Troubling Stories of the End of Occupy: Feminist Narratives of Tragedy, Villainy and Ambiguity 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. Specifically, the paper seeks to foreground and interrogate activist understandings of the end of Occupy, focusing particularly on the views of feminists involved. While some accounts emphasise the role of external repression in closing down camps along with the existence of a longer term legacy in terms of individual and community politicisation, this story is troubled by feminist interventions that point to serious internal instabilities and marginalisations within the Occupy camps, and thus to a more mixed legacy. In the paper, I expand on and complicate this feminist view by conducting a narrative analysis of the interview testimony of feminist participants in one particular camp – Occupy Glasgow. Investigating context, plotting, characterisation, point of view and story-telling style in the interview transcripts, I show how some of my interviewees characterise the fate of the camp as a tragedy; how all of them attribute responsibility for the end of the camp to co-campers and sometimes to themselves; and how they take very divergent lessons from their experience. In such ways, while this paper strengthens and reinforces a feminist critique of Occupy, it stops short of a singular feminist story about the outcomes of Occupy, emphasising instead the multiplicity of activist narratives and the elusiveness of their implications.