Everyday politics,social practices and movement networks: daily life in Barcelona's social centres

The relations between everyday life and political participation are of interest for much contemporary social science. Yet studies of social movement protest still pay disproportionate attention to moments of mobilization, and to movements with clear organizational boundaries, tactics and goals. Exceptions have explored collective identity, ‘free spaces’ and prefigurative politics, but such processes are framed as important only in accounting for movements in abeyance, or in explaining movement persistence. This article focuses on the social practices taking place in and around social movement spaces, showing that political meanings, knowledge and alternative forms of social organization are continually being developed and cultivated. Social centres in Barcelona, Spain, autonomous political spaces hosting cultural and educational events, protest campaigns and alternative living arrangements, are used as empirical case studies. Daily practices of food provisioning, distributing space and dividing labour are politicized and politicizing as they unfold and develop over time and through diverse networks around social centres. Following Melucci, such latent processes set the conditions for social movements and mobilization to occur. However, they not only underpin mobilization, but are themselves politically expressive and prefigurative, with multiple layers of latency and visibility identifiable in performances of practices. The variety of political forms – adversarial, expressive, theoretical, and routinized everyday practices, allow diverse identities, materialities and meanings to overlap in movement spaces, and help explain networks of mutual support between loosely knit networks of activists and non‐activists. An approach which focuses on practices and networks rather than mobilization and collective actors, it is argued, helps show how everyday life and political protest are mutually constitutive.     

Making Media for Themselves: Strategic Dilemmas of Prefigurative Work in Independent Media Outlets

This article explores independent youth media outlets, one sector of the broader media democracy movement, to theorize the strategic dilemmas that actors negotiate as they attempt to prefigure the media change that they want to see in the world. The outlets operate as noncommercial spaces for youth to challenge the norms of mainstream media through the collective production of oppositional media. In this millennium, we see the increased presence of these outlets across the country and globally as youth are building nodes of communication through differing digital platforms. The article draws out a case study of one independent media outlet, Youth Media Action, in an urban area in the northeastern part of the United States to trace the dynamics of how these outlets attempt to prefigure or model media change through their structures, practices, and content with a changing cast of participating youth groups. I then analyze the tensions that actors confront as they seek to model an ideal (a more just media system) within a constrained environment (overextended staff and resources). The focus on these prefigurative practices and politics affords a closer view of the ways that these sites seek to build a more inclusive, egalitarian, noncommercial media system with limited resources and educational and political practices that do not always resonate with the participating groups and youth. This research contributes to social movement work that focuses on dilemmas that groups face as they look to themselves to build and model systems of social change.     

‘A New Language that Speaks of Change Just As It Steps Toward It’: Transnationalism,Erotic Justice and Queer Human Rights Praxis

Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) movements have too often been dominated by US liberal individualist framings of lesbian and gay rights, resulting in the hegemony of US‐focused issues and institutional actions, despite the irony that the US government has been relatively unsupportive of LGBT rights on the international stage. We argue that transnational, grassroots queer movements embody more profound aspirations that do not limit the meaning of queer liberation to singular identity politics or rights‐restraining institutions. Specifically, we point to transnational and Third World‐based queer movements that offer more complex structural analyses of sexual oppression as well as more visionary praxes of sexual rights. Drawing on lessons from two cases of queer human rights praxis from the Philippines and México, we assert that a queer grassroots enactment of human rights allows for multiple subaltern constituencies to find – and to make – a place in human rights discourses; queer identity and actions create social formations that expand human rights agendas to further embody the intersectionality, interdependence and transnationality of daily life. Key to these enactments of queer human rights praxis are prefigurative politics and rooted cosmopolitanism, which catalyze new expansions of human rights to include intersectional framings and practices of erotic justice.     

‘Goldman-Sachs doesn’t care if you raise chicken’: the challenges of resistant prefiguration

This article addresses debates in the ‘post-Occupy movement’ over the resistant potential of prefigurative politics, and asks how prefiguration can be conceptualized as resistance in relation to activists’ understanding of politics, power and social change. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with activists in New York City, it looks at anarchist politics after Occupy Wall Street (OWS). Here, the absence of spectacular moments of confrontation and the removal of OWS’s space of mobilization and organizing challenged activists to adjust their prefigurative politics to the shifting spaces post-Occupy. This paper advances our understanding of prefigurative politics by conceptualizing prefiguration as resistance in consideration of the elements of ‘intent’, ‘recognition’, ‘opposition/confrontation’ and ‘creation’. Following this, it introduces the ‘logic of subtraction’ as a concept to understand the resistant potential of prefiguration. Here, I argue that rather than being in an antagonistic relationship with dominant power, resistant prefiguration aims for the creation of alternatives while subtracting power from the state, capital or any other external authority in order to render it obsolete. This understanding allows for a nuanced consideration of the proactive and creative potential of prefiguration, as well as of the difficulties of prefigurative practices in shifting movement spaces.     

