JOHN D. MCCARTHY LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD VERTA TAYLOR
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JOHN D. MCCARTHY LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
VERTA TAYLOR*
— 2008 Acceptance Lecture —
CULTURE, IDENTITY, AND EMOTIONS:
STUDYING SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AS IF PEOPLE REALLY MATTER†
Editors Note: In 2007, The Center for the Study of Social Movements at the Univer-
sity of Notre Dame began sponsorship of an annual award named for its first
recipient, John McCarthy. The John D. McCarthy Award for Lifetime Achievement
in the Scholarship of Social Movements and Collective Action has subsequently been
presented to Verta Taylor (2008), Mayer Zald (2009), and Doug McAdam (2010). As
part of each year’s award ceremony, the McCarthy Award winner gives a public
lecture that reflects on her or his past contributions to the field of social movement
research, while also looking forward to promising lines of future inquiry. The pub-
lication in Mobilization of these lectures highlights both the important role recipients
have played in shaping the field of social movement research, as well as their unique
perspectives on where the field is headed. To this end each award winner has gener-
ously collaborated with Mobilization in the publication of an article based on the
original McCarthy Award lecture. We are pleased to offer Verta Taylor’s contri-
bution in this issue. McCarthy Award lectures from other recipients will appear in
future issues as they become available to us.
The field of social movements has changed dramatically over the last thirty years, and the
honor of receiving the second John D. McCarthy Lifetime Achievement Award for the Study
of Social Movements provides an opportunity for me to reflect on the trajectory of my career
as it relates to these changes. Like many of us who study social movements, it was personal
involvement in social protest that awakened my interest in sociology. Participation, first in the
civil rights, antiwar, and student movements, then later in the women’s, lesbian feminist, and
gay rights movements, helped form my conviction that individuals have the capacity to shape
their identities and destinies and to transform society—not to mention academic disciplines—
through collective action. So I reflect here on identities and political commitments that were
pivotal to my research agenda to show how personal experiences, sometimes of the same sort
I was researching, provided me with new insight into the nature and dynamics of social move-
ments. And I propose a methodology for studying social movements in which, as the title sug-
gests, people really matter.
For a long time, because of my interest in identity, emotions, and culture, it seemed as if I
were swimming against the tide in the field of social movements. Then suddenly the sea
changed. In 2008, the same year I received the McCarthy Award, I was honored to receive the
Simon and Gagnon Career Award from the Sexualities Section of the American Sociological
*
Verta Taylor is a professor of Sociology the University of California, Santa Barbara. Please direct all corres-
pondence to the author at vtaylor@soc.ucsb.edu.
†
I would like to thank Leila Rupp, Dick Flacks, Mitch Duneier, Dan Myers, Mayer Zald, Nella Van Dyke, Vincent
Roscigno, and Alison Crossley for comments. The approach that I propose here for the study of social movements
was inspired by a talk in honor of the retirement of my colleague Dick Flacks at University of California, Santa
Barbara, May 2006.
© 2010 Mobilization: An International Journal 15(2): 113-134114 Mobilization
Association. When I received the latter award, I corresponded with a handful of colleagues who
had encouraged my scholarship on sexuality at a time when researching sexuality was terribly
risky (Taylor and Raeburn 1995). One of these was my friend Joan Huber, former Dean and
Provost at Ohio State University where I worked for nearly thirty years. She wrote back: “Good
for you. I can remember years ago when some of the people in the department thought you were
making a mistake to focus on sexuality, but you had the pluck and courage to continue anyway.
It was always the right thing to do.” If my colleagues’ resistance to my research on sexuality and
social movements staged an ongoing struggle, the tension ultimately became a source of insight
that enriched my scholarship.
Some things in which I take a great deal of pride are not on my curriculum vitae: that I am
the first person in my family to graduate from college, that I was almost kicked out of school as
an undergraduate for my campus activism in the 1960s, that a lesbian colleague tells me that I
am known as the “lesbian den mother of sociology” for my mentoring of lesbian graduate
students and junior colleagues, and that the drag queens in Leila Rupp’s and my book, Drag
Queens at the 801 Cabaret, like to call us the “professors of lesbian love” in reference to our
relationship of more than thirty years (Rupp and Taylor 2005).
