Paper short abstract:

Against the backdrop of austerity in the UK, the Focus E15 campaigners rejected the label ‘single mothers’, reclaiming new family forms and refusing inequality. I analyse their activism through Judith Butler’s work ‘Gender Trouble’ and her advocacy for a reclamation of life unbounded by labels.

Paper long abstract:

UK government cuts have entrenched inequality deliberately, in part as a backlash against women living outside the boundaries of normative heterosexuality. A group of ‘single mothers’ collectively received eviction notices from their hostel in 2013, they successfully organised to fight these evictions and demand their right to be housed in their home borough, Newham. The group succeeded in resisting the forced move out of borough and now fight for others experiencing this deliberate erasure. I interpret Judith Butler’s work ’Gender Trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity.’ (Butler [1990] 2006) and apply it to the activism of ‘Focus E15’, the campaign group that emerged from this event. This presentation will explore how this group re-appropriated the power stolen by invisibilising labels, demanding housing as their right. Motherhood and the home are not just the site of oppressions, sometimes they are the site of rebellion, unruly anger that spills over into a political fight against oppressions. Butler writes that gender is constructed as a method of maintaining normative heterosexuality; repeated performances of the societal norms that are ascribed to a given gender further entrench these expectations (Butler [1990] 2006). Fear of unintelligibility, and the material impact it could have on lives, perpetuates the performance of normative heterosexuality. I read Butler’s work as a political manifesto for the rejection of labels, through an unruliness that manifests in a refusal of the boundaries imposed by labels, and re-appropriation of the power purloined by their use.