Gendered Mobilizations and Intersectional Challenges Contemporary Social Movements in Europe and North America
About the book: A long and ongoing challenge for social justice movements has been how to address difference. Traditional strategies have often emphasized universalizing messages and common identities as means of facilitating collective action. Feminist movements, gay liberation movements, racial justice movements, and even labour movements, have all focused predominantly on respective singular dimensions of oppression. Each has called on diverse groups of people to mobilize, but without necessarily acknowledging or grappling with other relevant dimensions of identity and oppression. While focusing on commonality can be an effective means of mobilization, universalist messages can also obscure difference and can serve to exclude and marginalize groups in already precarious positions. Scholars and activists, particularly those located at the intersection of these movements, have long advocated for more inclusive approaches that acknowledge the significance and complexity of different social locations, with mixed success.
Gendered Mobilizations and Intersectional Challenges provides a much-needed intersectional analysis of social movements in Europe and North America. With an emphasis on gendered mobilization, it looks at movements traditionally understood and/or classified as singularly gendered as well as those organized around other dimensions of identity and oppression or at the intersection of multiple dimensions.
About the author: Celeste Montoya is Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is Director of the Miramontes Arts and Science Program.
Praise:
Gendered Mobilizations and Intersectional Challenges is essential reading, from the comprehensive theoretical overview in the introduction, to the diverse and insightful case studies presented. Making intersectionality much more than a fashionable word, this collection examines the processes and practices that spur or block collaborative social movement strategies across many differences of status, political power and identity in the US and Europe. This book is perfectly timed to enhance activists’ and scholars’ appreciation of why doing intersectional movement work is essential to support these democracies in the face of growing attacks on inclusion and equality.
-Myra Marx Ferree, Alice H. Cook Professor of Sociology (emerita), University of Wisconsin-Madison
This important volume—the first of its kind—brings into focus the challenges and opportunities of intersectional practices within gendered movements, and in a broad range of contemporary social movements, from Occupy, to Solidarity with refugees and BlackLivesMatter. Gendered Mobilizations and Intersectional Challenges is a crucial contribution for our understanding of intersectionality, that will help both scholars and activists identify and understand a plurality of intersectional voices.
-Eléonore Lépinard, Associate Professor, Centre for Gender Studies, University of Lausanne