body in Victorian England differs profoundly from what it means in contemporary contexts.

This contextual approach allows Parkins to avoid both biological essentialism (the idea that women’s bodies determine their nature) and social constructionism that loses sight of material corporeality. Bodies are real and consequential, but they are always bodies-in-context, shaped by and shaping the social worlds they inhabit.

The Suffragette Movement as Embodied Politics

Parkins turns to the British suffragette movement (roughly 1903-1914) as a rich historical case study of embodied feminist agency. The suffragettes, militant activists demanding votes for women, developed increasingly dramatic and daring protest tactics that placed their bodies at the center of political contestation.

The Political Exclusion of Women’s Bodies

To understand the suffragettes’ embodied protests, we must recognize the specific ways women’s bodies were positioned in relation to politics and citizenship in Edwardian Britain. The political domain was understood as a masculine sphere requiring rationality, self-control, and physical courage—qualities supposedly natural to men but lacking in women. Women’s bodies were associated with emotion, vulnerability, physical weakness, and reproductive functions that disqualified them from political participation.

This was not merely ideological; it was enacted through spatial arrangements. Political meetings, parliamentary debates, and public assemblies were physically organized to exclude or marginalize women. When women did enter these spaces, their bodily presence was treated as inappropriate, disruptive, or scandalous.

Corporeal Performance as Political Strategy

The suffragettes responded by deliberately using their bodies to disrupt these arrangements and challenge assumptions about women’s corporeal capacities. Their tactics included:

• Heckling and interrupting: Women stood up in political meetings and shouted questions, forcing their voices to be heard in spaces designed to exclude them.

• Chain protests: Suffragettes chained themselves to railings, making their bodies obstacles that had to be physically removed, forcing authorities to handle women’s bodies in public.

• Window breaking: Acts of property destruction demonstrated physical strength and willingness to engage in aggressive action.

• Hunger strikes: In prison, suffragettes refused food, using their bodies’ vulnerability as a weapon that embarrassed authorities.

• Resisting forced feeding: When authorities tried to break hunger strikes through brutal forced feeding, suffragettes’ resistance exposed the violence of the state.

Each of these tactics was a form of what Parkins calls “corporeal performance”—strategic use of the body to make political claims and contest existing power relations.

Mary Leigh: A Case Study in Embodied Agency

Parkins focuses particularly on Mary Leigh (1885-1978), a working-class suffragette whose militant career exemplifies embodied feminist agency. Leigh was involved in some of the movement’s most dramatic actions and endured significant physical suffering for the cause.

Early Militancy

Mary Leigh joined the suffragette movement in 1906 and quickly became one of its most fearless activists. Her early actions included disrupting political meetings and participating in deputations to Parliament. These activities drew on conventional feminine respectability while also violating norms about women’s proper behavior in public spaces.

The Axe Incident

In 1909, Leigh and another suffragette, Charlotte Marsh, carried out one of the movement’s most audacious actions. They broke into a hall where Prime Minister H.H. Asquith was speaking and used an axe to damage the platform and sound system. This act was remarkable for several reasons:

Physical Audacity: Wielding an axe, a tool associated with masculine labor and violence, Leigh challenged assumptions about women’s physical capabilities and willingness to use force.

Spatial Transgression: Breaking into a meeting hall and occupying space on the platform demonstrated that no political space could be secured against women’s presence.

Symbolic Power: The axe attack became an iconic image of suffragette militancy, showing women as active agents rather than passive victims.

Imprisonment and Forced Feeding

Leigh was repeatedly imprisoned for her activism and participated in hunger strikes. Her resistance to forced feeding was particularly significant. The practice involved restraining a prisoner and inserting a tube through the mouth or nose to pump food into the stomach—a violent, degrading, and dangerous procedure.

Leigh’s accounts of forced feeding reveal the complex dynamics of embodied resistance. While her body was physically overpowered, her refusal to cooperate—struggling, making the procedure as difficult as possible—asserted agency even in conditions of extreme physical constraint. Moreover, her testimony about the experience transformed her suffering into political evidence, exposing the brutality of a state that claimed to be protecting helpless women.

Rooftop Protests

Perhaps Leigh’s most spectacular corporeal performances were her rooftop protests. In 1912, she climbed onto the roof of a building where government officials were meeting, removed tiles, and shouted slogans while dropping leaflets onto the crowd below. Later that year, she set fire to the Theatre Royal in Dublin as a protest timed with Prime Minister Asquith’s visit.

