'Doing it for themselves': exploring the impact of masculinities on women's participation in social movements in 20 & 21st century Britain and France

The murder of Sarah Everard by a male police officer in the UK in March 2021 sparked outrage and appeals for better policing and tougher crime sentences for offenders. A new set of headlines and press statements called for 'ending' violence against women. But it is ineffective for politicians and the media to condemn gender inequality in its perpetrated state, or instigate knee-jerk punitive policies. Action to tackle male violence against women cannot hope to be successful or sustainable without an understanding of the roots of the forms of masculinity and gendered power structures which enable and promote such violence.
This research intends to address this omission by taking an interdisciplinary, socio-historical and ethnographic approach to interaction between masculinities and women's agency. I propose a comparative approach examining women's participation in social movements in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in two countries similar in history, geography, and political weight (France and Britain) and how masculinities in either country have influenced (blocking, enabling, dismissing) women's protest.
I intend to problematize conceptions of both 'masculinity' and 'femininity' as fluid in the way that they have been understood, constructed and appropriated both by social institutions and by the individuals concerned over the time period under study. I also intend to take an intersectional approach through case studies examining the navigation of multiple identities in addition to gender (i.e. race, religion, nationality) in protesters' aspirations for, and lived experience of, social change. In this way, we can: destabilize gender representations, particularly hegemonic masculinities, and explore how they influence women's individual and collective agency, both at the time of protest, and later, with hindsight; allow space to understand how certain gendered behaviours are perceived positively or negatively (i.e. Halberstam's 'masculine femininity') and by whom; and make room for gender at the interplay of intersectional identity.