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About Annual Meeting
I introduce the concept of “representational activism” to describe the efforts undertaken by activists to shift what they deem to be insufficient, false, restrictive, or stereotyped cultural representations of their identity group in the public sphere, particularly as propagated by media institutions. I argue that reigning paradigms in social movement theory do not offer the analytical preconditions for scholars to fully appreciate representational activism as an object of study. In order to redress this, I build on three lines of sociological inquiry, arguing for an analytical lens that foregrounds 1) the connotations and distribution of the symbolic content associated with a given socially salient group identity; 2) the public sphere or cultural environment in which these tropes circulate and structure social life, as well as the specific institutional contexts in which their effects are felt; 3) that changing the content of these images and the perceptions of the public matter deeply to activists both as means and as end, and that representational activism’s role as “end” is often theorized as inextricably connected to its role as “means” by activists engaged in efforts to effect broad social change. I use empirical analyses of the activities of the National Organization for Women, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the United Daughters of the Confederacy to illustrate the utility of this analytical move.