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Feminist Movements in Time and Space: An Introduction
Abstract
This chapter provides a comprehensive introduction to the systematic study of feminist movements across various European countries from 2010 to 2021. The chapter outlines the significant contributions of feminist mobilizations, highlighting their innovative approaches to organizational models, repertoires of action, and collective framing. It also addresses the existing gaps in social movement studies concerning feminist movements, advocating for a more inclusive and intersectional approach. By examining feminist movements in eight countries—Denmark, France, Greece, Italy, Poland, Slovenia, Spain, and Turkey—the chapter sets the stage for a comparative analysis of third-wave feminism within different national and temporal contexts. The chapter further details the theoretical model used throughout the book, emphasizing the influence of neoliberal capitalism and the socio-political backlash on contemporary feminist action. Methodologically, the research draws on a mix of literature reviews, interviews with activists, and a shared approach across the different case studies.
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The Handbook presents a most updated and comprehensive exploration of social movement research. It not only maps, but also expands the field of social movement studies, taking stock of recent developments in cognate areas of studies, within and beyond sociology and political science. While structured around traditional social movement concepts, each section combines the mapping of the state of the art with attempts to broaden our knowledge of social movements beyond classic theoretical agendas, and to identify the contribution that social movement studies can give to other fields of knowledge. The Handbook starts by presenting some of the main core theoretical perspectives in the field. A section exploring some of the major social transformations that have recently affected social movements is then followed by one devoted to the analysis of micro dynamics of collective action. At the meso-level, movements’ cultures, organizational models, and repertoires of action are covered. Finally, the last sections address the political and non-political opportunities for social movements’ development, as well as at social movements’ effects on their environment.
What are the varieties of gender regimes? The focus is the theory of varieties of gender regimes—domestic and public regimes; and, within the public, both neoliberal and social democratic varieties—and pathways to alternative forms. Is this model sufficient to encompass the turn to less progressive forms and multiple global regions or are further varieties needed? At stake here is the distinction between modern and premodern, public and domestic, the meaning of conservative, the concept of the family, and the theorization of violence. The article offers engagement with critics and further development of the theory.
This article introduces the concept of women’s cause field, which refers to the relational structure of groups mostly devoted to the advancement of women in a variety of social settings, cutting across the line between civil society and political institutions. Unlike the women’s movement, the women’s cause field encompasses a set of both extra-institutional and intra-institutional mobilizing structures. This concept expands on scholarship on institutional activism, and on field and network theory. Beyond the case of the women’s movement, it provides a new framework – the notion of cause field – to capture the architecture of specialized collective protest in the era of movement institutionalization, distinct from, and complementary to, the concept of social movement.
The article analyses the participation of young people in emerging social movements, focusing on the experience of the Italian Non Una Di Meno (NUDM) movement combatting male violence against women. Challenging scholarly assumptions of growing youth apathy in democracies, the analysis reveals high levels of participation on the part of the younger population engaged in gender-related struggles. Hit by both conservative and austerity policies associated with the economic and political crisis, feminist and LGBTQI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersexual) Millennials reacted by increasing their involvement in contentious politics. In the protest arena, they have crossed paths with older generations, activating processes of exchange, but also intergenerational tensions. Based on original qualitative data from ten semi-structured interviews with movement activists in Florence and Bologna, this piece of research sheds light on the role of young people in the birth and evolution of NUDM, and the relationship between different generations of activists within this movement. More specifically, it explains continuities and discontinuities between veterans and younger activists’ sources of theoretical inspirations, organizational models and mobilization resources, strategic priorities and action repertoires. Millennials embrace intersectional feminism and queer theory; opt for grassroots, horizontal organizing; adopt a conflictual attitude towards the state, and dialogical, introspective dynamics within the movement. Intergenerational disagreements especially relate to sex work, and surrogate motherhood.
This article aims to achieve a better understanding of how online networks contribute to the organization and the symbolic production of social movements using big data coming from social media platforms. It traces and compares online social and semantic networks that emerged on Twitter during two protest events organized by the feminist Italian movement Non Una Di Meno (NUDM) - a national strike organized on March 8th, 2017 and a march organized on November 25th of the same year. Our results suggests that, over time, online networks created on Twitter remain sparse and centralized around the movement handle but that they continue to host an interactive dialogue between the movement, its activists, and supporters. Also, over time, participants to online conversations around NUDM tend to use Twitter to discuss different aspects of the mobilization - paying more attention to the spaces of the protest during the strike and to the issue of gender-based violence in November.
