“We kind of created our own scene”: a geography of the Brixton Rebel Dykes

Milo Miller

City, 2023, vol. 27, issue 3-4, 433-447

Abstract: The ‘Rebel Dykes’ scene broadly refers to a network of punk anarchist feminists who first came together in the 1980s and were primarily based in squats in the south London neighbourhood of Brixton. As literature on lesbian urban geographies has demonstrated, lesbian identities, histories and communities are brought into being, negotiated and resisted in complex, shifting and specific spatial and temporal ways. Considering ‘lesbian’ and ‘dyke’ together while holding them in tension, this article contributes to this literature. Drawing on interviews with Rebel Dykes and their associates, this article assembles a geography of the Rebel Dykes by attending to spatial, material and infrastructural processes through which the Rebel Dykes—as a scene, a collective, a project—came to be. Formulations of dyke, lesbian and feminist, this article argues, make place and space and are themselves made in and through place and space; it is thus imperative to consider them in relation to and as contingent on the broader, specific histories, relations and spatialities in which they unfold. Further, in exploring anarchist feminist spatialities in 1980s London, this article engages with locations, histories, dynamics and political lineages under-explored in academic literature on British feminism and on squatting in England.

Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13604813.2023.2223856 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:cityxx:v:27:y:2023:i:3-4:p:433-447

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/CCIT20

DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2023.2223856

Access Statistics for this article

City is currently edited by Bob Catterall

More articles in City from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().