Photography, Memory and Women in May ’68

The dominant narrative configurations of May ’68 in France have rendered the figure of the “radical protesting student”—typically male—as the primary actor in the events, while women’s role has largely been erased from the “official” collective memory. The most frequently exhibited and published visual documents of the era dovetail neatly with these narratives, representing female participants either as problematic emblems or as passive, inactive, and bereft of political agency. This chapter focuses on photographs of female participants in the events that can be considered “canonical,” and asks how women have been portrayed in the visual narratives that dominated the post-1968 public discourse and whether alternative representations of them were, and maybe still are, excluded from this canon.