Women in Revolt


Naked in the gymnasium: women as agents of social change 
 

Maja Mikula 

Institute for International Studies, University of Technology Sydney 

 

 

 
… [T]he most ridiculous thing of all will be the sight of women naked in the palaestra, exercising 
with the men, especially when they are no longer young […] 
Yes, indeed, he said: according to present notions, the proposal would be thought ridiculous. 
(Plato in Agonito 1977, p. 26, italics added) 

 

Women have throughout history participated in and sometimes initiated rebellions to 

defend the welfare of their family, community, class and race or ethnic group. These 

rebellions – with all their political, social and cultural complexity – are sometimes (rather 

patronisingly) called ‘popular feminism’ or ‘unconscious feminism.’1 We realise how 

problematic this appellation could be, since women – in Britain in particular, but 

elsewhere as well – have in the not-so-distant past organised precisely against radical 

feminism, to defend family values and other more conservative standards of social 

conduct. The perceived paradox reveals how differences and their related ‘interests’ are 

shaped in a contest over the symbols of public culture, often intersecting the divide based 

on gender, class, political and denominational persuasion, ethnicity or race.  

 

It appears that generations of women in a wide range of political and social movements, 

individual women resisting social injustice and at least three waves of conscious 

feminism(s) have not yet succeeded in defeating the popular stigma surrounding female 

activism. Women moving in the public arena still evoke the same negative images they 

have conjured for centuries, reflected in such derogatory appellations as ‘viragos,’ 

‘witches,’ ‘femmes-hommes,’ or ‘hyenas in petty-coats’. 

 

                                                           
1 Both terms are indeed quite unacceptable, but they clearly demonstrate the inertia of language in staying 
abreast of social change. 

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It could be said that the best way to undermine women’s ‘revolutionary’ potential is to 

ask ‘what do you mean by women?’ or, ‘what do you mean by revolution?’ That is not 

my intention. However, qualifying my principal terms of reference seems imperative 

from the outset, since both notions have been at the centre of particularly animated 

polemics at least since the early years of ‘Women’s Revolution’ in the early 1960s and 

the collapse of the Iron Curtain in the late 1980s respectively.  

 

‘As if Women Existed’: Different Approaches to Subjectivity 
[…] the case against saying ‘we’ seems overwhelming: politically as a piece of imperialist 
presumption, and epistemologically as a fiction that equates autonomy with universality. 
(Scheman 1993, p. 190) 

  

Invoking ‘women’ in the title of this paper is a hazardous enterprise, which may attract 

accusations of essentialism, normativity and exclusivity. Ever since the publication of De 

Bouvoir’s The Second Sex (1949), gender has been regarded as a social, rather than 

biological category. Subsequent debates problematised its ‘universal’ and ‘essential’ 

nature. Positing gender as a ‘multiple interpretation of sex’ inevitably challenged the 

existence of unified categories of ‘women’ and ‘men’. 

 

On the one hand, essentialist discourse has been widely criticised by non-white and non-

western feminists on the account of its blindness to the multiplicity of racial, ethnic, 

cultural, social and political intersections in which concrete groups of women are 

constructed (see for example Spelman 1988; Elshtain 1995). On the other, it has been 

challenged by poststructuralist, deconstructionist and postmodernist theorists, who 

generally reject the existence of pregiven, stable and unified subjects. Most notably, anti-

essentialist approach has been advocated consistently by the American cultural theorist 

Judith Butler (1990, 1992).  

 

Assumptions of the existence of a coherent identity of ‘women’ based on either biology 

or ‘universal’ social conditioning have been characteristic of feminist discourse since the 

1960s. Motivated by a desire to constitute ‘woman’ as a subject on an equal footing with 

the Aristotelian rational ‘man’, feminists of the 1960s and 1970s were engaging in a kind 

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of ‘transpraxis’, using the models and strategies at their disposal, which had been at the 

core of the ‘oppressive’ relationship they were rebelling against. Even nowadays, many 

theorists adhere to a view that a certain degree of essentialism is a necessary precondition 

for feminist political action.  