User‐generated online queer media and the politics of queer visibility

In this article, we review sociological research on the politics of queer self‐presentation and visibility in user‐generated online media, such as personal homepages, blogs, YouTube vlogs, and queer‐specific social networking sites. Using an intersectional lens to attend to multiple axes of identity, the review offers a deeper understanding of how online queer media impact self‐presentation and visibility, while also privileging certain racial, sexual, and gender identities and practices over others. Online platforms can serve as spaces of resistance wherein queer people not only make themselves visible but also redefine dominant conceptions of identity, as well as the boundaries between public and private life. However, our review also finds that online spaces of queer self‐presentation often become another space for the reinforcement of dominant norms pertaining to various axes of one's identity. Given that the advent of user‐generated media and the Internet has facilitated the mobilization of queer people worldwide, an understanding of queer self‐presentation in online media demonstrates how new iterations of sex, gender, and sexuality are constructed in a technological era by queer‐identified people themselves, and how people can both resist and reify dominant social hierarchies across boundaries of space and time.     

The Cultural Construction of Heterosexual Identities

In this article, the author reviews current scholarship on the cultural construction of heterosexual identities. Specifically, this article examines current research on how heterosexual identities are (i) central to the production of the ritual practices of marriages, weddings and high school proms; (ii) ever more salient due to increases in lesbian and gay visibility in America; and (iii) formed through their relationship with constructions of masculinity and discourses of homophobia. Finally, I briefly discuss new scholarship on queer heterosexualities as a way to illustrate how queer cultural studies are influencing the field of sexualities studies more generally.     

Identity and Ideas: A Roundtable on Identity Politics

This roundtable discussion examines the issue of identity politics and how identity influences and is influenced by gay/queer politics and theory. The participants discuss how identity politics affects political organizing and activism, how different identity communities can build coalitions, how the language related to identity is evolving, and how sexual attractions and practices interact with identity. The discussants look at how the influx into the gay and lesbian movement of new groups that challenge traditional identity boundaries—e.g., bisexuals and transgendered people—is affecting the movement. Finally, the discussants examine how “idea-based” politics may supplant identity-based politics as a new inclusive paradigm.     

"Are You an African?" The Politics of Self-Construction in Status-Based Social Movements

Current debates over identity politics hinge on the question of whether status-based social movements encourage parochialism and self-interest or create possibilities for mutual recognition across lines of difference. Our article explores this question through comparative, ethnographic study of two racially progressive social movements, "pro-black" abolitionism and "conscious" hip hop. We argue that status-based social movements not only enable collective identity, but also the personal identities or selves of their participants. Beliefs about the self create openings and obstacles to mutual recognition and progressive social action. Our analysis centers on the challenges that an influx of progressive, anti-racist whites posed to each movement. We examine first how each movement configured movement participation and racial identity and then how whites crafted strategic narratives of the self to account for their participation in a status-based movement they were not directly implicated in. We conclude with an analysis of the implications of these narratives for a critical politics of recognition. Keywords: identity politics, social movements, race, self, hip hop.     

Social movement schools: sites for consciousness transformation,training, and prefigurative social development

ABSTRACT

We develop the concept of “social movement school’ (SMS), showing how these organizational spaces are deliberately designed for purposes of educating, mentoring, training, and coordinating individuals as effective, committed movement agents. SMSs can also be important sites of prefigurative design and practice for future societal development consistent with movement goals. We motivate the theoretical significance of SMSs based on five perspectives in social movement scholarship: (1) resource mobilization; (2) cultural approaches to repertoires of contention; (3) cognitive perspective; (4) micro-mobilization; and (5) biographical consequences of participation. We then offer a typology to capture primary purposes, and spatial reach within the broad field of SMSs. Within-movement variation is illustrated by focusing on a variety of SMSs in the U.S. civil rights movement; and the cross-movement breadth of the concept is illustrated by highlighting contemporary SMS forms drawn from three very different movements–labor, radical feminism, and mindfulness meditation movements. In the interest of launching a research agenda on SMSs, we end with several key questions that could serve to guide future research. Important theoretical, empirical, and practical considerations suggest that SMSs deserve the attention of scholars and activists alike.     

