Little Acts of Rebellion

• In Event: LGBTQ Behavior and Representation

Abstract

The relationship between individuals’ sense of power and their political participation remains unclear, with different work producing conflicting results. This might be the result of work on participation conceptualizing politics, measuring attitudes about power, and focusing on a limited subset of participation that does not match how the general public thinks about these concepts. I use semi-structured interviews to investigate how people think about politics, power, and their participation in order to explore underlying (often implicit) assumptions in the participation literature in order to ground my study in how individuals think about these concepts. I conduct interviewees with
LGBTQIA people as a means to understand politics and power through the perspective of queerness, which serves to highlight the ways in which marginalized communities understand politics, contest their domination, and think about political power. From these interviews, I generate an alternative to political efficacy to measure individuals’ perceptions of their and other’s power. Those I spoke to have a nuanced and more complex understanding of power than can be captured in standard survey instruments. They also have a broad understanding of politics and contest power relations in both small, everyday forms of resistance and using larger-scale collective action.

Author

• Ryan Bell, Princeton University