 

The question is, do we need an unproblematic unity of ‘women’ in order to be politically 

engaged, that is, is political action really dependent on solidarity of identity? A 

characteristic lament from the advocates of conventional pragmatics is: ‘Why is it that 

just at the moment when so many of us who have been silenced begin to demand the right 

to name ourselves, to act as subjects rather than objects of history, that just then the 

concept of subjecthood becomes problematic? Just when we are forming our own 

theories about the world, uncertainty emerges about whether the world can be theorized’ 

(Hartsock 1990, p. 164). Others believe that this kind of ‘strategic essentialism’ simply 

won’t do, since ‘strategies always have meanings that exceed the purposes for which they 

are intended’ (Butler 1990, p. 5). Despite her opposition – in principle – to ‘strategic 

essentialism’, Butler concedes that temporary unities ‘might emerge in the context of 

concrete actions that have purposes other than the articulation of identity,’ permitting of 

‘multiple convergences and divergences, without obedience to a normative telos of 

definitional closure’ (1990, p. 16). According to this view, ‘certain forms of 

acknowledged fragmentation might [actually] facilitate coalitional action, precisely 

because the ‘unity’ of the category of women is neither presupposed nor desired’ (1990). 

 

Anti-essentialist argument has spilled over from theory to feminist practice. It has been 

recognised that the rejection of universality entails an acknowledgment of the contingent 

and specific nature of political claims for women and men alike. Anti-essentialist 

political strategies are seen as resting on ‘analyses of the utility of certain arguments in 

certain discursive contexts, without, however, invoking absolute qualities for women or 

men’ (Scott 1988). On a practical level, new strategies for women’s activism have been 

developed. By far the most popular is ‘transversalist politics’, which draws on strategies 

employed by Italian feminists from Women’s Resource Centre in Bologna. 

‘Transversalist politics’ (Yuval-Davis 1997) involves a process of ‘rooting’ and 

Portal Vol. 1, No. 1 (2004) 3



‘shifting,’ in which activists remain rooted in their own identities and values, while at the 

same time being ready to shift views in dialogue with those of other identities and values. 

Political dialogue fashioned in this manner is expected to avoid uncritical solidarity and 

the homogenisation of the ‘Other’. The knowledge acquired through this practice is 

always ‘unfinished’, but its fluidity is seen as beneficial, because of its capability to take 

into account differences and ruptures, which would otherwise remain hidden under the 

surface. 

 

Recent feminist studies tend to resist the temptation of producing a ‘grand narrative’ of 

the ‘universal woman’. Individual ‘fragments’ speak for themselves. This refusal to treat 

women as a ‘universal subject’ is not considered a defection from politics, but on the 

contrary, a political act in itself (Butler 1992, p. 4), aimed at opening up spaces for 

political interests that have hitherto been marginalised. 

 

‘As if Revolution was Possible’: Women and the End of History 
Just when we are talking about the changes we want, ideas of progress and the possibility of 
systematically and rationally organizing human society become dubious and suspect. 
(Hartsock 1990, p. 164) 

 

If the previous section reads as an apology to feminist essentialists, we also owe one to 

the advocates of posthistoire, whose influence in the last fifty years cannot be 

overlooked. Posthistorians leave little room for revolt and we are more or less expected to 

resign to a status quo. This version of the ‘end of history’ looks both more plausible and 

more desirable from a position of power. From women’s vantage point, it is hard to 

accept that history might be coming to an end. History had been man’s domain for 

centuries and women began gaining access to it only in the last three or four decades. Not 

surprisingly, modern-day ‘eschatologists’ are mostly men. The few women who have 

tackled speculations on the end of history, have done so only to dismiss them as either 

irrelevant or missing the point. Jean Bethke Elshtain, for example, has seen them as 

short-lived delusions proving that ‘history does not bend to our wishes or to our theories, 

at least not in the ways we fondly hope or optimistically project’ (1995, p. 196). Julia 

Kristeva has reasserted the necessity of nurturing a ‘culture of revolt’, by invoking the 

Portal Vol. 1, No. 1 (2004) 4



correlation – central to psychoanalysis – between pleasure and revolt: ‘… happiness 

exists only at the price of a revolt. None of us has pleasure without confronting an 

obstacle, prohibition, authority, or law that allows us to realize ourselves as autonomous 

and free. The revolt revealed to accompany the private experience of happiness is an 

integral part of the pleasure principle’ (2000, p. 7). 

