Tenderlymilitant.exe: A Weapon Armoury for the Queer-Feminist Counter Apocalypse

This broom armoury is part of ‘Fairywar’: a wider project developing a soft militancy to counter the emotional impact of the patriarchy. This particular collection reimagines the broomstick as both a tool for care and resistance. Each broom draws from the militant potentials of the plant kingdom — organisms often seen as passive, yet evolved to enforce boundaries against predators that fail to listen. Their mechanisms of defence are reinterpreted and catalogued on a website, examining their supportive and strategic potential to demolish the patriarchy. Their activation draws on movement research from the broom’s historical links with female labour, the witch hunts and the resistance cultivated in martial arts. By combining fighting potential with care objects, the work challenges narrow ideas of weapons as purely violent, proposing care as a radical, nurturing force for emotional and social resistance.