Reflexivity in Mobilization: Gender and Memory as Cultural Features of Women's Mobilization in Vieques, 1999-2003

2010 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-97
Author(s):  
Roberto Vélez-Vélez

This article explores the significance of reflexivity as a cultural process in social movements. It examines the roles that gender and memory played in mobilizing women in the antimilitary movement in Vieques, Puerto Rico, between 1999-2003. In particular, the analysis focuses on the articulations and actions undertaken by the Alianza de Mujeres Viequenses. While some emerging research stresses the novelty of women's participation in the latest effort to remove the U.S. Navy from this island, none have operationalized the event in a theoretical context and highlighted key nuances. This article engages literatures on the significance of gender in the mobilization process as well as the cultural nature of remembrance and its significance in the meaning-making process for collective actors. It does so through an examination of the mobilization of women in the antimilitary movement. Furthermore it argues for the acknowledgement of reflexivity in the examination of claims articulation for mobilization.

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Varela-Flores ◽  
◽  
H. Vázquez-Rivera ◽  
F. Menacker ◽  
Y. Ahmed ◽  
...  

Author(s):  
Julilly Kohler-Hausmann

In 1970s America, politicians began “getting tough” on drugs, crime, and welfare. These campaigns helped expand the nation's penal system, discredit welfare programs, and cast blame for the era's social upheaval on racialized deviants that the state was not accountable to serve or represent. This book sheds light on how this unprecedented growth of the penal system and the evisceration of the nation's welfare programs developed hand in hand. The book shows that these historical events were animated by struggles over how to interpret and respond to the inequality and disorder that crested during this period. When social movements and the slowing economy destabilized the U.S. welfare state, politicians reacted by repudiating the commitment to individual rehabilitation that had governed penal and social programs for decades. In its place, they championed strategies of punishment, surveillance, and containment. The architects of these tough strategies insisted they were necessary, given the failure of liberal social programs and the supposed pathological culture within poor African American and Latino communities. This book rejects this explanation and describes how the spectacle of enacting punitive policies convinced many Americans that social investment was counterproductive and the “underclass” could be managed only through coercion and force. Spanning diverse institutions and weaving together the perspectives of opponents, supporters, and targets of punitive policies, the book offers new interpretations of dramatic transformations in the modern American state.


2002 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert A. Renken ◽  
W. C. Ward ◽  
I.P. Gill ◽  
Fernando Gómez-Gómez ◽  
Jesús Rodríguez-Martínez ◽  
...  

2021 ◽  
pp. 107780122110260
Author(s):  
Chiara C. Packard

Research has revealed how antiviolence activism can become entangled with the state's punitive agenda, leading to what some have called “carceral feminism.” However, this scholarship focuses primarily on the U.S. context. Additionally, few studies examine the cultural battles about gender-based violence that emerge in television media, a site of cultural struggle and meaning making. This study conducts a quantitative and qualitative content analysis of 46 Indian television panel broadcasts following a highly publicized rape in New Delhi in 2012. I find that elite state actors pursue punitive agendas, but feminists and other panelists engage in discursive resistance to this approach.


2018 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 100-121 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roberto Vélez-Vélez ◽  
Jacqueline Villarrubia-Mendoza

Most research on art and social movements focuses on the representational aspect of art, leaving untouched how artwork informs audiences and actors on the mobilization dynamics permeating the field of action. In this article the authors contend that the analysis of art in social movements should pursue the ways in which collective actors place art as part of their interpretative lens to act upon changing social conditions. The article’s analysis of art around the DREAMers Movement suggests that artwork allows for movement actors to change the limits of their cultural context and affect the repertoires of articulations conceived within that context. This analysis moves beyond the notions of art as representation and presents art as a field to challenge the forms and dynamics of mobilization.


2012 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 92-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Doowon Suh

Most scholars of social movements have been drawn to research on the politically contentious behavior of collective actors because of the conviction that social movements sometimes generate significant historical progress and social change. Yet movement outcome research has been least developed in the literature. This irony emanates from methodological and causal intricacies that fail to clearly explicate how social movements create change. The challenges encompass the heaped typologies, mutual inconsistencies, causal heterogeneities, and conflictive evaluation criteria of movement outcomes. To overcome these quandaries, this paper proposes that (1) any attempt to find an invariant model or general theorization of a movement outcome is inevitably futile; (2) instead, attention to the specific context of time and place in which social movements produce outcomes is necessary; and (3) a comprehensive understanding of the origins of a movement outcome becomes possible when multiple variables are considered and their combined effects are analyzed.


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