 

One’s acceptance or rejection of the possibility of history coming to an end depends 

mainly on the interpretation of ‘progress’ one subscribes to. The Enlightenment promise 

of an orderly advance from poverty and ignorance to prosperity and modernity has been 

exposed as part and parcel of colonialist discourse. Contrary to the common perception, 

postmodernist interpretations at the other end of the spectrum do not categorically deny 

the possibility of progress as such, but they refuse to see it in the context of a prophetic, 

supposedly universal ‘grand narrative’.  

 

If it is true that the time of great rebellious projects, bold prophecies and dichotomies 

charged with value judgment is behind us, what implications does that have on women 

and their social agency? Three ‘grand narratives’ of the twentieth century – socialism, 

fascism and communism – have all failed and the perceived anomie makes contemporary 

posthistorians feel uneasy. The fourth competing narrative, that of liberalism, is rather 

uncritically glorified by posthistorians. Macro-narratives in the epic tradition as well as in 

history have notoriously been at the core of the patriarchal rhetoric: the symbolic ‘slaying 

of the virago’ in classical literature has been brought to our attention by a number of 

scholars (see, for example, Tomalin 1982); religious fundamentalisms have endeavoured 

to make woman practically invisible; fascism has cast her as procreator and ‘guardian of 

the hearth’; while communism has bequeathed her with the legacy of the ‘double burden’.  

 

Narrative tends to order reality. Narrative form has been described as consisting of 

repeated binary oppositions, through which meaning is universally produced. 

Consequently, disintegration of a narrative always entails a collapse of the underlying 

grid of dichotomies. Francis Fukuyama published his much-debated essay ‘The End of 

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History?’ in the National Interest in 1989, the year of the collapse of the Berlin Wall.2 

Although it is impossible to refer the end of the Cold War to any single event, 1989 

symbolically marks the ‘implosion’, or ‘self-deconstruction’ of the greatest twentieth-

century political dichotomy of communist totalitarianism vs. western liberal democracy.  

 

Deconstruction of binary oppositions has been one of the vital strategies of feminist 

theory. In particular, feminists have consciously engaged in undermining what was seen 

as the two staple elements of patriarchal discourse, namely the male/female and the 

public/private dichotomies. It has been argued that the male/female opposition reflects an 

essentially masculine conception of the ‘autonomous self’, while the female element of 

the opposition merely functions as a ‘prop’ for its construction (di Stefano 1996, p. 96). 

Arguments in favour of autonomy have mainly been motivated by pragmatic reasons, in 

campaigns for women’s legal and political rights. Others have maintained that 

autonomous self-determination is not gender-biased and as such does not necessarily 

require that women fit into male-defined norms (see Grosz 1987, p. 193).  

 

The dichotomy of ‘public’ versus ‘private’ domains has arguably been the most 

instrumental in the exclusion of women from political rights and other rights commonly 

associated with citizenship. In liberalism, a clear division of these two realms – 

interpreted respectively as ‘the state’ vs. ‘civil society’; ‘the social’ vs. ‘the personal’; 

and the ‘public’ vs. the ‘domestic’ – has been considered a much needed guarantor of 

individual freedom.3 According to Carole Pateman, the strong separation between public 

and private spheres in liberalism meant that domestic power relations were seen as a 

matter of personal ‘choice’, not to be incorporated in the scope of democracy. The issue 

for women then was to apply democratic ideals ‘in the kitchen, the nursery and the 

bedroom’ (1988, p. 216). Pateman’s arguments focus on the origins of liberal democracy 

in a social contract, which, according to Pateman, went hand in hand with a sexual 

contract of women’s subjugation through marital rights.  

