German Studies Review

These two slim volumes explore the legacy of 1968 through the lens of gender. Women, Global Protest Movements, and Political Agency examines the historical and contemporary significance of 1968 in different national and geographical contexts, asking questions about women's involvement and experiences as both victims and perpetrators of violence. Gender, Emancipation, and Political Violence focuses on a range of questions about militancy, the causes and legitimating strategies for the exercise of political violence, the use of counterviolence, and, importantly, about women's creative strategies of intervention that engage with violence in multifarious ways.

Both volumes read "woman" as a political and cultural category inseparable from the political and cultural contexts of their engagements and the discursive constructs of femininity. They examine the constitution of and struggles for female agency and the consequences of thinking "woman" as a—often disruptive—political subject. In its challenge to prevalent gender norms, women's activism becomes all the more fraught when it includes provocative, nonnormative, and confrontational practices and militant and violent actions.

Women, Global Protest Movements, and Political Agency provides a geographically and culturally diverse perspective on violence, militancy, and the legacy of 1968 that aims to be attentive to both local specificity and transnational tendencies. Gender, Emancipation, and Political Violence's focus is primarily on Germany and on the question of why and how violence might be said to be emancipatory. Providing readers with wide-ranging perspectives on issues of gender and violence, the volumes' interdisciplinary approach opens up productive conversations about the legacy of 1968 across overlapping fields of inquiry. Contributors are scholars from women's and gender studies, political science, history, and international, film, cultural, literary and area studies. While several chapters draw on contributors' previously published research, all succeed in reframing earlier arguments, adding new perspectives and nuances.

The two volumes are companion pieces with cross-references in the introductions and between the individual chapters. The reasoning behind splitting the chapters into two volumes is difficult to ascertain, as neither the quantitative scope nor the conceptual framework would seem to call for the division. A single volume would have provided scholars with a more user-friendly resource and the editor with a [End Page 638] chance to pen one comprehensive introduction rather than two overlapping ones referencing each other. This said, the volumes challenge dominant interpretations and self-interested instrumentalizations of 1968; they constitute an impressive and urgent contribution to scholarship on violence and gender in relation to the legacy of 1968 and will serve as an invaluable resource for further investigations.

Women, Global Protest Movements, and Political Agency presents sections on gender and cultural memory, violence and/as counterviolence, and women as violent actors. Kristina Schulz examines how differing memories of 1968 led, in the 1970s, to different assumptions and conclusions with regard to feminist action. She argues that the internal tensions and divisions of the feminist movements in the 1970s are linked to the divergent attitudes toward 1968. According to Schulz, the arguments, tactics, and strategies—in particular, regarding violence against women—developed after 1968 as a divide between cultural and social feminism. Schulz associates cultural feminism, using Helke Sander as one example, with retreat and the privileging of personal experience, and associates social feminism with an engagement in politics that aims to transform public institutions. In Schulz's estimation, the weakening of this division ultimately contributed to the development of a broader range of arguments and strategies. Presumably, this erosion of the dividing line between cultural feminists, who situate themselves in the revolutionary tradition of 1968, and social feminists, whose foundational narratives are shaped...