Description
The politics of race in white-dominated, Western feminist anti-nuclear activism has not received significant academic attention – despite extensive critiques of racial and colonial hierarchies in global feminism, and some parallel discussion of exclusion in anti-nuclear organising. In response, this paper investigates whether and how racial and colonial hierarchies were reproduced and contested in the transnational solidarity politics of one UK network, Women working for a Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (WWNFIP). Through a discourse analysis of a newsletter archive, the paper first shows how race and colonialism are depicted as central to the production, testing and storage of nuclear weapons in the Pacific region, before exploring the racialised identity constructions of both British-based anti-nuclear activists and the Pacific Islanders whose struggles they sought to support. Attending to ambivalences in the representation of white privilege and indigenous agency, I nonetheless argue that UK Cold War feminist campaigners centred racism and colonialism in their struggle to a greater degree and in more creative ways than has yet been acknowledged. I end by briefly considering the implications for current feminist re-tellings of Cold War anti-nuclear activism as well as for contemporary feminist interventions in anti-nuclear politics.
