This gendering of the riots emphasised feminine domesticity – the protecting of homes and places of work – in the face of young male violence (Mainardi, 1970). The role of black women in the context of young black male rioting is something which is often neglected. In the case of Michael Brown, his mother was at the centre of a large amount of media coverage in the Ferguson riots, portrayed in many cases as a voice calling for peace (Gorman, 2014). Butler (1994) has highlighted the inadequacy of models of femininity and masculinity which oppose social norms such as violence and peacekeeping. Feminist readings such as that of Brenner (2000) are further of use because they highlight the intersectionality of gendered processes, in which black women in particular become a doubly charged political grouping in that they represent both feminist causes and opposition to white ethnocentrism. Thus the emergence of figures such as the mother of Michael Brown and Pauline Pearce – black women who are urging peaceful solutions to the crisis – becomes of intersectional importance because it demonstrates the complex inter-space between the simple dichotomy formed in the discourse on the riots. Rather than slipping through this gap, in the case of London and Ferguson such intersectional figures often became highly important to the events and the discourse which surrounded them.
This kind of discourse demonstrated the central opposition in both the London and the Ferguson cases: namely, that between the forces of the establishment (representing order) and the force of the rioters (representing disorder). Intersectional politics entered into debates and media coverage of this opposition, with some analyses considering different ethnic and social groups in terms of whether they were with the rioters or against them. Thus one might emerge as in a category of ethnic minority and pro-civil order, or indeed as a white, British rioter.
