Troubling Stories of the End of Occupy: Feminist Narratives of Trauma, Anti-Heroes and Ambiguous Moral Lessons at Occupy Glasgow

This paper offers a feminist take on the question of why the Occupy movement of 2011-12 ended and what it left behind. Published participant-commentator accounts indicate the emergence of a collective story which emphasises both the role of external repression in closing down camps, and the existence of a longer term legacy in terms of individual and community politicisation. Feminist interventions have troubled this account by pointing to serious internal instabilities and marginalisations within the Occupy camps, and thus to the limitations of their legacy in terms of who has been politicised and in what ways. In this paper, I expand on and complicate this feminist view by conducting a narrative analysis of the interview testimony of feminist participants in Occupy Glasgow. Investigating plotting and characterisation in the interview transcripts, and their underlying moral message, I show how interviewees characterise their experience of Occupy as tragic, even traumatic; how they attribute responsibility to co-campers and themselves; and how they take divergent lessons from their experience. In such ways, while this paper reinforces a feminist critique of Occupy, it stops short of a singular feminist story, emphasising instead the multiplicity of activist narratives and the elusiveness of their implications.