 

                                                           
2 The thesis offered in the essay was later dealt with in book format in The End of History and the Last Man 
(1992). 
3 For a discussion of the dichotomy within liberalism, see Will Kymlicka (1990). 

Portal Vol. 1, No. 1 (2004) 6



Pateman’s influential book on The Sexual Contract has been challenged by later 

feminists, who questioned the relevance of the origins in social (and by extension, sexual) 

contract for present-day liberalism (see Brown 1995, p. 137). More generally, feminists 

have emphasised the ways in which women’s chances of becoming political equals are in 

fact influenced and often determined by power relations within the household and work 

force. It has been recognised that the ‘boundary between the public and the private is a 

political act in itself’ and that ‘political power relations with their own dynamics exist in 

each social sphere’ (Yuval-Davis 1997, p. 80). The nature and makeup of what is 

considered ‘public’ and ‘private’ varies from one study to another, from one set of power 

relations under scrutiny to another. 

 

Feminist theorists such as Butler and Scott (Butler 1990; Butler 1992; Scott 1992, p. 22-

40) have preferred to disassociate themselves from the grand narratives of social progress 

and refused to substitute them with alternative, supposedly more ‘women-friendly’ 

narratives. Rejecting the today widely discredited rhetoric, they have asserted that our 

world is really full of micro-narrative possibilities opening up in countless directions. 

History continues, because numerous potential as well as actual conflicts around the 

globe warn us against both complacency and defeatism. But history itself has to shake off 

its prophetic aspirations and loaded rhetoric. In the case of Marxism, Richard Rorty has 

suggested to abandon the idea of progress through ‘the anticapitalist struggle’ in favour 

of ‘the struggle against avoidable human misery;’ to start talking about ‘greed and 

selfishness’ rather than about ‘bourgeois ideology,’ about ‘starvation wages’ and 

‘layoffs’ rather than about the ‘commodification of labor,’ and about ‘differential per-

pupil expenditure on schools’ and ‘differential access to health care’ rather than about the 

‘division of society into classes’ (Rorty 1995, p. 212). In a similar vein, feminist studies 

of women as agents of social change can be interpreted as unique anecdotes, which may 

help us observe how different women in different contexts have struggled against what 

they viewed as avoidable human affliction.  

 

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Women and Revolution 
 
… [T]he woman holds the promise of liberation. It is the woman who, in Delacroix’ painting, holding the 
flag of the revolution, leads the people on the barricades. She wears no uniform; her breasts are bare, and 
her beautiful face shows no trace of violence. But she has a rifle in her hand – for the end of violence is still 
to be fought for. 
(Marcuse 1972) 
 

Women are often seen as the guardians of tradition, rather than as the symbols of social 

change. This is especially true in revolutions inspired by a drive for national liberation 

and independence (see Yuval-Davis 1997, pp. 60-61). However, it has also been noticed 

that women’s political participation peaks in periods of turbulent social change (see 

Kaufman 1997, p. 165). This statement – which is, incidentally, also true for the majority 

of men – may sound like a truism within societies based on patriarchal power and 

dominated by masculine culture. In that context, revolution always seems to bring 

promise of inclusion for the excluded and the oppressed. Significantly, women have also 

been prominent in symbolic representations of the ‘World-Turned-Upside-Down’ during 

carnivals of sixteenth-century Europe (see Davis 1975, pp. 124-151), and young women 

appeared as ‘living icons’ in official representations of revolutionary France (see Hunt 

1992, p. 82). And indeed, Delacroix’ Liberty Guiding the People – a young woman 

holding the revolutionary flag – has become an almost universal image of revolution. 

Women’s revolutionary potential has been asserted in most major world revolutions and 

subversive movements, from France to Russia, from China to Latin America, from Iran to 

India. This potential has been recognised by theorists like Marcuse (1972) and Habermas 

(1989).  

