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Social movements experience periods of intense activity and periods of abeyance, when collective action is very weak because of an inhospitable political climate. Non-democracies are extreme cases of hostile political environments for social movements. Drawing on a case study of the women’s movement in Franco’s Spain (mid-1930s to 1975) based on an analysis of published documents and 17 interviews, this paper argues that some non-democracies force social movements that existed prior to dictatorships into a period of abeyance and shape collective organizing in terms of location, goals, and repertoire of activities. Some social movements under prolonged non-democratic rule manage to link and transmit the aims, repertoire of activities, and collective identity of pre-dictatorship activists to those of post-dictatorship activists. This occurs mainly through cultural activities.

This chapter analyzes the role of grassroots organizations as natural helping systems for women’s empowerment in the rural areas of central Mexico. For almost three decades, productive projects have been the preferred strategy by the Mexican government in order to alleviate extreme poverty and promote women’s empowerment. Even if the impact of productive projects on women’s empowerment has been limited, grassroots organizations are created in order to have access to financial resources that have promoted the collective dimension of women’s empowerment. Through semi-structured interviews and participatory observation, this study retrieves the experience of women’s leadership, frustrated by changing public policy, local corruption, and political use of the social policy. In those difficult circumstances, grassroots organizations are fundamental tools for women’s well-being as they promote a specific understanding of empowerment, where family, community, and relatedness are values more important than competition and individualistic achievements.

Age and gender intersect, often lowering quality of life for older women. Microlevel patterns include ignoring older women in one’s presence, flattening their identities to only their status as older women. Macrolevel patterns include the erasure of older women, with cultural (media) representations, organizational practices and policies and social policies that ignore the existence of older women or distort their characteristics in ways that diminish the likelihood of equitable treatment. Using autoethnography, conversations with a small group of older women, and scholarly and popular literature, we describe varieties of microlevel experiences and responses to them. Focusing on macrolevel erasure, we describe some of the effects of combined ageism and sexism, and we look at activists’ and organizational responses aimed at changing public awareness and attitudes toward age and gendering. Policy changes are suggested to make the social treatment of older women more equitable, including attention to housing, health care, and public education. We note specific past achievements that demonstrate policy change is possible.

This project examines how queer and trans zines have complicated the notion of traditional patient narratives and provides insight into the issues that LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning) populations face when accessing healthcare information and resources. Historically, information about queer and trans identities has been suppressed in the United States, reflecting dominant social values that pathologize queer identities. Using health-related zines housed at the Queer Zine Archive Project as a case study, this project investigates how queer and trans zines about healthcare have resisted these homophobic and transphobic ideologies. The analysis reveals that queer and trans zinesters use their feelings of impatience with the medical industry to fuel communal solutions to accessing and providing health care information.

The purpose of this paper is to review the legacy of sociologist Irving Kenneth Zola in bringing the body into social science research and making visible and dismantling social structured barriers to hearing and speaking and living as fully human.

It begins with an examination of Zola’s experience of “being sexy” in his book, Missing Pieces (1982). It considers what a visual sociological focus on “being sexy” can contribute to understanding structured barriers to living as fully human after the emergence of this field in the 1990s and 2000s.

It provides two examples of the use of video cameras in understanding the daily experiences of adults using wheelchairs and children with asthma that continue the embodied work begun by Zola.

Embodied sociological research can be a strategy for social and political change.

In 1992, a Kaq’chikel woman, Vera, told a tale of shapeshifting and dreams to me and the woman with whom she was staying while teaching weaving classes in Northern California. Laughingly, we were exploring the question of power between man and woman. Asked why she, a young woman, was the first to leave her town, Santa Catarina, to travel to North America, she cited a “lineage of power” back to her grandparents that turns on gender and reproductive roles. The following is a synopsis:The Nawal (Shapechanging) WifeHer grandfather had first a bad wife. This wife had no children. She was a woman who went out into the night and ran wild as a lion. The husband grew to be afraid and suspicious, even though she gave him something to make him sleep as if he were dead. One night he awoke anyway; his wife was not beside him. He went out of the house, taking his machete. He waits and he waits, and then it is big, crying “aieee”…“aieee” in the night and it is coming close, it is coming closer and he slashes with his machete, he slashes his machete and she dies. He knew and yet did not “know” that it was his wife. The head of the animal, which was now human, uttered words. She did not finally die until she was returned to the house of her father the next day.

Using data from a feminist discourse analysis of comments on Facebook news articles, this research outlines backlash and regulatory practices directed towards youth activists Greta Thunberg, X González and Malala Yousafzai. A conceptual framework of semiotic violence highlights how these comments function to silence, delegitimise, vilify and punish sociopolitically active girls who challenge the status quo. The first mode of semiotic violence works to symbolically annihilate girl activists by silencing or rendering their political contributions invisible. The most obvious manifestation of this is instructing girls to shut up and go away. Additionally, their activism is ignored by refusals to acknowledge it as appropriate through suggestions they focus on gender-normative activities, such as domestic chores, playing with dolls and finding boyfriends. Undermining girls’ agency by describing them as puppets, mouthpieces, script readers, pawns and tools is also common. Here, girls’ contributions are rendered invisible through implications that they are being brainwashed and manipulated. The second mode of semiotic violence reinforces ideologies that girls are not politically competent and punishes them for being outspoken. This includes explicitly discrediting girls’ knowledge and abilities. Regulating their emotionality is also prevalent. This is consistent with Liberal political theory which justified women’s exclusion from public life by associating men with reason and women with emotion. Finally, insults degrade them for transgressing into a space demarcated as an adult and masculine realm. The semiotic violence directed towards these ‘girl power’ figures highlights that many people do not believe girls have the right to assert their sociopolitical opinion.

Relations between Indigenous women and the Australian women’s movement have never been easy. For some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women the white women’s movement has seemed irrelevant to the real struggles in Aboriginal women’s lives, which have tended to be more politically aligned with Indigenous struggles more broadly. Many Aboriginal women have viewed white feminists as insensitive to their own role in Australia’s colonial history and the implications of this for contemporary intercultural relations. In response to such criticism, many white feminists have struggled with the challenge of effective cross cultural engagement and collaboration.

This chapter brings an intersectional analysis to bear in an effort to understand these challenges, developing a framing of agonistic processes of collective identity as a way of thinking about the potentially productive role of conflict in social movements. Through an examination of Indigenous and non-Indigenous responses to a particular policy framework, the chapter suggests that feminist interventions focussing on the negative, racist impacts of the policy have tended to neglect the gendered dimensions of the underlying problem. As a result these arguments risk neglecting (some) women’s lived experiences.

Activists understand that achieving social reform via advocacy campaigns requires competencies in a wide range of cultural and political venues. However, differences in movement organizations’ identities and subsequent strategy choices often lead to inter-organizational conflict that detracts from achieving the desired reform goals. In this study, the argument is presented that the exchange of resources, such as proficiencies and skills derived from organizational specialization, in combination with strong personal ties between the organizations’ leadership structure, which forge a degree of trust despite ideological differences, will lead to cooperation. To understand when groups engage in strategic resource exchange and inter-organizational cooperation within a particular issue field, several women’s rights action campaigns organized by women’s groups in New Delhi, India are analyzed. The qualitative data utilized in this chapter consist of in-depth interviews with members of several women’s groups as well as organizational documents; thus, enabling a process-tracing approach to support the argument that personal ties drive the formation of informal inter-group coalition building to advance women’s rights in India.