In this article, I begin by discussing the biographical influences that shaped the approach I
have taken to the study of social movements, acknowledging some of the people and
collaborations that have influenced my scholarship in social movements at crucial points. For in
the study of social movements I found not only an intellectual haven, but a source of support
from a community of scholars striving to bridge different perspectives in sociology in order to
create deeper and richer frameworks for understanding social protest and social movements. I
then discuss the core contributions of my body of work thus far and its implications for a “multi-
institutional” perspective on social movements emerging in the field (Armstrong and Bernstein
2008; Taylor and Zald 2010; Zald 2009). I conclude by outlining a methodology and logic of
inquiry and theory building for producing academic scholarship that treats social movement
actors both as central to the research process and as a critical audience, but simultaneously
allows us to address questions that have larger theoretical relevance. This approach has guided
both my own research and the research of my students and collaborators who have made
identity, culture, and emotions central to the analysis of social movements as a corrective to the
overly structural and state-centered focus of the resource mobilization, political process, and
contentious politics approaches. My agenda over the years has never been to undermine the
advances made by these approaches; rather I have been interested in finding the answers to a
different set of questions that illuminate aspects of social movements and contentious politics
overlooked by these theories.
THE IMPORTANCE OF MENTORS AND COLLABORATORS
My journey into the study of social movements began as a graduate student at Ohio State
University where I studied with Enrico Quarantelli who, as a student of Herbert Blumer, had
been trained in the classical tradition of collective behavior theory. My first academic position
was as Assistant Professor of Sociology and Director of Field Studies, later Co-director with
Quarantelli, of the Disaster Research Center at Ohio State. I vividly remember the first
American Sociological Association (ASA) Meeting I attended, where I assisted Professor
Quarantelli, who was circulating a petition to found the Section on Collective Behavior and
Social Movements, now one of the most vital sections of the ASA. I recall meeting Ralph
Turner, Lewis Killian, Clark McPhail, John Clark, John Lofland, Bill Gamson, and Tony
Oberschall, all also involved in the campaign. If scholars in the classical collective behavior
tradition were at the forefront of establishing the Collective Behavior and Social Movements
Section of the ASA, it was not long before the social psychological approach of classical
collective behavior theory with its emphasis on emergence, intentionality, and human agency inMovements as if People Really Mattered 115
collective action would give way to resource mobilization and political process approaches that
emphasized the role of resources, organization, and structural and political constraint.
It is an extraordinary honor to be the recipient of an award that bears the name of John
McCarthy. McCarthy and Zald’s 1977 article, “Resource Mobilization and Social Movements:
A Partial Theory,” published in the American Journal of Sociology, was a turning point in the
field of social movements. This article was so influential to my own scholarship and academic
career that I will never forget the day I read it on one rare sunny afternoon in Columbus, Ohio,
after I had finished swimming laps. Leila and I were beginning our work on the women’s
movement in the post Second World War period. In this groundbreaking article, McCarthy and
Zald carved out social movements as a distinct area of inquiry separate from the field of
collective behavior, lending legitimacy to the study of social movements and sowing the seeds
for a field of study that has blossomed over the past three decades.
Even if, at times, I have been one of the most vocal critics of what resource mobilization
theory and political process approaches have failed to address (notably grievances, culture,
emotions, and identity), McCarthy and Zald along with political process theorists Chares Tilly
(1978), Doug McAdam (1982), and Sid Tarrow (1989; 1998) carved out an area of study and
provided a useful set of concepts that have allowed many of us to pursue a lifelong commitment
to the study of social movements and other forms of collective resistance. For it was not just the
study of sexuality that was deemed risky by many of my colleagues at Ohio State during the
1980s and even into the 1990s, but the study of social movements as well. Worse yet, from my
colleagues’ standpoint, almost every time there was some sort of protest on campus, they would
look to my graduate students as the likely instigators.
As it turned out, John McCarthy, whom I met along with Mayer Zald in the mid-1980s at a
conference at Bowling Green when I was a young Associate Professor, served as an external
reviewer for Leila’s and my book Survival in the Doldrums (1987). Survival drew upon resource
mobilization theory’s attention to organization, resources, and shifting opportunities to challenge
the prevailing view that the women’s movement died in the 1920s after the suffrage victory and
was not reborn until the mid-1960s, when it re-emerged out of the civil rights and New Left
movements. Rupp and I used the concepts of resource mobilization theory advanced by
McCarthy and Zald (1977) and Craig Jenkins (1983) in his Annual Review of Sociology article
that speak to how movements emerge, how they operate and maintain themselves over time, and
how they achieve their goals. We uncovered new historical knowledge about the U.S. women’s
movement that called into question the prevailing orthodoxy that the movement mobilized in
two intense waves of protest and virtually died in the interim years. We argued, instead, for a
more continuous view of movements as having thresholds and turning points that scholars had
previously mistaken as “births” and “deaths.”