 

Insights into women’s revolutionary potential have been offered by disciplines such as 

anthropology and psychoanalysis. Anthropology’s concept of liminality, devised and 

elaborated by Arnold van Gennep, in his The Rites of Passage (1960) and Victor Turner 

in The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (1969), seems to be particularly 

useful. Both studies deal with transitional stages and the accompanying rituals in 

primitive societies. According to Turner, ‘limen’4 is a ‘no-man’s land betwixt-and-

between […] a fructile chaos, a fertile nothingness, a storehouse of possibilities […] a 

                                                           
4 Lat. limen signifies ‘threshold’ or ‘margin’. 

Portal Vol. 1, No. 1 (2004) 8



striving after new forms and structures. Political liminal groups ‘frighten’ a stable 

commune but are invaluable in crisis.5 Liminality is open, fluid and diverse. Also, there is 

a certain correspondence between the ‘weakness’ of liminality in transitional periods and 

the structural inferiority of certain groups or categories in established social systems. 

Turner has outlined the difference between the attributes of liminality and those of the 

status system in terms of a series of binary oppositions, such as ‘transition/state’, 

‘communitas/structure’, ‘equality/inequality’, ‘absence of status/status’, ‘nakedness or 

uniform clothing/ distinctions of clothing’, ‘minimisation of sex 

distinctions/maximisation of sex distinctions, ‘suspension of kinship rights and 

obligations/kinship rights and obligations’ etc. Within this framework, woman becomes a 

liminal entity by definition. However, rites of passage – like world-turned-upside-down 

carnivals – upset the system only to define and confirm it. Indeed, women in 

revolutionary movements have often felt ‘betrayed’ once the revolutionary disorder has 

petrified into a new system (see Diamond 1998; Galili 1998).  

 

In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the creative impetus for change lies in the unconscious, the 

magma, the outside – and by implication, precisely in the female. Luce Irigaray has 

maintained that rationality in the Western tradition has always been conceptualised as 

male (see Irigaray1985). It is based on the principles of identity, non-contradiction and 

binarism. These principles arise from a belief in the possibility of individuating stable 

forms. For the female imaginary – according to Irigaray – there is no such possibility. 

Irigaray describes women as a ‘sort of magma […] from which men, humanity, draw 

nourishment, shelter, the resources to live or survive for free’ (1993, p. 102). 

Consequently, women are said to resemble the unconscious (Irigaray 1985, p. 73), a 

sphere in which the laws of identity and non-contradiction do not apply.  

 

‘Naked in the Gymnasium’ 

I would like to conclude this essay with a reflection on the opening quotation from 

Plato’s Republic. In this controversial treatise, Socrates maintains that women should be 

educated equally with men and included among the Guardians, the ruling class of his 

                                                           
5 For a perceptive treatment of women as a liminal group see Trexler (1980, p. 16). 

Portal Vol. 1, No. 1 (2004) 9



ideal city. Susan Moller Okin has convincingly argued that this revolutionary vision goes 

hand in hand with Plato’s erasure of the private sphere and individual property from the 

lives of the Guardians (1991, p. 21). Elsewhere, the preservation of property necessitates 

monogamy and private households, and thus brings women back to their role of ‘private 

wives’ with all that this involves. In the light of this interpretation, women are drawn into 

a prophetic (and utopian) ‘grand narrative’, but they can also easily be betrayed by it. 

 

The ‘grand narrative’ out of the way, we can play with its fragments. I propose that we 

consider the image of naked women and men in the gymnasium. We can then establish 

that gymnasium symbolically represents society and that nakedness (or ‘absence of 

clothes’) stands for difference freed of social constraints. Along with Plato’s Glaucon, we 

can conclude: according to present notions, the proposal – in addition to being thought 

‘ridiculous’ – is not necessarily a desirable objective for either women or men. Clothes 

may be a conditio sine qua non, but through numerous revolts, women and men may 

achieve more freedom in choosing their attire for different occasions. 

 

 

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	Naked in the gymnasium: women as agents of social change
	Maja Mikula
	Institute for International Studies, University of Technology Sydney
	Women and Revolution