These actions demonstrated extraordinary physical courage, skill, and determination. Climbing roofs, handling fire, working at heights—these were all activities considered beyond women’s capabilities. By performing them, Leigh didn’t just make political claims; she enacted a different model of what women’s bodies could do.

Theoretical Implications

Parkins’ analysis of Mary Leigh and the suffragettes offers several important theoretical insights about embodiment and feminist agency:

Agency Through Constraint

One of the most powerful aspects of Parkins’ argument is her analysis of how agency can emerge from and through bodily constraint. The suffragettes didn’t transcend their embodiment to become pure political actors; rather, they used the very constraints placed on women’s bodies as resources for resistance.

When women were told their bodies were too weak for politics, suffragettes demonstrated physical courage. When women’s bodily vulnerability was cited as needing protection, suffragettes weaponized that vulnerability through hunger strikes. When women’s bodies were violently controlled through forced feeding, that violence itself became evidence of state injustice.

This suggests that feminist agency doesn’t require escaping embodiment but rather finding creative ways to deploy corporeal existence against the systems that constrain it.

Corporeal Knowledge

Parkins emphasizes that the suffragettes developed what we might call corporeal knowledge—practical understanding gained through bodily experience. Learning to speak publicly, to resist physical force, to endure imprisonment, to climb buildings—all of this involved acquiring bodily skills and capacities.

This corporeal knowledge was both individual and collective. Suffragettes learned from each other’s experiences, developed shared tactics, and created a culture of embodied resistance. This collective dimension is crucial; individual acts of bodily courage become politically powerful when they’re part of a shared movement.

The Politics of Visibility

Much of the suffragettes’ strategy involved making women’s bodies visible in new ways and places. They forced their bodies into political spaces, onto rooftops, into newspapers and public consciousness. This visibility was double-edged—it exposed suffragettes to ridicule, violence, and objectification. But it also disrupted the invisibility of women’s political exclusion and created new possibilities for women’s public presence.

Parkins notes that this politics of visibility must be carefully theorized. Making bodies visible is not inherently empowering; it depends on the context and how that visibility is framed and interpreted. The suffragettes worked hard to control the meaning of their embodied protests, though they couldn’t always determine how they were represented.

Embodiment and Citizenship

Perhaps most fundamentally, Parkins argues that the suffragettes’ corporeal performances challenged the very definition of citizenship and the political domain. By demonstrating that women’s bodies could perform feats of courage, endurance, and strength, they undermined claims that women’s physical nature disqualified them from citizenship.

But the challenge went deeper. The suffragettes didn’t just argue that women’s bodies were capable of the same political actions as men’s; they introduced new forms of embodied protest that expanded what counted as political action. Hunger strikes, for instance, transformed bodily vulnerability into political power in unprecedented ways.

This suggests that citizenship and politics are not fixed categories into which bodies must fit, but rather contested domains that can be reimagined through embodied practice.

Feminist Agency Reconsidered

Parkins’ analysis offers a nuanced account of feminist agency that avoids both liberal voluntarism (the idea that individuals are free agents) and determinism (the idea that structures completely constrain action).

Situated Agency

Agency, in Parkins’ account, is always situated—shaped by specific bodily, social, and historical contexts. Mary Leigh’s agency was made possible by her particular embodiment, her class position, the specific political conjuncture of Edwardian Britain, and the collective movement of which she was part. We cannot understand her actions by reference to abstract notions of free will or individual choice.

Yet within these constraints, genuine agency was possible. Leigh made choices, took risks, and acted in ways that challenged existing power relations. Her agency was real, even if it wasn’t unlimited or unconditioned.

Collective and Individual

Parkins also emphasizes the interplay between individual and collective agency. While she focuses on Mary Leigh as an individual case study, she makes clear that Leigh’s actions only made sense within the collective context of the suffragette movement. Individual acts of embodied protest derived their meaning and efficacy from being part of a shared political project.

This has important implications for thinking about feminist activism. It suggests that individual courage and collective organization are not alternatives but mutually constitutive. Movements need individuals willing to take risks, and individuals need movements to give their actions political meaning and support.

Transformation Through Practice

Finally, Parkins suggests that feminist agency involves transformation through embodied practice. The suffragettes didn’t simply apply pre-existing capacities to political ends; they developed new bodily skills, habits, and ways of inhabiting their bodies through the practice of activism. In learning to protest, to resist, to endure, they became different kinds of embodied subjects.

