Complexity and Social Movements: Multitudes at the Edge of Chaos ...

Identities, protest dynamics and technology 55
‘honorary women’ during the action and were motivated by deeply
held, biographically sedimented concerns, quite distinct from the declared
objectives of the Prague action.
Whilst a primary respondent within the group is used to represent these
themes, here we would emphasise that these are consistent with a group
view contained in the video Tactical Frivolity: protesting against the IMF
and World Bank in Prague (Mirrabelle Productions 2000).
The complexity of the Pink Frame arose from a combination of deeply
considered personal reflections on the nature of conflict within contemporary
society with a significant gender dimension. One respondent related
her sense of frustration at what can be characterised as the historical wheel
of violence dominated, though not confined to, exchanges between groups
of males.
Throughout history we have like a whole human history of like people
fighting each other and righteously fighting each other and going well,
I’m fighting you because you’re evil and you’re wrong and so that
means that I have to fight you, you know, and it’s like somehow trying
to get away from that and kind of play it differently so that we’re
saying well we don’t like what you’re doing, we don’t agree with what
you’re doing and we’re here to voice our concerns about what you’re
doing. But that doesn’t mean that I’m going to get out a bigger stick
than you’ve got and beat you dead with it. It’s just like, symbolically
like to have two groups of people dressed in black, fronting each other
off, to me it’s just like a continuation of history, a continuation of
people fighting against people and saying we’re right and you’re wrong
and yes it is a fight and it is a struggle and it is a battle and I think that
we’re all warriors as well in a sense. But just by dressing up and making
ourselves vulnerable, to me it was sort of symbolic moving us out of
that war like space in a way, you know, trying to get away from the
total black and white, them and us, you know, we’re gonna win or
you’re gonna win or, you know, and it’s just trying to move the whole
thing from there a bit. And I think just dressing up makes it a bit
more, we’re not faceless, you know, it forces it to become a little bit
more human.
That is what I’m ultimately frightened of. I’m not frightened of being
on my own or of nature, you know, I’m frightened that some man is
going to hurt me and I was aware of the fact before I went to Prague
that I was actually in some way going there to like face this fear because
I was going there and I was going to end up facing a man in black who
had an intention to hurt me at the end of the day. And so it’s quite a
sort of like I was up for taking this challenge on board, I was up for like
confronting my fear and so these riot police protecting the World Bank
and the IMF had sort of become symbolic for all my fears, all the men
out there that might hurt me, you know, and I was actually quite up for,