Women’s historians were reluctant to accept the notion that an elite group of “career
activists” counted as a “movement” and that these networks and the feminist culture they
nourished, which at times was elitist and racist, had played a critical role in the emergence of a
more progressive grassroots-based second wave of the women’s movement. This objection held
up the publication of our book for almost a year, although our analysis was based on meticulous
evidence from archival sources and oral histories funded by a substantial award from the
National Endowment for the Humanities. During this period, when I would run into John or
Mayer at a conference, I would tell them that I was trying to introduce social movement theory
to gender scholars but that they were passively resisting. At that time, with the exception of a
handful of scholars—including Jo Freeman (1975), Jane Mansbridge (1986), Mary Katzenstein
and Carol Mueller (1987), and Myra Marx Ferree (Ferree and Hess 1994)—most writings on
feminism failed to draw on and contribute to the larger body of work on social movements. The
support and intellectual leadership of this group of women were critical to my early
development as a scholar of women’s and social movements.
In the meantime, Craig Jenkins joined the faculty at Ohio State and, over the years, his
presence would not only help to legitimate the study of social movements, but he would serve116 Mobilization
on the dissertation committees of all of my graduate students, who I am proud to say include
some of the field’s leading young scholars. One of my greatest joys has been working with such
a wonderful crop of graduate students both at Ohio State and the UC Santa Barbara.
Ultimately, Leila’s and my research on the post-war women’s movement changed funda-
mentally the way scholars think about the women’s movement. In Different Wavelengths, my
former graduate student Jo Reger (2005) continues scholarship in this tradition, documenting a
third wave of feminism that is different and delineated from the second wave, giving rest to
proclamations of the death of feminism and providing further evidence of the continuity of
American women’s movements. And the works of other scholars of women’s movements, such
as Nancy Naples (2005), Myra Marx Ferree (Ferree and Martin 1995), Carroll Mueller (Ferree
and Mueller 2004), Suzanne Staggenborg (Staggenborg and Taylor 2005), Patricia Martin
(Ferree and Martin 1995), Nancy Whittier (1995; Taylor and Whittier 1992); Mary Margaret
Fonow (2003), Benita Roth (2004), Sandra Grey and Marian Sawer (2008), and Lee Ann
Banaszak, Karen Beckwith, and Dieter Rucht (2003), also reflect this newer model.
As social movement scholars began to discover our work on the U.S. women’s movement
(in part thanks to Bill Gamson, who invited us to participate in an Author Meets Critic Section at
ASA after Survival in the Doldrums received Honorable Mention in the Collective Behavior and
Social Movements Distinguished Book Award competition), it became evident that there was
something fundamentally wrong with the then prevailing view that movements are born,
flourish for awhile, then die. This model simply does not reflect the history of many U.S. social
movements rooted in longstanding structural cleavages and ideologies, such as the civil rights,
women’s, labor, and peace movements. In a 1989 article published in the American Sociological
Review, I introduced the concept of abeyance structures, using the case of the women’s
movement to delineate the organizational and cultural processes that allowed a submerged
network of feminists to continue their campaign for gender equality in the post second World
War period, a time when mass feminist mobilization receded and there was widespread
opposition to women’s rights, and to make connections with the 1960s cycle of the feminist
movement. Doug McAdam’s attention to networks and collective identity as predictors of
activism in Freedom Summer (1988; see also McAdam and Paulsen 1993) led me to hypothe-
size that collective identity and oppositional culture might also be significant for sustaining
activist commitment. Subsequently scholars such as Debra Minkoff (1993), Nancy Whittier
(1995), Judith Taylor (1998), Suzanne Staggenborg (1998),Tricia Sawyers and David Meyer
(1999), Jo Reger (2005), and Marian Sawer and Sandra Grey (2008), began to investigate
various other types of abeyance structures in women’s movements both in the U.S. and abroad,
underscoring the necessity for studying social movements in historical context. The concept of
abeyance changed forever the field of social movements. It has been influential to scholars of a
wide range of movements who have been interested in the social contexts within which activists
forge and sustain oppositional movement identities (Edwards and Marullo 1995; Mooney and
Hunt 1996; Sherkat and Blocker 1997; Edwards and Marullo 1996; Van Dyke 1998; Barnett
1999; Weigand 2001; Isaac and Christiansen 2002; Almeida 2003; Futrell and Simi 2004;
Nepstad 2004; Fillieule 2005; Rojas 2007; Klandermans 2008). Further, our work on the sur-
vival of the women’s movement brought me into contact with Dick Flacks, who shares the view
that oppositional consciousness and culture are critical to the survival of protest. And this re-
lationship ultimately led me to the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a new set of
collaborators in training graduate students in the field of social movements.