This processual understanding of agency is important. It suggests that feminist politics isn’t just about using bodies we already have but about transforming how we inhabit and deploy our embodiment.

Contemporary Relevance

Although Parkins writes about events from a century ago, her analysis resonates with contemporary feminist activism:

Body Politics Today

Contemporary feminism continues to grapple with questions of embodiment. From SlutWalk protests reclaiming women’s bodily autonomy, to Black Lives Matter highlighting the vulnerability of racialized bodies, to disability activism demanding recognition of diverse embodiments, many current movements place bodies at the center of political struggle.

Parkins’ framework helps us understand these movements not as merely symbolic but as genuinely embodied politics where corporeal performance makes political claims and contests power relations.

Digital Embodiment

The rise of digital activism raises new questions about embodiment and agency. When protest happens online, what role does the body play? Parkins’ emphasis on the situated, contextual nature of embodiment suggests that digital contexts create new forms of embodied agency rather than transcending the body. Even online, we are embodied subjects—typing, clicking, viewing—and our physical locations, bodily needs, and corporeal vulnerabilities shape our digital activism.

Intersectional Embodiment

Contemporary feminism’s emphasis on intersectionality requires attending to how different bodies are differently positioned in relation to power. Parkins’ historical focus on British suffragettes, mostly white and middle-class, reminds us that embodied agency looks different depending on race, class, disability, and other factors.

A fuller account would need to explore how racialized, disabled, queer, and trans bodies experience and deploy embodiment in feminist politics. The framework Parkins develops—attention to corporeal performance in specific contexts—provides tools for such analysis even as her specific case study has limitations.

Trauma and Vulnerability

Parkins’ discussion of forced feeding and bodily suffering raises difficult questions about trauma, vulnerability, and the costs of embodied resistance. Contemporary feminism increasingly recognizes that not all bodies can or should be expected to endure violence for political ends. The ethics of embodied activism require careful consideration of whose bodies are put at risk and how movements can sustain activism without requiring members to sacrifice their bodily wellbeing.

Critiques and Limitations

While Parkins’ article makes important contributions, it also has limitations:

Historical Specificity

Parkins’ focus on the suffragettes is illuminating but specific to a particular time, place, and movement. The strategies that worked for Edwardian British suffragettes may not translate to other contexts. More comparative analysis across different movements and historical moments would strengthen claims about embodied agency.

Race and Class

While Parkins acknowledges Mary Leigh’s working-class background, the article could do more to analyze how class shaped her embodied agency. Moreover, the suffragette movement was predominantly white, and Parkins doesn’t substantially address how race would complicate her arguments.

Masculinization Concerns

Some critics might worry that Parkins celebrates suffragettes for performing traditionally masculine activities (wielding axes, climbing buildings, physical courage). Does this reinscribe masculine norms as the standard for political agency? Parkins might respond that the suffragettes weren’t simply mimicking masculinity but transforming what counted as political action, but this tension deserves more explicit attention.

Violence and Ethics

The suffragettes’ tactics included property destruction and actions that risked harm to others (like setting fires). Parkins focuses on the courage these acts required but says less about the ethics of militant tactics. When and how is embodied protest that involves violence justified?

Conclusion: Bodies That Matter

Parkins’ “Protesting like a Girl” makes a crucial contribution to understanding feminist agency by insisting that bodies matter—not just as theoretical concepts or sites of discourse, but as lived, material, consequential dimensions of political struggle. The suffragettes’ corporeal performances didn’t just represent or symbolize political claims; they enacted them, transforming what women’s bodies could do and what the political domain could contain.

The article’s lasting value lies in its demonstration that embodiment is a practical resource for feminist activism, not merely a theoretical concern. By examining how actual women in specific historical circumstances used their bodies strategically to challenge power relations, Parkins provides a model for analyzing embodied agency that is both theoretically sophisticated and grounded in material practice.

Mary Leigh climbing onto a roof, wielding an axe, resisting forced feeding—these are not just interesting historical anecdotes. They are examples of feminist agency emerging from and through embodiment, of political transformation enacted corporeally. In “protesting like a girl,” Leigh and her fellow suffragettes showed that women’s bodies could be instruments of resistance, sites of courage, and agents of political change. That lesson remains vital for feminism today.