It was while readjusting my swiftly numbing legs and arms that, covered in fake blood, and lying on my back looking up at the cold, grey sky, I considered the spectacular quality of the naked female body in protest. All this is spectacle. That day, I was surrounded by other women; we were all wearing skin-coloured underwear and participating in an anti-fur protest in Trafalgar Square. It was late June in 2017, and it was raining hard, which could have been considered exceptional for the season. Although the protest was supposed to last for four hours, we called it a day after two. Fifteen ‘underwear’ participants had diminished to seven, which eventually became three. And yet, despite the rain, despite the disappearing size of the protest, I lost count of the number of photographs that were taken of us that day; the press, members of the non-human animal rights movements, members of the public.… We must have featured in the holiday snaps of many, many tourists. Despite the rain, I counted groups of 40 or 50 people around our protest space for the whole time (except for a lull to about 20 people, when a break-dancing group started their act next to us, although eventually they, too, ceded to the rain, leaving just us under the forbidding sky).

In this chapter, I examine this presentation of the female body in protests where the body is the canvas on which the protest is conveyed. I consider these protests as a disruption in the way in which public space is striated, and what this means for social and spatial justice against a background of contemporary rape culture. I examine how far these protests might be recuperated into a guerrilla war machine and towards a transformative politics. Drawing on debates within the non-human animal rights movement, the phenomenon of sexualised protest, analyses of human/non-human relationships and the spatialisation of these politics, I consider how these disruptions intersect with rape culture.

Corporeal, embodied protest is a striking thing. As we saw in the last chapter, in the context of pregnancy, the body ‘represents humanity in its rawest form’ (Eileraas, 2014: 41).