Transnational social movements and changing organizational fields in the late twentieth and early twenty‐first centuries

Recent decades have seen dramatic changes in the global political arena, including shifts in geopolitical arrangements, increases in popular mobilization and contestation over the direction of globalization, and efforts by elites to channel or curb popular opposition. We explore how these factors affect changes in global politics. Organizational populations are shaped by ongoing interactions among civil‐society, corporate and governmental actors operating at multiple levels. During the 1990s and 2000s, corporate and government actors promoted the ‘neoliberalization of civil society’ and the appropriation of movement concepts and practices to support elite interests. Not all movement actors have been passive witnesses to this process: they have engaged in intense internal debates, and they have adapted their organizational strategies to advance social transformation. This article draws from quantitative research on the population of transnational social movement organizations (TSMOs) and on qualitative research on contemporary transnational activism to describe changes in transnational organizing at a time of growing contention in world politics. We show how interactions among global actors have shaped new, hybrid organizational forms and spaces that include actors other than states in influential roles.     

Queer habitus: bodily performance and queer ethnography in Lebanon

Based on ethnographic and theoretical material, this article focuses on the interaction of queer bodies within particular urban spaces in Beirut. By highlighting bodily performances that challenge normative behaviour in contemporary Lebanon, the article makes a case for the production of a queer habitus, which finds itself expressed in different ways that all emphasise the importance of bodily and mental dispositions of queer individuals in forming their own gender and class identities.     

Agents for Change and Changed Agents: The Micro‐politics of Change and Feminism in the Academy

This article explores gender politics and processes in the academy and investigates change from the perspectives of feminist academics. In particular, it explores the experiences of women academics attempting to effect change to the gendered status quo of their own institutions. Focusing on micro‐politics, the feminist movement is empirically explored in localized spaces of resistance and in the small but significant individual efforts at making changes in academic institutions. The analysis is based on interviews with female academics working in business and management schools and focuses on the challenges for change and how change attempts affect their personal and professional identities. The article explores the range of change strategies that participants use as they try to progress in their academic career while staying true to their feminist values and priorities through both resisting and incorporating dominant discourses of academic work. The analysis highlights such tensions and focuses on a contextualized, bottom‐up perspective on change that, unlike more totalizing theorization, takes into account mundane and lived experiences at the level of the individual.     

Postnational acts of citizenship: how an anti-border politics is shaping feminist spaces of service provision in Toronto,Canada

Postnationalism has seen a modest resurgence in recent years as both a theory of citizenship and as a set of claims frequently articulated by anti-border movements. Yet the implications of postnationalism for feminist politics remain relatively under-theorized. Using interviews with feminist advocates in Toronto, Canada, this research examines how postnational challenges to state power are being mobilized in spaces of service provision addressing gender-based violence. I show how, for some advocates, a postnational politics deeply informed their critiques of state borders and restrictive immigration controls as fundamental sources of gendered and racialized violence. However, postnational approaches were also limited in offering few concrete alternatives to state protection from domestic or interpersonal violence, particularly for women with precarious immigration status. Significantly, it was through advocates’ everyday practices of service provision that they blueprinted an alternative feminist ethics of solidarity. I argue that these practices constitute postnational acts of citizenship, in so far as they attempt – albeit imperfectly – to de-border institutional spaces from within.     

Crafting social change: former global factory workers negotiating new identities in Sri Lanka’s villages

This article explores how former factory workers negotiate new identities in villages, as new brides, mothers and daughters-in-law, after 5–6 years of employment in an urban Free Trade Zone. I argue that their performances of self-discipline and disavowal of transgressive knowledges allow them to make use of the limited social, economic and political spaces available while gradually reshaping local understandings about the good daughter-in-law. Former workers’ strategic deployment of social conformity represents the foundation on which their entry into village social, economic, political spaces is based on. Although individual social conformity would conventionally be identified as everyday politics, I argue that former workers’ performance of self-discipline and social conformity is strategic and leads to changes in gender norms and village social hierarchies and thus represents a form of politics that is in between everyday and transformative politics – politics that creates conditions of possibility for social transformations.     

