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This panel’s title riffs on two phrases from the late 1960s: Juliet Mitchell’s ‘Women: The Longest Revolution’ (1966) and Rudi Dutschke’s phrase ‘the long march through the institutions’. Mitchell engaged Marxist theory, challenging the left with its omission of women; Dutschke, drawing upon Maoism, proposed entering institutions to enact revolutionary work from within and thereby utterly change them. Fifty years after the women’s movement in art began, it’s obvious that asking for equality (50% women) is not enough; and that ‘add women and stir’ will not bring political and cultural change in museums, galleries, and Universities. At this time of hardening differences, defunding and attacks upon many cultural and educational institutions, we invite papers that address feminist resistance as a strategy for change from within institutions.

Papers may address, inter alia: What has been achieved – or not – by the political, social and economic goals of feminism entering the institution? Is Dutschke’s strategy useful in the current socio-political climate in arts institutions? Who can actually ‘get inside’ institutions? How do we reconcile strategies of resistance from within with the heavy facts of institutional violence experienced by women, people of colour, queer and disabled people and others in white patriarchal institutions? Can ‘revolutionary work’ be done within the arts and its institutions, and how? How can feminism resist being co-opted into capitalist gestures of ‘inclusiveness’? What other strategies might ensure institutional change? Is rejecting institutions an option? What institutional initiatives have been tested – to what effect?