BORROWING IDEAS AND PUSHING BOUNDARIES
But this is only half of the story. Mary Douglas (1987) argues in her book, How Institutions
Think, that there really are no new ideas in academic fields. Rather, new ideas come about when
individuals recognize the importance of undervalued ideas, which they borrow from other fieldsMovements as if People Really Mattered 117
or disciplines, and promote by demonstrating how these ideas can contribute to answering
unresolved questions. The concept of abeyance (Taylor 1989) was borrowed from Ephraim
Mizruchi’s (1983) theory of organizations and was suggested to me by William Form, a
colleague at Ohio State University who, at the time, was editor of American Sociological
Review. Anyone familiar with my body of work on social movements immediately recognizes
that ultimately it was in the intersection of the literatures on gender and social movements that I
found the concepts, methods, and the passion that have allowed me to play a central role in the
“cultural turn” in social movement theory (Johnston and Klandermans 1995). Over the past two
decades, the field of social movements has been divided between a dominant structural and a
cultural or constructivist tradition, and this divide continues. While the structural concepts of
resource mobilization and political process theory had considerable pay-off in my early work,
studying women’s movements ultimately forced me to struggle with issues such as collective
identity, emotions, and culture as they relate to collective action. By bringing these concepts to
the forefront, I have sought to further the dialogue between the structuralist approaches of
resource mobilization, political process and contentious politics and social constructionist and
new social movement approaches that have been concerned with the processural, relational, and
cultural aspects of political contention.
The story of how I came to gender is fairly typical of feminists of my generation. When I
was completing graduate studies at Ohio State during the late 1970s, the academic field that we
now think of as women’s or gender studies was just beginning to emerge out of the women’s
movements of the sixties and seventies. I had been active in the antiwar, student, and women’s
movements since my undergraduate days, when I led a large campus demonstration against
gender discrimination in residence hall policies and narrowly escaped being arrested and
suspended the quarter before I graduated. It did not help that the Vice President of Student
Affairs was hit in the head with a rock during the demonstration and hospitalized with a
concussion. I will never forget the day that I asked my doctoral advisor at Ohio State, Clyde
Franklin, for permission to add Laurel Richardson’s sociology of women seminar, which did
NOT fulfill any of the requirements for the doctoral program, to my course of study. He was
adamantly opposed, explaining that the course was marginal to sociology and to my interest in
social movements. I can only laugh now when I remember this explanation. Clyde later went on
to become a leading scholar of Black masculinity (Franklin 1988). Sex and Gender is now the
largest section of the ASA, and as many of you know, Laurel Richardson and I would later co-
edit (in 1983) Feminist Frontiers, the first social science-based anthology in women’s studies,
which is forthcoming in its ninth edition in 2011 (with my former student, Nancy Whittier, and
life partner Leila Rupp as co-editors). Clearly, gender also has been anything but marginal to my
scholarship in social movements.