Relational dynamics in factional adoption of terrorist tactics: a comparative perspective

Scholars of political terrorism generally agree that the radical group is usually a splinter faction of an opposition movement. Seldom, however, is an attempt made to incorporate insights and tools from the literature on social movements and contentious politics into the study of the process by which a faction splinters from the larger opposition movement and adopts terrorist tactics—a process commonly known as radicalization. Drawing upon the relational approach from the literature on contentious politics, this article seeks to further understanding of radicalization by examining how and when relational mechanisms, operating in their respective relational arenas, interact and combine to drive it. Proposed is a relational framework for a comparative analysis of radicalization at three levels—domestic, ethno-national, and international—employing the case of the Weather Underground, Fatah-Tanzim, and al-Qaeda respectively.     

Queering the Home

Abstract

In the West, the private sphere of the home is traditionally associated with the heterosexual nuclear family. Through social, cultural, and legal processes, the heterosexual bond has been constructed as central to the family home. Despite these dominant discourses, the home is also a space in which heteronormativity (or the unacknowledged assumption that heterosexuality is the natural and normal form of sexuality) may be subverted. This article considers how the domestic lives of lesbian and gay couples in England challenge the heteronormativity prevalent in dominant discourses of the home. Drawing on in-depth interviews with lesbians and gay men, the article continues to extend and build on the existing literature on queer domesticity by focusing on how lesbian and gay couples divide and understand domestic labor in their homes. The perceived normativity of coupled domesticity and childrearing means that on the one hand the lesbian and gay participants in this study could be seen to fit in with normative ideals of domestic family life. On the other hand, I show how these couples subvert heteronormative assumptions about gendered household practices through their approaches and attitudes towards domestic labor and parenting. In particular, the article focuses on the complex ways in which lesbian and gay couples destabilize traditional domestic gender roles and queer the spaces of the home through the seemingly unremarkable, mundane practices and negotiations of domestic labor and childcare.     

Schulman's urban lesbian: a hobosexual pedestrian rhetoric

The following article reads the protagonist in Sarah Schulman's Girls, Visions and Everything as not only lesbian, but as hobosexual-a concept representative of anti-capitalist practices in both sex and labor. The hobosexual is developed as an extension of the lesbian flaneur, as a concept that requires reading Schulman's urban lesbian at the intersection of class and sexuality. Lila Futuransky's sexual identity is suspended and complicated through an emphasis on her desire for queer mobility; her urban movements connect her to hobo history, but also expose the effects of capitalism that thwart her urban movement.     

Ethnographic Cartographies: Social Movements,Alternative Media and the Spaces of Networks

Research on social movement networks has been defined by an emphasis on structural determinism and quantitative methodologies, and has often overlooked the spatial dimension of networking practices. This article argues that scholars have much to gain if (1) they move beyond the understanding of networks as organisational and communication structures, and analyse them as everyday social processes of human negotiation and construction, and (2) they pay attention to how networks between different organisations create multiple and overlapping spaces of action and meaning that define the everyday contexts of social movements. Drawing on ethnographic research within the Cuba Solidarity Campaign, this article explores the everyday dimension of political and communication networks. It shows that everyday networking practices are embedded in processes of identification and meaning construction, and are defined by a politics of inclusion and exclusion; introducing the concept of ethnographic cartography, it demonstrates that social movement networks are incorporated into everyday practices and narratives of place-making.     

Negotiating civic identity across different political contexts: Immigrant participation in social movements and political incorporation

This article examines the understudied intersection between migration and contentious politics, focusing specifically on immigrant participation in social movements within their host societies. Drawing upon data from the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (Anti-ELAB) Movement in Hong Kong, it illuminates the process through which Chinese immigrants become politicized, evolve collective identities, and mobilize against civil dominance. Further, it underscores the transformative potential of social movements in facilitating immigrant political incorporation. However, it also recognizes the unilateral acceptance determined by mainstream society, which often leaves immigrants sidelined in discussions regarding their qualifications for unconventional political participation. To address civil inequality, immigrants establish their civil identities, challenge dominance, and amass political capital for future incorporation. This study extends the migration and social movements literature by shedding light on the political dynamics of immigrant participation and the hurdles they encounter during their journey toward political incorporation. It also underscores the significant role of progressive social movements in fostering immigrant political participation. Furthermore, the research highlights the unique immigrant political identity that emerges and evolves through participation in social movements, contesting exclusion and monopolistic dominance over democratic realization.