‘Sistah Space’ as a geopolitical No-Man’s Land
The content of this post has been adapted from an assignment that was originally submitted during my Masters studies.
With its deeply entrenched associations to the battlefield, the phrase ‘no-man’s land’ has been used colloquially as a metaphor to describe a space of contention, separating different sides of war, remaining empty and uninhabited by soldiers (Navaro-Yashin, 2003). This militarised conceptualisation of no-man’s land has manifested into popular culture in a number of ways, including the 2001 No Man’s Land film about the Bosnian war; or the No Man’s Land short TV series released this year about the Syrian civil war.
While there is no set definition, Lesham and Pinkerton (2016) purport that no-man’s lands are not merely dead zones with an absence of humans and human activity; but lively spaces constituted by an abandonment-enclosure dynamic enacted through the more-than-human. Plants, animals, and ecological biodiversity are able to exist and flourish freely without human impediment, much like how UK wildlife has been able to thrive during the Covid-19 pandemic with streets being abandoned under the rules to stay at home. In this sense, the ‘outside’ has come to be a temporary, but necessary, no-man’s land to prevent the spread of the virus.
Indeed, the phrase has since extensively diverged away from its battlefield roots to instead be contemplated within geopolitical thought, broadening no-man’s lands to demilitarised buffer zones, borders, ungovernable territory, social abandonment, or urban dilapidation (Lesham and Pinkerton, 2016). Yet, there has been a noticeable dearth of work in geography engaging with the inherently gendered nature of the term no-man’s land.
Referring back to the term’s warfighting roots, the fraught linkages between war and masculinity are not new. No-man’s land joins other gendered military language such as ‘manpower’, which continues to permeate into everyday lexicon beyond war contexts. However, I will be using this post to consider no-man’s land in its more literal meaning: the absence of men, rather than the absence of humans more broadly.
One example that immediately came to mind was the not-for-profit, community initiative Sistah Space based in Hackney as a no-man’s land in the more literal meaning of the phrase. Ran by volunteers, the grassroots project provides support for women and girls of African heritage to escape and/or recover from domestic abuse. Initially, it began as a community safe space made for women, by women in November 2015.
Looking at who, or indeed what, has led to the formation of this particular no-man’s land (Lesham and Pinkterton, 2016), the existing oppressive structures of society — cis-hetero patriarchy and capitalism that bolster the state and its institutions — have resulted in the social abandonment of the most marginalised in the UK (Olufemi, 2020), therefore prompting the creation of Sistah Space as a site of collective care in Hackney.
Particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic, women-only spaces like Sistah Space have been an invaluable lifeline that prioritise vulnerable women’s security during a time where domestic violence cases have surged dramatically with more people embracing the global call to stay at home (Lott-Lavigna, 2020; Townsend, 2020; Brickell, 2020).
We can see the geopolitical agency of Sistah Space volunteers in mobilising to provide an enlivened, multi-faceted no-man’s land that not only acts as an enclosure for domestic abuse survivors, but as a radical space to challenge social abandonment and resist structural racism, sexism and classism in the UK.
Furthermore, in line with Lesham and Pinkerton’s (2016) assertion that no-man’s lands are difficult to remove, a similar persistence has indeed been demonstrated by Sistah Space in their recent premises dispute with Hackney Council during the UK’s first lockdown, in which the council tried to evict the grassroots initiative (see Chant, 2020).
