NAME: VIKRAMADITYA SINGH
ROLL NO: 369
DEPARTMENT: SOCIOLOGY
GE : GENDER IN MODERN WORLD
MOVIEW REVIEW ON “SUFFRAGETTE”
“We Are the Dead Ones”: Suffragette (2015) and the
Politics of Feminist Sacrifice
Abstract
Sarah Gavron’s Suffragette (2015), scripted by Abi Morgan, attempts something rare in mainstream
cinema: to dramatize not the triumphs of liberal feminism but the violence of its becoming. Set in
1912, on the cusp of Britain's descent into modern warfare, the film foregrounds a revolutionary
moment in which women, long inscribed as objects of history, violently inscribed themselves upon it.
Through a deft combination of historical verisimilitude and affective realism, Suffragette constructs a
feminist political imaginary that is at once deeply situated in its era and disturbingly resonant with
contemporary struggles for bodily autonomy, labour equity, and legal recognition.
The narrative centers on Maud Watts (Carey Mulligan), a fictional working-class laundress whose
induction into the WSPU (Women’s Social and Political Union) is less a tale of conscious ideological
awakening than one of painful, involuntary exposure to structural violence. This shift in focus—from
emblematic heroines to the anonymous, precarious foot soldiers of the suffrage movement—marks
one of the film’s most subversive narrative decisions. Maud’s arc is not teleological; it is brutal,
elliptical, and, crucially, unfinished.
Sacrificial Subjects and the Aesthetics of Pain
Maud is not portrayed as a heroic reformer but as what theorist Judith Butler might term a
“grievable life”—a subject who becomes intelligible only through suffering. The camera’s gaze lingers
not on speechifying or triumph but on the fractured body: battered in prison, force-fed during
hunger strikes, and ultimately alienated from her child. In a radical departure from triumphalist
feminist narratives, Suffragette asks: What does political subjectivity cost the body? What do political
rights extract from the flesh?
In this context, the suffragette becomes a sacrificial figure—a martyr not to a clear cause, but to a
utopia perpetually deferred. The film’s climax, the death of Emily Wilding Davison (Natalie Press)
beneath the king’s horse at the Epsom Derby, is rendered with a kind of sacred minimalism. No
words, no close-up; only the sudden intrusion of death into spectacle. Davison’s act is historically
well-documented, yet the film refrains from mythologizing her. She is not canonized; she is
consumed. Her body, absorbed into the machinery of royal pageantry, becomes a text of radical
protest. Here, Gavron allows us to see what Walter Benjamin once suggested: that behind every
monument of civilization stands a monument of barbarism.
Time, Temporality, and the Non-Linearity of Progress
Suffragette disorients linear notions of feminist progress. It is tempting to view the film as a historical
antecedent to contemporary feminist victories, but the film resists closure. The epilogue, listing the
dates when various nations granted women the right to vote, is not celebratory. It is damning. That
Switzerland waited until 1971, and Saudi Arabia until 2015, suggests not the inevitability of justice
but the glacial pace of structural change. Time, in Suffragette, is not a narrative arc but a wound that
keeps reopening.
This non-linearity is mirrored in the film’s visual style. Eduard Grau’s cinematography bathes the
screen in industrial greys and muted greens, evoking a world drained of warmth and clarity. The
mise-en-scène is often claustrophobic: crowded laundries, narrow alleyways, cramped prison cells.
These spaces are not just backdrops but political topographies—zones where class and gender
intersect to constrain female agency. Even moments of collective action are shot with a trembling
camera, suggesting instability, precarity, and risk.
Surveillance and the Gendered State
The film is haunted by the spectre of surveillance. Brendan Gleeson’s Inspector Steed, a complex
antagonist, embodies the state’s ambivalent gaze: paternalistic, dispassionate, yet ruthlessly efficient.
Steed is not a sadist; he is worse—he is a bureaucrat. He records, categorizes, and disciplines female
bodies with the cold rationality of the modern state. The scenes in which suffragettes are
photographed and archived echo Michel Foucault’s notion of the panopticon: these women are not
simply punished—they are rendered legible within a regime of power.
Moreover, the WSPU’s own tactics—window smashing, mail bombings, public disruptions—are
presented without moral judgement. Gavron does not ask us to like these methods, but to
understand their necessity. As Maud says, “War is the only language men listen to.” In an era when
property rights trumped human rights, destruction becomes a form of eloquence. This tension
between militant feminism and liberal respectability is central to the film’s political message: there
can be no polite revolution.
The Absence That Speaks: Race and the Limits of
Representation
No review of Suffragette can avoid grappling with its representational lacunae. The conspicuous
absence of women of colour from the narrative has been rightly critiqued. While the film focuses on
white working-class women, it does so in a manner that elides the racial complexity of the suffrage
movement. Figures such as Sophia Duleep Singh, a prominent Anglo-Indian suffragette and daughter
of the deposed Maharaja of Punjab, are notably missing. This omission risks reinscribing a white
feminist history that invisibilizes intersectionality.
However, it is also possible to read this absence as symptomatic of the broader problem the film
exposes: that even within radical movements, certain lives are foregrounded while others remain
marginal. The film, in its grim refusal of comfort, perhaps unintentionally mirrors the failures of first-
wave feminism to encompass difference.
Conclusion: A Cinema of Refusal
Suffragette is not a celebratory film. It does not soothe. It wounds. And in doing so, it performs a
necessary political function: it insists that feminism’s history is not one of inevitable progress but of
constant rupture, loss, and resistance. By centering working-class women, refusing narrative closure,
and making visible the bodily cost of political action, the film becomes not just a work of historical
fiction, but a cinematic manifesto of feminist militancy.
In the words of Maud Watts, “We’re half the human race. You can’t stop us all.” But Suffragette
reminds us that even when ‘stopped,’ silenced, or erased, resistance carves its message into the
stone of time. The film is, above all, a requiem for those whose names history never remembered—
and a call to ensure their struggle was not in vain.
