Seeing (in)security, gender and silencing: posters in and about the British women’s suffrage movement

Feminist Security Studies focuses on expanding the referent object to individuals and non-state collectives, looking beyond the military sector to include questions of identity, and uncovering (in)security in unexpected places. An important part of this debate concerns silence, particularly how certain individuals are silenced and how this might be challenged through images. This article looks at the ways images can be used to make gender-specific security problems visible. It holds that text, images and practices interact to construct (in)security and outlines a tripartite text-image-practice model for analyzing these interactions. Through a case study of the British women’s suffrage movement it illustrates the potential of the text-image-practice model. The suffrage movement leveraged visuals, militancy and practices like hunger-striking to resist attempted silencing by the government across textual, verbal and visual planes. Using this case, it shows how posters were used to try to silence Suffragettes and how Suffragettes resisted silencing. Thus, it demonstrates that images are important sites of feminist resistance and security politics that can communicate a politics of the body. The article also offers an illustration of how historical cases of gender insecurity and resistance as well as their visualization can be brought into Feminist Security Studies.