Education and Representation: Cognitive Scripts and Queer Politics on the College Campus

• In Event: 3451 - Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 12. Repertoires, Tactics, and Strategies

Abstract

The collective processes and logics through which particular strategies and goals are favored over others is a key area of inquiry for social movement scholars attempting to understand movement dynamics—particularly within diverse social movement communities. Queer politics, in particular, takes a number of different forms and emphasizes varying goals in a multiplicity of contexts. This is due, in part, to the wide range of intersecting identities and investments that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning (LGBTQ+) people hold. In the following paper, I analyze the ways that queer college students’ socialization into queer politics was shaped through practices that were sanctioned in the institutional context of the University. That is, students’ orientations towards queer activism reflected the available, resonant frames of the educational institution, and structured definitions of what “inclusive strategies” looked like. In this case, the university provided the framing and subsequent repertoires of contention that students used in their everyday and organized resistance strategies. I argue that these repertoires, which relied on educational tactics designed to appeal to both internal and external targets, resulted in the uneven distribution of labor among student activists and, subsequently, the reproduction of racial inequalities within this site.

Author

• Shaeleya Miller, California State University, Long Beach