Social Movements and Sexual Citizenship in Southern Europe

A. Santos

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781137296405
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores the relationship between social movements, sexual citizenship and change in Southern Europe. Providing a comparative analysis about LGBT issues in Italy, Spain and Portugal, it discusses how activism can generate legal, political and cultural impact in post-dictatorial, Catholic and EU-focused countries.

1

Social Movements, Queer Studies and Citizenship: Exploring Theoretical Intersections

This book draws on two major sets of theory: social movement studies, on the one hand, and lesbian, gay and queer studies, on the other. The particular choice of these two bodies of literature results from the specificity of the topic discussed in the book – the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) social movement – which clearly contains aspects of interest both to social movement theorists (and activists) and to lesbian, gay and queer studies theorists (and activists).

The two main bodies of literature are located within a wider interest in issues of citizenship, particularly as the notion has shifted to become more inclusive after feminist theoretical and political significant input (Halsaa et al., 2012). In addition, because issues of family and personal life sit at the core of LGBT demands in Italy, Portugal and Spain, notions of bodily, intimate and sexual citizenship will be explored towards the end of the chapter.

Early approaches to collective action

Social mobilization and collective action are permanent features of contemporary western human history. Influenced by the work of Gustave Le Bon and his understanding of “the crowd” as chaos and disruption (Le Bon, 1903; Ruggiero and Montagna, 2008), the early theoretical approaches to collective action dealt with social movements as something deviant and transitory; social movements were to be feared, rather than celebrated (Goodwin and Jasper, 2003: 5). These included the Marxist approach, the collective behaviour approach and the structural-functionalist approach to social movements.

Emerging from the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the late 19th century, the Marxist approach focused on the economic aspects of the binary oppressor/oppressed. Marxism, in its classical forms, argued that class struggle was the main focus of conflict in society, opposing the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. This perspective – developed by Georg Lukács and Antonio Gramsci among others – helped to develop the concepts of resistance, consciousness, interest and mobilization (Ruggiero and Montagna, 2008). Yet it bypassed the existence of heterogeneity within each of these two groups. Issues of gender, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation or religion were not regarded as important as class.

A new theoretical trend emerged in the 1940s, the collective behaviour approach, whose predecessors are to be found in the 1920s, especially among symbolic interactionists like G. H. Mead (1863–1931). The landmark work is Herbert Blumer’s Outline of Collective Behaviour, written in 1934, which highlighted the existence of creative processes ruling collective behaviour and, more specifically, interaction. Change is the main topic for these theorists and they looked to collective action as a way of producing new rules and solidarities. Blumer, for instance, defined social movements as “collective enterprises to establish a new order of life” (1995: 60). His work considered the impact of emotions and identities, while downplaying the role of the societal context (Crossley, 2002).

Talcott Parsons’ study of fascist movements in 1942 aimed to explain the rationale underpinning apparently unplanned behaviour. But quite differently from Blumer, Parsons was interested in isolating the structural determinants of collective action, rather than identifying patterns of interaction. Therefore, Parsons led the way to a third theoretical perspective about social movements – the structural-functionalist approach.¹ This perspective emphasized the existence of structural strains that precipitated collective action. Social movements would play a specific role linked to the need to accommodate tension within the wider system. While proposing a wider interpretation of the macrolevels of conflict and mobilization, this approach failed to provide an explanation for the ability of actors to break these cyclical and rather deterministic histories of social tension.²

And then came the 1960s with its explosive variety of collective action, hardly anticipated, let alone explained, by the previous theories.

After the 1960s: contemporary perspectives on social movements

Deep in every discussion of collective action stirs the lava of a volcanic eruption: collective action is about power and politics; it inevitably raises the questions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, hope and hopelessness; the very setting of the problem is likely to include judgements about who has the right to act, and what good it does.

(Tilly, 1978: 5)

During the 1960s, European and North American theorists began to recognize that previous approaches were no longer capturing the increasing complexity of social struggles. New issues demanded to be taken into account. Both in the USA and Europe different critical reviews of the former approaches took shape.³

The North American approach to social movements presented a critique of the structural-functionalist school. There are two main and often connected trends to consider – the political process approach and the resource mobilization theory. The political process approach placed its emphasis on the relationship between institutional political actors and protest, including electoral instability, influential allies, conflictual elites, processes of decision-making and agenda-setting, and geographic decentralization (Della Porta and Diani, 1999; McAdam et al., 2001; Tarrow, 1994). For Tarrow (1994), there are two basic dimensions to consider when evaluating opportunities for collective action: the stability of ideological divisions within a given political system (the less flexible they are, the greater the motivation for action) and autonomous action within the system (people who are not institutionalized). Although this approach pays great attention to the interaction between new and traditional actors, emphasizing the institutionalized systems of interest representation, several problems derive from its political reductionism, as Della Porta and Diani (1999) point out. First, it bypasses the structural origins of protest (i.e. it disregards the wider context of inequality and oppression operating under dictatorships, for instance). Then, it does not provide a set of indicators to measure the degree of openness/ closure of political systems. Additionally, causal explanation seems absent because it does not state which political opportunities are relevant, nor how to connect the political structure to the impact it has on specific social movements. Finally, it is not clear as to which parcels of collective action can be explained by specific variables of the political opportunity structure.

