Women in Protest Photography, Allegories For Our Discontent
(Top photo - Olga Lozina being carried by police at the recent protest in Moscow, Russia; Bottom photo - Ieshia Evans being arrested at a 2016 Black Lives Matter protest in Baton Rouge, Lousiana, USA)
Photographs of women like Lozina and Evans go viral because they are an ancient allegory rendered living. Liberty and freedom have always been women. Since a statute of Libertas stood in the Roman Forum, we’ve understood that the abstract concept can only be made concrete by the body of a woman. Marianne and the Statute of Liberty might have been modeled on real women, but it’s their transformational power that endures (even Soviet kitsch at its finest couldn’t resist such an alluring allegory).
“Liberty” Warner writes, “prolongs the ancient associations of women with Otherness, outsiderdom, with carnality, instinct and passion, and against men endowed with reason, control, and spirituality who govern and order society.” But if such associations position men as masters of the state (also, particularly in America, represented as a woman), then the allegory of liberty also unravels that order, subverting those categories by placing “women in a different relation to these categories […] placing women in a different relation to civilization, to its content and happiness as well as its discontents.”
Lozina and Evans then are iconic because, in the photograph, they have ceased being individuals, subsumed instead by the longing for an allegory for the discontent or the disenfranchised. And yet the photographs are a pertinent reminder that while liberty might be a woman, women still have a tenuous grasp on the very value they have given form to for centuries.
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