Social movements are not distinct and self-contained; rather, they grow from and give birth to other movements, work in coalition with other movements, and influence each other indirectly through their effects on the larger cultural and political environment. Building on both political process and collective identity perspectives, this paper uses a case study of the women's movement's impact on U.S. peace movement activity in the 1980s to develop a theory of movement-movement influence. We argue that this influence is shown by: 1) the adoption of feminist ideological frames by the peace movement, 2) the spread of the women's movement's tactical innovations into peace protest, 3) increased presence of women in leadership positions in both the institutionally-oriented and direct action wings of the movement; and 4) the adoption of organizational structures that built on feminist processes designed to avoid hierarchy. Drawing data from both movements at local and national levels, we suggest four mechanisms of transmission between the movements: 1) organizational coalitions, 2) overlapping social movement communities; 3) shared personnel; and 4) broader changes in the external environment. Social movement spillover effects have implications for our understanding of both the continuity and impact of social protest movements.
In the world of feminist activism, the time is ripe for reflection and review. We need to ask why change is not happening, what works, and what is next. This article points to the fact that while women have made many gains in the last decade, policies that successfully promote women's empowerment and gender equality are not institutionalised in the day-to-day routines of State, nor in international development agencies. We argue for changes which re-delineate who does what, what counts, who gets what, and who decides. We also argue for changes in the institutions that mediate resources, and women's access, voice, and influence. We outline key challenges, as well as ways to envision change and strengthen the capacity of State and development organisations to deliver better on women's rights.
Shows how social change affects political mobilization indirectly through the restructuring of existing power relations, comparing the impact of the ecology, gay rights, peace, and women's movements in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. Of interest to students and researchers in political science and sociology.
Women's movements are among the most continuous, consequential, and diverse social movements. Participants in women's movements respond to gendered structures of oppression and opportunity to mobilize for a variety of goals. Targets of women's movements include institutional, cultural, and interactional arenas. Perhaps more than any other movement, women's movement participants rely on developing oppositional cultures, communities, and collective identities both as social change in and of itself and as tactics to create other types of social change. Across the globe, individuals of various racial/ethnic, national, sexual, and gender identities (including genderqueer and trans women) participate in and lead women's movements. While many women's movements embrace a feminist identity and seek to advance the social position of women, it is not always the case. Women also mobilize around claims that are unrelated to or in opposition to feminism.
Feminist movements, in the broadest sense, are collective efforts to improve the situation of women, and they have emerged in most parts of the world, beginning in the mid‐nineteenth century and continuing into the present. Most contemporary feminist movements are intersectional, linking gender to racial/ethnic, class, and other categories of difference. Feminism has influenced other social movements, such as the civil rights, Chicano, peace, environmental, global justice, reproductive rights, LGBTQ, Occupy, and Black Lives Matter movements, through its ideologies, collective identities, tactics, and organizational forms. Scholarship on feminist movements has focused on their origins; different waves or cycles; feminist ideologies, collective identities, tactics, and organizational forms across time and place; and the impact of feminism on other social movements, on political and cultural change, and on the structure of gender relations.
This article explores the role of gender in the social movements of the Greek crisis. Building on extensive fieldwork, we observe a gradual shift from claim‐based, street mobilizations to locally embedded solidarity initiatives that addressed social reproduction needs in relation to food, health, education, and housing. We illustrate how this foregrounded social reproductive practices; challenged traditional divisions of labor and the temporalities and spatialities of movement organizing; and brought forward the value of building intersectional coalitions and of embracing affect and radical care. Despite the lack of explicitly articulated feminist values and principles, we argue that many social movements of the crisis therefore have cultivated situated and implicit modes of feminist solidarity that warrant further attention. Accordingly, we discuss the implications for feminist organizing and radical social movements more broadly.
This article studies the experiences of gender experts in international institutions of governance and examines their interactions with multiple actors in the governance system as they negotiate their authority to act as experts. Moving beyond binaries, such as those on the inside of hegemonic institutions versus those on the outside, or co‐optation versus activism, the analysis uses processes of instrumentalization as a vantage point to lay out the multiple paths emerging in these politics of engagement. The article frames politics of engagement in terms of micropolitical tensions, ambivalences and contradictions that unfold in these interactions. It first argues that the boundaries that exist between inside and outside institutions are not clear cut because actors circulate between them. The study shows how gender experts instrumentalize their own life and career trajectories, navigating between advocacy and governance, to enhance their power in current institutional settings. It then focuses on instrumentalist discourses and traces their emergence in unequal negotiations. It demonstrates how gender experts can become part of the processes that they also critique. Finally, the study analyses strategies in which experts instrumentalize institutional inequalities to their advantage to produce diverse political possibilities with open‐ended outcomes.
