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Gender Conflict in the Occupy Wall Street Movement

Tue, August 19, 12:30 to 2:10pm, TBA

Abstract

Scholars have mixed views about whether conflict is productive or harms social movements. Drawing on new approaches to the study of culture in social movements, I apply Amin Ghaziani’s resinous culture framework to understand infighting about gender conflict within the Occupy Wall Street movement (OWS). The study uses an original ethnographic dataset including participant observation, movement documents, and interviews with 73 informants collected between March and December 2012 in New York City, the San Francisco Bay Area, and at the Occupy National Gathering. I find four patterns that suggest gender conflict contributed to participatory democracy by: 1) forcing participants to acknowledge male dominance and a gendered tyranny of structurelessness, 2) providing critiques of tokenism, 3) applying intersectional analyses to understand a “hot mess” of multiple oppressions and inequalities, and 4) celebrating feminist cultures. Gender conflicts served as a resin or as a cultural carrier for rich meaning-making discussions about gender identity, feminist strategy, and sexism. The study contributes to research about the significance of gender conflict, feminism, and antifeminist backlash in contemporary social movements.

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