Dance Theatre of Harlem

This chapter explores the women of the Dance Theatre of Harlem company and the radical acts of resistance they executed to subvert ballet’s dominant white normative culture: from the debated act of women wearing flesh-tone tights and pointe shoes, to joining the picket line in the country’s first strike by unionized dancers, negotiating gender-based, color-biased casting, and women performing ballet in natural hairstyles as an act of defining black female agency. The chapter illuminates how the black ballerinas of Dance Theatre of Harlem existed within the American social structure of white racist values against black female bodies performing ballet and the radical acts that emerged.

Toward a Theatrical History of the Picket Line

This chapter proposes a theatrical history of the picket line, reading this particular political and performative site of struggle through the lenses of space and spectatorship in order to explore the boundaries of performance and theatricality. Tracking its evolution from the nineteenth century to the Thatcher era, the chapter interrogates the picket line in British industrial and labor history as a site of the interplay of legality and performativity, and argues for the value of reading the political picket through a theatrical lens. A picket line functions as both a practical enactment of rights in space (understood as an occupation of or claim on public space intended to make visible a form of collective identity) and the symbolic expression of workers’ rights to organize and act collectively. Its theatricality resides in this space between symbolic and practical action, in the relationship between presence (a literal placing of bodies in space) and representation as a process of claim-making. The encounter produces affects and behaviors carrying implications beyond the immediate point of conflict: Who owns labor? Who has the right to act collectively? Who holds responsibility for these issues? These issues remain central to debates around labor, conditions, contracts, and rights today, involving the right to unionize, the effective return of zero-hours contracts, and the destruction of communities historically rooted in shared industrial labor.

Then and Now: Vulnerable Workers, Industrial Action, and the Law in the 1970s and Today

With the much vaunted ‘withering of the strike’, a mythology of past militancy appears to have taken root; militant men taking to the picket line on the flimsiest of pretexts. This stereotype is challenged through exploring two accounts of three strikes, Trico and Grunwick in 1976, and, following the raft of ‘salami slicing’ legislation kettling workers and trade unions, the dispute at Gate Gourmet in 2005. These were acts of desperation by vulnerable workers. Each book highlights the heterogeneity of race and gender, and in some cases how this served to divide workers. The attack on existing conditions and the increased use of agency workers, the issues challenged by Gate Gourmet workers, and continued disputes concerning equal pay, as with the Trico strike, indicate the limited power of organized labour today in the context of the persistence, if not escalation, of employment grievances.

(Un)Managing Emotions at the Forefront: Stories from Shoreham Picket Line

In this article, I reflect on my experience as an active rank and file member of CUPE 3903, the union representing contract faculty and graduate students at York University in Toronto, Ontario, during the 2018 York University Strike, where I volunteered as a front-line communicator, or “car talker”. Drawing on these experiences, I reflect on the ways in which picketers generally try to (un)manage the emotions of drivers passing through the picket line. My analysis is focused on a particular venue - the Shoreham picket line located at the southwest entrance of the university, and centers around my personal interactions with the drivers crossing the picket line during the morning hours from March 2018 to May 2018. My analysis aims to open up space to discuss the largely overlooked role that the emotions of the public play in shaping the picket line experience. In particular, I provide a multi-directional analysis of the encounters that occurred between the picketers and the general public at the Shoreham picket line during the 2018 strike, highlighting the multiplicity of variables, such as the environment, the pre-existing beliefs of the participants, and expressions of collective anger, which informed these encounters. In doing this, I illuminate the complexity of the intertwined relationship between emotional and cognitive framing, thereby providing a more comprehensive model for understanding the role that emotions play in social movement organizing.