Social movement studies and studies on civil society and, related to them, studies on voluntarism and the third sector, are burgeoning fields of knowledge, which have, however, only rarely interacted with each other. In fact, social movement scholars have devoted little attention to the concept of civil society, not even when addressing issues of “social capital”. Vice versa, civil society scholars have, with few exceptions, not considered social movements as cognate phenomena. This is all the more puzzling as there is instead ample theoretical and empirical overlapping, which calls for the building of bridges between these fields of study. In political and media discourse some organizations, individuals or events are defined interchangeably as linked to either social movements or civil society. In the social sciences, however, the core conceptualizations have pointed towards different elements as characterizing these phenomena. In particular, social movement studies can contribute to the literature on voluntarism a toolkit of concepts and theory oriented to understand social and political conflicts, learning from the literature on voluntarism about conceptions and practices of solidarity. In this article, I will address some (potential) interactions between the two fields, looking at differences and similarities in the conceptualizations of the two phenomena as well as in their empirical analysis as they have developed in time. I will first of all address conceptualizations in these cognate fields with attention to their theoretical developments. Then, I will point towards some recent trends that have blurred the distinction between social movements and civil society, voluntarism and third sector policies, looking in particular not only at more established analyses of NGOization of social movements, but also, and especially, of what can be defined as an SMOization of civil society—that is, the hybridization of more established civil society organizations into social movement organizations, especially when facing politicization in times of crises and increasing criminalization of solidarity activities.
This article reviews contemporary academic debates about feminist organising in and against neoliberalism, which we see as structured by a co-optation–resistance dichotomy. We outline three narratives: a high-profile ‘strong’ co-optation thesis; a more nuanced co-optation discourse; and an emergent counter-narrative of resistance. While sympathetic to the latter two, we critically unpack the account of neoliberalism, of feminist protagonists and of where feminist activism takes place in all three. We sketch out ways in which neoliberalism and the ‘who’ and ‘where’ of feminism might be considered differently, and argue overall for the need to move beyond the co-optation–resistance dichotomy.
In Global Democracy, Social Movements, and Feminism Catherine Eschle examines the relationship between social movements and democracy in social and political thought in the context of debates about the exclusions and mobilizations generated by gender hierarchies and the impact of globalization. Eschle considers a range of approaches in social and political thought, from long-standing liberal, republican, Marxist and anarchist traditions, through post-Marxist and post-modernist innovations and recent efforts to theorize democracy and social movements at a global level. The author turns to feminist theory and movement practices--and particularly to black and third world feminist interventions--in debates about the democratization of feminism itself. Eschle discusses the ways in which such debates are increasingly played out on a global scale as feminists grapple with the implication of globalization for movement organization. The author then concludes with a discussion of the relevance of these feminist debates for the theorization of democracy more generally in an era of global transformation.
This chapter examines the role of women within the family as a source of social productivity, that is, of surplus value making. In pre-capitalist patriarchal society the home and the family were central to agricultural and artisan production. Women, children and the aged lost the relative power that derived from the family's dependence on their labor, which was seen to be social and necessary. In order to see the housewife as central, it was first of all necessary to analyze briefly how capitalism has created the modern family and the housewife's role in it, by destroying the types of family group or community which previously existed. The “unreliability” of women in the home and out of it has grown rapidly since then, and runs directly against the factory as regimentation organized in time and space, and against the social factory as organization of the reproduction of labor power.
This book, with fifteen articles, draws on examples of homeworkers from around the world. The collection is divided into three parts, the first of which consists of an introduction and two overview essays. The six case studies in Part II explore the diverse experiences of housewives, others, and workers who earn wages at home. These chapters derive from field work, interviews, survey data, and economic social analysis. Part III of this book addresses the practices of governments at international, national and local levels in (re)creating home based work as a marginal, supplemental, low-paid activity and the emerging efforts of home-worker organisations to counter such practices. Some of the individual papers are abstracted in International Development Abstracts. -after Editors
We augment the survey-based studies of attitudes toward feminism with comparative, contextual perspectives emphasizing the importance of social structure and culture. In doing so, we are able to assess the relative merits of two very different structural theories. Most researchers implicitly assume a simple linear effect of social context on attitudes. On the other hand, some early works on American conservatism suggest to us that status discontent may be a better explanation. We explicate these two approaches and derive a series of testable hypotheses for each. We then examine the validity of these theories utilizing data from nine European nations.
This article traces the divergent paths followed by women in East and West European countries in their attempt to participate in politics. Women in Western Europe have struggled for rights which seemed to be granted easily to women in the East; women remained very marginal to decision-making in most of these countries, although Scandinavian women were far ahead of others in this respect. Western feminists therefore admired emancipated Communist women, thought to be far more integrated into their political systems than were women in the capitalist West. Women in the East did benefit from a greater degree of public commitment to equality and from more social rights, but in many ways male/female roles in both the workplace and the home remained untouched. With moves towards greater integration in the European Community and with the upheavals in East Central Europe, what models for political participation are there now for women? Without Communism as a reference point, do women in the East want to align themselves with the values of the capitalist West? Would they not have much to lose? Will the increased importance of the European Parliament make a difference for women in the West?
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