Barriers to Doing Activism

This chapter discusses the costs (financial, physical, psychological and emotional) associated with doing activism. While participants speak about activism in terms of the everyday and suggest that it is something anyone can do, they often do not acknowledge the privilege required to do activism. This chapter draws out the tensions present in the notion that everyone can and should do activism by exploring the barriers and exclusions that prevent individuals from participating politically. This includes the reality that those who are hardest hit by austerity often do not have the resources to protest against it. Therefore, while lived experiences of issues are deemed to be a key and authentic motivation for doing activism (a topic that is explored further in Chapter 6), it becomes clear that those who are most affected by austerity are less able to protest against it because of its effects. Despite women being disproportionately affected by austerity, this chapter reveals the continuing and heightening gendered barriers that exist in the specific context of austerity and a local anti-austerity activist culture that privileges questions of class over those of gender. It demonstrates how, in response, women are forming their own feminist resistance to austerity, and explores how this is empowering but problematic because it upholds austerity through the provision of unpaid care in the absence of public services.