Burning the Boundaries of Political Action: Feminism, Anarchy, and Militancy in Anne Hansen’s Direct Action: Memoirs of an Urban Guerilla
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper, I situate Canadian political anarchist Anne Hansen’s writing within the genre of feminist memoir, and her activism within feminist history. On November 22 1982, the firebombing of three Red Hot Video stores in Vancouver’s Lower Mainland made national media headlines. The nascent feminist group the Wimmin’s Fire Brigade—of which Hansen was a part—claimed responsibility for the action, declaring it an act of “self-defense against hate propaganda.” I suggest that the firebombing marks a turning point for Canadian feminist activism not simply because of the use of violence by women against the state and private capital, but because of the failure of the state to intervene on a new form of capitalism that commodifies violence against women. In demonstrating how the materiality of violence against women was undergoing a remarkable historical shift through the creation of and distribution of commercial representations of sexualized violence against women, I argue that feminists in early 1980s Canada were facing unchartered political terrain. \n \nDespite the novelty of the firebombing, the only publication that examines this event thoroughly is Ann Hansen’s memoir. I suggest that Hansen’s memoir may be overlooked within feminist literary studies due to her theorization of women as active participants in oppositional violence and criminal sabotage. Through an examination of her personal writing, communiqués, and court statements, I examine her politicization via anarchist and feminist principles. I argue for the importance of disrupting what counts as feminist agency under particular historical conditions, and for the inclusion of narratives of women’s violence within our own stories of what counts as feminism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.036 | 0.056 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".