Meaning Work in the Movement that Cannot Move: Preservative Pragmatism in China’s LGBTQ+ Movements

• In Event: Collective Behavior and Social Movements Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 4: Participants, Allies, and Opponents: The Landscape of LGBTQ Movements

Abstract

In recent years, China’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ+) movements have been well-captured by abeyance, which is ‘a holding process by which movements sustain themselves in nonreceptive political environments and provide continuity from one stage of mobilization to another’ (Taylor, 1989, p.761). Under abeyance, the significant shifts in the environment provoke an existential quest for meaning; therefore, the ‘meaning work’ becomes salient and crucial for Chinese LGBTQ+ organizers. ‘Meaning work’ is a concept this paper uses to refer to the work that organizers put into constructing and reconstructing the meaningfulness and meaninglessness of their actions and participation within the current environment. This paper inquires: how does such meaning work sustain the continuous participation of organizers under movement abeyance?
Based on 19 months of ethnographic fieldwork, including participant observation and semi-structured interviews with 60 LGBTQ+ organizers, this paper finds the ‘preservative pragmatism’ that Chinese LGBTQ+ organizers adopt to sustain their participation, which is preservative, pragmatic, and partially strategic. ‘Preservative pragmatism’ contains four dimensions, including safe grounding, emotional buffering, agenda reframing, and imagining temporality. Preservative pragmatism shows that organizers emphasize survival, focuses on down-to-earth activities, and very little on ideals. Meanwhile, it also has the preservative side that brings hope, envisioning the future, and granting new meanings to the present. By studying the meaning work of LGBTQ+ organizers, this paper goes beyond the structuralist focus on movement abeyance, and contributes to the meaning-making dimension under movement abeyance. Meanwhile, this study also contributes to the meaning-making literature by pointing out that in social movements, meaning-making is not only instrumental, symbolic, and cultural, but also, existential, which has been significantly understudied in the existing literature.

Author

• Ada Wang, University of Oxford