Erica S. Lawson

Sartorial Strategies, War-Ending, and Peacebuilding Desires: Re-thinking Liberian Women’s Mass Mobilization through the Black (International) Aesthetic-Activist Tradition  

Liberian women are widely acknowledged for their crucial, collaborative role to bring an end to their country’s protracted civil war (1989-2003), which claimed the lives of approximately 250,000 people and displaced many more. Women’s successful mass mobilization for peace has made significant contributions to scholarly research in peace, conflict, and feminist studies, concerned with how gender organizes war, peacebuilding, and transitional justice. Much less attention has been paid to women’s anti-war mobilization situated along the continuum of the Black intellectual-activist tradition: how they strategically placed their bodies on the frontlines and made sartorial decisions such as wearing all-white garments, to instigate a ceasefire. Through their clothing choices (white t-shirts with anti-violence messages and blue and white wrap-around-lappas), Liberian women marked themselves as politicized subjects engaged in a struggle to “save” and re-imagine the nation. By emphasising dress and bodies as sites of subaltern activism, I locate these women in the (transnational) Black protest tradition that uses aesthetics to resist colonialism, racial capitalism, and anti-Black violence. My aim is to re-think Liberian women’s anti-war movement as a mode of sartorial self-representation through an anti-colonial feminist frame, to address how they (re)imagine anti-war futures centered on peacebuilding and gender justice.   

Biography 

Erica S. Lawson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at The University of Western Ontario. She teaches in the areas of feminist and critical race theories, and gender and post-conflict recovery. Her research focuses on the politics and practices of Black women’s maternal activism for social and political change.