Title: Gender and Social Movements - Sociology of Gender - iResearchNet
Headings: Gender and Social Movements
Gender and Social Movements
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Content: For African American and Latina women during the same era, their connections to mixed sex movements around race mitigated their interest in a mixed race movement around gender. Instead, they advocated for women’s interests within mixed sex movements (Roth 2004). Similarly, international women’s conferences sponsored by the United Nations have illustrated how women in third world countries define their interests quite differently from those in the highly industrialized global North. Second, movements’ collective identities, or group definitions, are gendered. Some social movements directly try to change the definition associated with their group, as feminist movements, for example, try to change what it means to be a woman. Beyond this, movement participants bring with them a gender consciousness that affects the collective identities they construct, and they draw on ideas about gender from both dominant and oppositional cultures. For example, environmental or peace activists may define themselves as mothers concerned about the well-being of children and future generations, and participants in antiglobalization protests may draw on masculinity to define themselves as warriors standing up to the police, or they may draw on feminist and queer politics to define themselves as rejecting the dominant gender order along with capitalism. Third, social movements construct interpretive frames to explain their grievances and issues, addressing their causes and calling for action. In doing so, they draw on mainstream discourses and also challenge and extend those discourses. Mainstream frames and discourses are built around particular definitions of the nature, roles, and responsibilities of women and men, and social movements include elements of these mainstream frames and discourses and construct alternatives.