Copyright: Ed van Rijswijk Fotografie
Clara Vlessing
Research project
On Andrea Dworkin and Gisèle Halimi: The Cultural Remembrance of the Women’s Liberation Movement’s Legal Activism
Project summary
Amidst heated discussion around questions of consent and harassment, intersectionality, gender-identity, sex work, colonialism and the politics of right-wing feminism, figures from the women’s liberation movement (c. 1963-1982) hold a prominent place in contemporary society. Remembering these figures is often a means for political position-taking in the present.
This project compares the cultural remembrance of two feminists associated with that movement: American activist Andrea Dworkin (1946-2005) and French lawyer Gisèle Halimi (1927-2020). It points to the wildly different trajectories the afterlives of women’s liberation-era feminists can take.
The project draws from existing studies of cultural memory and feminist activism (Crozier De-Rosa & Mackie, 2019; Chidgey 2019; Crozier De-Rosa & Calvini-Lefebvre 2023) to investigate the changing ways in which these two figures have been depicted over time. It analyses their representation across life writing, archival material, documentary film, cultural productions and through conversations with contemporary feminists to question how the cultural afterlives of feminists are incorporated into powerful national and political narratives.
What are the social, cultural and ideological conditions under which these two figures’ afterlives have developed in different directions? And what, more broadly, does the remembrance of figures from this era of feminist protest teach us about struggles against intersecting forms of oppression today?
Different lives and afterlives
Dworkin and Halimi can be compared in their use of legal reform to pursue feminist ends. Both dedicated their lives to feminist campaigning with consistent attention to questions of violence against women, insisting that this was a structural rather than a moral or domestic issue. Both also made efforts to enact feminist change through the development and use of criminal law.
However, the afterlives of these two feminists are highly divergent. For contemporary feminists, Dworkin is seen as either a figure of inspiration or a cautionary tale, prompting declarations of strong support and rejection from those on both the left and right of the political spectrum. Her “incandescent rage” acts “as a source of illumination” (Szalai, 2019) for many twenty-first century campaigners with divergent beliefs and aims, yet she remains a highly contentious figure. Her efforts, along with feminist lawyer Catherine MacKinnon (1946-), to change laws surrounding pornography in the United States remain one of the most controversial aspects of her afterlives.
Halimi committed her life to feminist advocacy, persistently highlighting – as Dworkin did – the extent to which violence against women stemmed from wider societal structures. Halimi acted in high profile court cases regarding Algerian independence, rape and abortion. Increasingly lionised as a ‘heroine’ of French national progress, Halimi has been celebrated and commemorated in public monuments and ceremonies, with Macron recently thanking her for making the Republic “plus libre”. There appears to be a consensus on her importance and political contribution in a national and, to a lesser extent, international, context.
Aims and outcomes
Through a comparative study of the cultural afterlives of these figures, my project raises broader questions about the legacy of the women’s liberation movement across different national contexts. It considers the ways in which feminist pasts are absorbed into mainstream and less mainstream narratives, taking into account the opportunities and limitations of formal, legal-based forms of feminist action. It also looks at the relationship between public and more institutional forms of memory-making in the afterlives of feminist figures, including statues and public memorials, and those forms that are less public or top-down, such as social media hashtags, articles and academic conferences.
The remembrance of these figures is used to support political claim-making in the present and is never neutral. Nevertheless, apparently common-sense claims that these women ‘should’ or ‘should not’ be remembered often obscure the politics behind their recollection. Against the backdrop of a backlash against feminist progress, the rise of the manosphere, revocations of abortion rights and state-sponsored transmisogyny, my project examines the relationship between representations of the past and – partially-realised or potentially problematic – visions for a non-discriminatory future.
Biography
Clara Vlessing is an interdisciplinary scholar trained in literary and cultural analysis. She researches the relationship between memory and social movements with particular attention to the role of gender. Clara is a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Dublin (2026-2028) and an FWO Marie Curie Seal of Excellence Postdoctoral Fellow at Ghent University (2025-2029). She is an editor-in-chief of DiGeSt – Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies and was previously a chair of the Memory Studies Association’s working group on Memory and Activism.
Clara’s research has been published in the peer-reviewed journals Memory Studies (2026, with Charley Boerman), Social History/Histoire Sociale (2023) and Nineteenth Century Gender Studies (2021); as well as in several edited volumes (The Visual Memory of Protest, AUP 2023; Dynamics, Mediation, Mobilization, de Gruyter 2025, with Duygu Erbil; Palgrave Encyclopedia of Cultural Heritage and Conflict, Palgrave 2025; Remembering Contentious Lives, Palgrave 2025). With Vasiliki Belia and Kristina Gedgaudaitė she has co-edited the special collection “Comics, Memory, Activism” (Memory, Mind & Media, CUP 2026) and with Duygu Erbil and Ann Rigney the volume Remembering Contentious Lives (Palgrave 2025). In 2026 her first monograph Remembering Revolutionary Women: The Cultural Afterlives of Louise Michel, Emma Goldman and Sylvia Pankhurst was published by De Gruyter.
