Why Atlanta? How Space and Place Overdetermine Intersectional Activism

• In Event: 166 - Section on Community and Urban Sociology Paper Session. Sexualities and Place

Abstract

In Atlanta, Georgia, and in no other place in the United States, men have created grassroots activist groups that work against sexism, while organizing around another intersecting identity (race, sexuality, religion). This has happened not once, but three separate, independent times, creating the groups Black Men for the Eradication of Sexism, Muslim Men Against Domestic Violence, and the Sweet Tea Southern Queer Men's Collective. This paper considers the ways that specific characteristics of geographical areas—things like demographic trends, financial investments, local government policies, existing institutions, history of activism, etc.— powerfully shape the possibilities for identity group organizing. Based on a year of participant-observation and interviews with two of these groups and content analysis of materials created by all three, this paper argues that local grassroots activism is shaped by place in overdetermined ways: historical, geographical, political, demographic, and institutional. It illustrates how these characteristics of Atlanta combine to create an environment where multiple intersectionally-organized men's anti-sexist groups could form independent of each other, while no other such groups have formed elsewhere in the country.

Author

• Tal Peretz, Seattle University