Are You In Or Out?: Essentialism, Constructionism and Pathways to Allyship within Feminism and LGBTQ Activism

• In Event: 308 - Section on Sociology of Sex and Gender Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 07. Non-heterosexuality: Session II

Abstract

Contemporary social movements have recently become deeply interested in the question of how to cultivate efficacious ties with allies—privileged people who do not benefit directly from social justice efforts but nevertheless invest time and energy in collaborating with the marginalized groups who do. However, much sociological literature on allies lacks theoretical sophistication, narrowly focusing on allies in specific social movements without considering how ally cultivation might vary between movements. This paper strives to move towards a broader theory of ally incorporation, focusing specifically on how two social movements (i.e., feminism and LGBTQ activism) construct distinct strategies for ally incorporation that are contingent on whether the organizations therein tend to rely more on essentialist or constructionist models of identity politics and empirically illustrating this theory with ten months of ethnographic fieldwork in five social justice organizations (i.e., two feminist and three LGBTQ-oriented) located in a small Southeastern city.

Author

• Jaime Hartless, University of Virginia