Introduction

Since the 1970s, US feminist movements have diversified into new institutional contexts and have taken on a variety of goals (Staggenborg and Taylor, 2005). As feminist movements have become more diffuse, their goals, strategies and personnel have influenced other social movements, and other social movements have likewise spilled over into feminism (Meyer and Whittier, 1994; Hurwitz, 2019a). Feminists have utilised the protest camp tactic for decades to both advance feminist goals and contribute to a variety of other social justice objectives, from peace to civil rights and economic issues (McKnight, 1998; Wills, 2012; Nicolosi, 2013). Participation in protest camps exemplifies a contemporary feminism that is characterised by a wide variety of goals and tactics (Reger, 2012; Crossley, 2017). Yet because feminist and women activists have been active in so many different types of US movements and utilised such diverse tactics (Crossley and Hurwitz, 2013; Crossley, 2017; Hurwitz and Crossley, 2019), and because gendered and racial inequalities persist even within progressive spaces (Hurwitz, 2019b), women and feminists have often been marginalised within broader movements. In this chapter, we explore the invisibility of women and feminists of different genders, races/ethnicities, and sexualities in the US Occupy movement and reveal the feminist archiving practices that are required to recognise and analyse their substantial contributions.

In autumn 2011, activists in New York City and San Francisco, including some feminists, joined the global wave of pro-democracy protests by founding the Occupy movement. What began in New York City on 17 September 2011, with concurrent solidarity protests in San Francisco, spread over the course of weeks to more than 1,000 cities and towns across the United States and around the world. Activists used online social networks like Facebook and Twitter extensively to build the movement. They also circulated art, flyers and other movement documents at information tables in protest camps and handed out literature to passers-by to encourage them to join in the camps. The movement was both highly place-based – with participants camping overnight together and sharing everything in their daily lives, including food, medical support and entertainment – and based in the digital sphere, with participants amplifying the movement online and dialoguing across camps and across spaces on social media.