The resource mobilization theory, emerging in the 1970s, consists of a second set of perspectives presenting a critique of structuralfunctionalism. It emphasizes the costs and benefits of collective action, considering the material (income, services, jobs, people) and non-material (authority, faith, skills, trust, friendship, moral engagement) resources available to social actors in a specific time-place situation (Oberschall, 1973). Therefore, a collective movement is “a rational, purposeful and organized action” and resources are “conditions which enable discontent to be transformed into mobilisation” (Della Porta and Diani, 1999: 8). The “purposeful and organized” character of social movements, according to resource mobilization theorists, is also evident in the definition of social movements offered by Craig Jenkins as “extensions of institutionalized actions [ . . . ] that attempt to alter elements of social structure and /or reward distribution of society [ . . . ] or represent the interests of groups excluded from the polity” (Jenkins, 1983: 529). Charles Tilly, another resource mobilization theorist, defines mobilization as the “acquisition of collective control over resources” and argues that “contending for power means employing mobilized resources to influence others” (1978: 78), suggesting it is possible to measure mobilization. However, this approach minimizes important aspects of collective engagement, such as the role of emotions and the ability of “dispossessed” social groups to mobilize (Della Porta and Diani, 1999: 9). According to Piven and Cloward, this is due to an overstatement of the “structural requisites of protest” (1995: 148). These authors accuse the resource mobilization approach of being biased towards a “normalized, overorganized, and conventionalized conception of political protest” (1995: 162). It also downplays the role of culture as an important factor outside this cost-benefit game and provides a static image of strategic choice, as if choice could remain “uncontaminated by negotiation” (Foweraker, 1995: 18). Another critique of resource mobilization theory is put forward by Sasha Roseneil (1995), who argues that this approach overstates the role of strategy, reduces collective action to instrumental rationality and ignores the “cognitive praxis”⁴ of social movements.

Despite insightful inputs related to cycles (Tarrow, 1995) and repertoires of contention (Tilly, 1978), Alberto Melucci offered a pertinent critique of these approaches:

When these approaches are used to provide a general interpretation of “a movement as such”, what disappears from the scene in all the three cases [collective behaviour, political process and resource mobilisation] is collective action as social production, as a purposive, meaningful and relational orientation.

(1996: 386, my emphasis)

Melucci is arguing for a new definition of social movement as social, purposive, meaningful and relational collective action, aspects that inform my understanding of LGBT movements as relational and dynamic. In fact, European scholars offer a different theoretical approach to social movements, which is where this book is located in terms of social movement studies: new social movement theory. Offering a critique of the Marxist school (Touraine, 1981), the new social movement approach attempted to provide explanation for the social movements, which emerged in the 1960s and that were connected to a vast array of issues, including cultural identity, peace and environmental movements, rather than being exclusively class-oriented. The new social movement approach mirrors a shift from party-based action towards a wider political participation, linked to the emergence of issue-based politics (Todd and Taylor, 2004). For scholars such as Alain Touraine, Claus Offe and Alberto Melucci, social movements could not be represented as actions of homogenous groups of people. Complex and often overlapping and/or competing forms of identity lead to protest and conflict, and diversity must be taken into account.

Alain Touraine accuses the so-called old social movements of being violent and revolutionary, rather than democratic (1995: 391). Whereas “old” social movements were class-based, targeting the state, operating through formal and hierarchical (vertical) organizations within the political system, seeking political integration through negotiation and inclined towards material concerns, the new social movements are described as rejecting hierarchies and formal models of organization, promoting direct action instead of negotiation, being value-driven, embodying post-material values, favouring collective claims on identity and emancipation, aspiring to social change and moving in a civil society framework (Foweraker, 1995: 40–42).

However, it is arguable whether these social movements are really new. For a start, social actors are not static: “as historical contexts change, so do people’s ways of seeing and acting in the world, as well as the theories that seek to explain both actions and their contexts” (Escobar and Alvarez, 1992: 8). Some theorists argue that new social movements, rather than being radically new, recover old struggles and articulate them in a different way, politicizing previously private issues (Scott, 1990).

