Movements, Masks, and Their Meanings: Identity Covers and Subversive Performances of Anonymity

• In Event: 1529 - Mind and Matter: Synthesizing Cognition and Materiality

Abstract

In this paper, I analyze the strategic performances of anonymity by various social movements. I blend the interpretive tools of cognitive sociology and the strong program in cultural sociology, the analytic sensitivities of symbolic interactionism, and the methodological perspective of formal sociology to explore the ways that social movement actors use material covers that transform individuals into meaningful collective forces in order to perform resistance to power and advance social change. I focus on cases that span the realm of political ideology to show that both the general material form and particular aesthetic design of social movement masks impact the meanings that social movement actors work to convey. To this end, I analyze the historical work of the Ku Klux Klan. I also analyze the activity of the hacker network that bears the very name “Anonymous” as well as the contemporary anarcho network, Antifa, and various underground or guerilla movements from different periods and contexts, including the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN), or Zapatistas. I consider how the masks used by anonymous movement participants allow them to overcome barriers that would otherwise inhibit their ability to express certain seditious positions or engage in insurgent activities. When engaged in subversive anonymous acts, such political performers use their masks and other material covers to undermine dominant cultural codes and meaning systems in order to act out a framework for a counter-society – one they actively advance as an alternative to the dominant, default, or mainstream social order. In this view, the material tools and cultural symbolism of subversive action, as mobilized via the anonymous mode of performance, makes and defines particular antagonisms as much as it expresses underlying social tensions. Subversive actors use their masked performances to define issues, events, and experiences and make the meanings of oppression, injustice, and emancipation.

Author

• Thomas DeGloma, CUNY-Hunter College