‘Impotence is the Magic Hood of Cowardice’: Developments and Implications of Militant Feminism in Germany between 1975-1995

The resurgence and radical re-appropriation of feminist positions represent a key element of the multifaceted youth revolt of the late 1960s and the long cycle of protest in its aftermath. Female activists not only became important spokeswomen of movement organisations, but also prominent protagonists of the ‘armed struggle’. Bernadine Dohrn, Margherita Cagol, Fusako Shigenobu, and Ulrike Meinhof are only some of the most obvious examples of the seemingly new phenomenon of female fighters. Unsurprisingly, an epistemic community of ‘terrorism experts’ analyses these women’s biographies in hyper-sexualised and gender-biased terms including the stereotype of gun-toting ‘man-hating female terrorists’ who compensate for repressed or excessive sexual identities (Merkel 1986). Such accounts not only reproduce an unapologetic male gaze, but also misrepresent the significance of feminist, anti-patriarchal thought within radical militant discourse in the late 20th Century. By contrast, this paper aims at analysing the political discourse and practice of one of the rare examples of an all-female, anti-patriarchal fighting formation, the German ‘Red Zora’ (active between 1977 and 1995) and her organisational predecessors. Consequently, it argues that these groupings represent an illustrative example of how radical feminism not only challenges self-acclaimed revolutionary identities, but also changes militant ideologies over time. In double delimitation towards wider militant scene and liberal feminism, ‘Women of the Revolutionary Cell’ intervened in everyday societal conflicts with violent means, increasingly gained organisational and ideological independence from the late 1970s onwards as ‘Red Zora’, and fostered a theoretical position of militant feminism which sustainably influenced theory and practice of their mother formation, the ‘Revolutionary Cells’, throughout the 1980s. While both formations failed to reach their goals and ceased activism in the early 1990s, the paper contends that the productive conflict about social-revolutionary politics between Cells and Zoras helps understanding shifts within the militant landscape of 1980s West Germany and beyond. The paper draws on a critical discourse analysis of the groups’ writings and its perception within the contemporary radical counter-public and beyond.