There is strong evidence of the innovative strategies and discourses developed by social movements since the late 1960s. Social movements had to adjust themselves to new demands, new conditions and new possibilities. The context of social conflict post-1968 focused on issues of identity, equality and difference – what Inglehart labelled as post-material values (Inglehart, 1977) – rather than on labour conditions or on economic disadvantage. In this process of adjustment, new forms of creative resistance also emerged, highlighting important differences when compared with traditional ways of operating in collective action (Appadurai, 2006). Jackie Smith, for instance, analyses the innovative repertoires of social movements, such as the creation of transnationally oriented collective action and electronic activism (Smith, 2001). Therefore, besides the shifting issues, forms of action also vary widely.

According to Touraine – one of the main figures in the new social movement approach – contemporary societies are “programmed societies”, complex systems of action in which power is linked to the control of cognitive and symbolic resources. The ultimate goals are self-management and the social control of “historicity”,⁵ in a “hierarchized set of systems of action” (1981: 25). The emergence of a new generation of social movements is directly linked to three main features of these programmed societies: rather than reproduction, management of production and social life through policy and political struggles; rather than inherited tradition, the focus is on transformation; power is everywhere, rather than seen as a unified body⁶ (Touraine, 1981). Therefore, to succeed as an organized collective force, new social movements must identify the power sources to recognize their formal opponents. The author uses the example of authoritarian regimes to provide an insightful metaphor. Thus, dictatorships as totalitarian regimes:

do not box in or crush social movements or, more generally, social actors. Rather, they pervert them, or even destroy or dissolve them. The horses do not race the day the barriers are raised, because they have been locked up for too long. They lacked oxygen, many have died, and others do not have the strength to run or are afraid of the whippings they used to receive.

(Touraine, 1995: 381)

Identifying sources of hegemonic power is a major task for the development of tools of resistance, rather than allowing entrenched feelings of fear or alienation take the leading role (Freire, 1997).

New social movement theories focused on the expansion of what counts as political (i.e. the processes through which areas of social life become politicized). The link between new social movements and the political sphere is also pointed out by Scott, who argues that:

The personal is not political merely in the sense that power relations are embedded in personal ones, but also in the sense that demands for personal autonomy, freedom, etc., are political in nature. Furthermore, some aspects of new social movement ideology are quite clearly concerned with existing political institutions, and can very well be understood in terms of citizenship, representation, and so on.

(Scott, 1990: 23)

According to Touraine, “political action is all pervading: it enters into health service, into sexuality, into education and into energy production” (1981: 7). Later on he argues that programmed societies “judge themselves in truly social and political terms” (1981: 15). However, this is not to convey the idea that social movements are subordinated to political forces. Instead, Touraine stresses the importance of self-management – a notion that he considers as important for new social movements as the categories of social justice and liberty were for previous social struggles – as a signifier for independence and self-determination in terms of decision-making and agenda-setting (1981: 22).

In Offe’s perspective, new social movements constitute an overall political critique of the established order and press for change and alternative systems:

these movements are not just shaped by what they “are” in terms of their social composition, their issues, and demands; they are shaped equally by the ways in which they are perceived, interpreted, and symbolically treated by political elites.

(Offe, 1985: 863)

What Offe suggests is an understanding of collective action that goes beyond the social movement specific remit, to include the ways in which it is perceived, represented and/or addressed by outsiders. This approach is particularly useful when examining changing perceptions and representations of the LGBT movement in parliamentary debates and the media, for instance, as discussed in chapters 3 and 5.

The greatest challenge posed to traditional ways of doing politics lies in Offe’s proposal for a radical democracy, emphasizing participation against representation, and interpersonal solidarity and autonomy against bureaucracy and material advantages. Accordingly, social movements are expressions of inclusion, participation and fluidity, in which the social rules over the economic (Offe, 1985).

Following Offe, Melucci argues that social movements aim to resist domination and repression, seeking to maintain a high level of autonomy and to denounce and oppose hegemonic manipulation (Della Porta and Dian...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Social Movements, Queer Studies and Citizenship: Exploring Theoretical Intersections
• 2. Political, Legal and Cultural Change in Southern Europe
• 3. LGBT Activism, Politicians and Political Change
• 4. Legal Change and the Juridification of LGBT Activism
• 5. News Is Power: Activism, the Media and Cultural Change
• 6. Overcoming the Dichotomy: The Syncretic Activist Approach
• Conclusion: What Difference Do Social Movements Make?
• Appendix: The Portuguese Case Study
• Notes
• References
• Index