Rebel Dykes

Against a back­drop of 1980s aus­ter­i­ty and oppres­sion, a group of punk les­bian activists and artists meet at the Green­ham Com­mon peace camps and begin to drift towards the squats of South Lon­don. This is where punk rebel­lion and its dis­rup­tive spir­it turn into direct action and loud protest against the silenc­ing strate­gies of Sec­tion 28 and the AIDS epidemic.

The punk music of the Sleeze Sis­ters and the Sluts from Out­er Space blasts at The Bell pub in King’s Cross, and the unequiv­o­cal hedo­nism of the ​’80s SM dyke scene is embraced in the erot­ic mag­a­zines ​‘Love Bites’ and ​‘Quim’. These inter­sec­tions of pol­i­tics and inti­ma­cy, par­ty and protest, allow film­mak­ers Har­ri Shana­han and Sîan Williams to pro­duce a his­tor­i­cal and artis­tic archive of a cul­tur­al his­to­ry that sits out­side of gen­er­al knowledge.

For mar­gin­alised groups, espe­cial­ly in the sub­cul­tur­al con­text, access to the archive can be a major chal­lenge. Archives are spaces of vio­lence as well as pow­er, so how can doc­u­men­tary film­mak­ers pro­duce work that is polit­i­cal­ly crit­i­cal of this fact while retain­ing a broad appeal? The aes­thet­ics of club cul­ture that were so dom­i­nant in char­ac­ter­is­ing the dyke sub­cul­ture are apt­ly reflect­ed in this video­graph­ic depic­tion of life as a rebel dyke squat­ter in the Thatcherite ​’80s – a time where the sex wars were raging.

A vibrant SM les­bian club night called Chain Reac­tion becomes an inti­mate meet­ing point as well as trans-inclu­sive safe haven, embrac­ing sex­u­al per­for­ma­tiv­i­ty and rene­go­ti­at­ing sex­u­al rela­tions through mutu­al exchanges of pow­er based on con­sent. While Green­ham fem­i­nist sep­a­ratists drew com­par­isons between mil­i­tarism and every­day male vio­lence towards women, they saw sado­masochism as a reen­act­ment of domes­tic vio­lence relationships.

SM les­bians were being called vio­lent and sex­ist, and this caused schisms with­in fem­i­nism to grow. It’s impos­si­ble not to draw ties between the dan­ger­ous rhetoric of the the rad­i­cal fem­i­nists of the ​’70s and ​’80s, the ​“les­bian sex police” as shown with­in the film, and the unhinged, vio­lent ide­olo­gies of today’s trans-exclu­sion­ary rad­i­cal feminists.

The documentary’s cri­tique of a British fem­i­nism that relies on essen­tial­ist notions of wom­an­hood and female sex­u­al­i­ty points to the fact that lib­er­a­tion move­ments lose all sub­stance and tex­ture in their inabil­i­ty to take dif­fer­ence into account.

The film jux­ta­pos­es mem­o­ries of per­son­al plea­sure with expe­ri­ences of deeply felt emo­tion. It is an invalu­able com­mu­ni­ty pro­file that finds expres­sion in a mosa­ic of inti­mate oral his­to­ries. Mim­ic­k­ing the visu­al lan­guage of a zine, the film’s DIY aes­thet­ic is sig­nalled through an archive of under­ground ephemera, a patch­work of grit­ty archival footage and pho­tographs from the leg­endary visu­al artist Del La Grace Vol­cano, as well as orig­i­nal – albeit often rudi­men­ta­ry and mis­placed – sequences of animation.

By cap­tur­ing the cul­ture of fetish, par­ty and riot, fem­i­nism, sex and pol­i­tics, this unique blend of styles offers a fit­ting rep­re­sen­ta­tion of a punk sub­cul­ture that gave ​’80s queer and fem­i­nist activism its vibrancy.