Movement-countermovement & Intra-movement Contexts: The Organizational Dynamics of California’s Marriage Equality Movement

• In Event: 578 - Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Paper Session. Movement Relevant Research

Abstract

In this paper, I draw from interviews with 47 key informants who participated in California’s marriage equality movement, participant observations, and documentary data to explore how participants’ emotional and cognitive responses to the passage of Proposition 8 in 2008 influenced the organizational dynamics of the post-8 marriage equality movement. First I situate the California marriage equality movement’s emergence and organizational development within the movement-countermovement dynamics of the larger gay and lesbian movement and its countermovement, the Religious Right (Fetner 2008). I show how the movements’ organizational field was bifurcated between the grassroots and a professionalized statewide infrastructure. This bifurcation, and the professionalized organizations’ use of model campaign tactics (Stone 2012) during the campaign, resulted in grassroots activists’ experience of exclusion and marginalization from the No on 8 campaign. The campaign’s decision-making structure was hierarchically organized and excluded the perspectives of grassroots activists and, in particular, activists within rural communities and communities of color. After Prop. 8 passed, activists focused on building organizations that emphasized new tactics, organizing within communities of color, rural communities, or communities with little existing movement infrastructure. Also, as activists debated strategies for repealing Prop. 8, they attempted to build a structure that would provide cohesiveness and leadership to the grassroots movement. These findings suggest that schisms between professionalized and grassroots movement organizations may lead to movement failure. One possible outcome of such failure is the availability of opportunities for those who hold less power within the movement to revise infrastructural arrangements.

Author

• Anna Sorensen, SUNY Potsdam