From the beginning, my approach to the study of social movements has been grounded in a
feminist activist standpoint. In the mid-1980s, as I and a number of other scholars of women’s
movements began using the lens of social movement theory to research women’s movements, it
became clear that the theoretical approaches that dominated the field—and even the very
conceptualization of what counts as protest—were based largely on the study of male-dominated
movements. To illustrate, until very recently scholars of social movements paid little or no
attention to health movements, yet the radical branch of the women’s movement mobilized, in
part, through women’s alternative health institutions, such as the Boston Women’s Health Book
Collective. The gender bias in social movement theory is not surprising because the institutions
and processes that dominant approaches identified as key to explaining the emergence, nature,
and outcomes of social movements—the state, the economy and other resources, and organi-
zations—are the very institutions that feminist sociologists have revealed to be fundamentally
gendered (Acker 1990; Connell 1987). In my work with Nancy Whittier on gender and social
movements (Taylor and Whittier 1998a; 1998b), I have sought to demonstrate that feminist
reconceptualizations of the state, cultural hegemony, and organizations (Martin 1990); feminist
accounts of the fluidity and socially constituted nature of identity (Butler 1990; Fenstermaker118 Mobilization
and West 2002); and feminist critiques of binary thinking (for example, the dichotomy between
expressive and instrumental politics, identity and strategy, and rationality and emotion) pose
serious challenges to the assumptions of resource mobilization and political process theory
(Jaggar 1983; Fraser 1989). I have drawn from feminist scholarship to examine the significance
of gender for the political opportunities that support and constrain collective action (Taylor
1989); the structure and culture of the organizations and networks through which social
movements mobilize (Taylor and Rupp 1993; Taylor 1996); the collective identities that
promote solidarity and justify collective action (Taylor and Whittier 1992; Taylor and Rupp
1993); the role of emotions in the formation and collective representation of movement identity
(Taylor and Rupp 2002; Taylor and Leitz 2010); and the tactical repertoires deployed by a set of
collective actors (Taylor and Van Dyke 2004). In so doing, my students (Raeburn 2004; Dugan
2005) and I (Taylor and Whittier 1992; 1995) have sought to bring a cultural emphasis that has
been an important corrective to the excessively political focus of the dominant political process
perspective.
Let me illustrate by discussing briefly two projects I worked on in the 1980s, a collaborative
research project on lesbian feminist communities with Nancy Whittier (Taylor and Whittier
1992; Taylor and Rupp 1993) and my research on women’s self-help movements (Taylor 1996).
These are types of collective action that have been largely overlooked because of the
preoccupation of resource mobilization and political processes theory with social movements
that target the state. In both of these projects, I mined intersections between Gerson and Peiss’s
(1985) theory of gender as a system of relationships structured and maintained through boun-
daries, consciousness, and negotiation, and Melucci’s (1995) conceptualization of social move-
ment collective identity as an ongoing process in order to specify the processes involved in the
creation of collective identity by social movement actors. The insight that gender plays a crucial
role in a movement’s collective identity, collective action frames, tactics, and organizational
forms seemed so obvious that it was almost not worth writing up. However, Myra Ferree, Carol
Mueller, and Aldon Morris encouraged us to do so; and, much to our surprise, Nancy Whittier’s
and my 1992 chapter, “Collective Identity in Social Movement Communities: Lesbian Feminist
Mobilization,” was considered a path-breaking piece of work on collective identity. In this
chapter, as well as in my body of work on women’s self-help movements (Taylor 1995; 2000;
Taylor and Leitz 2010) and on gay and lesbian movements (Taylor and Raeburn 1995; Taylor,
Rupp, and Gamson, 2010; Rupp, Taylor and Shapiro 2010), I have sought to demonstrate that
identity-based movements are motivated by participants’ collective understandings of how iden-
tity categories are constituted and how identity categories and codes serve as axes of domina-
tion. Along with Bert Klandermans and his collaborators (Klandermans 1997; Simon and
Klandermans 2001; Klandermans, van der Toorn, and Stekelenburg 2008) and Bill Gamson
(1992), my collaborators and I were among the first sociologists to bring European new social
movement theory to an American audience. The major insight of new social movement theory,
in this context, is that a politicized collective identity, which translates structural injustice into
personally experienced discontent, is a fundamental social psychological dynamic of mobili-
zation (Pizzorno 1978; Touraine 1985; Melucci 1989; Castells 1997).
It was inevitable that the study of women’s movements, especially women’s self-help
movements, would lead to an interest in social movement culture and the politics of emotion. A
host of emotions, such as anger, shame, fear, and depression, arise from all forms of subordi-
nation (Kemper 1978). Social movements mobilize, in part, by fostering distinctive emotion
cultures that use emotion-laden rituals both to create solidarity and self-change among
participants and to nurture and sustain activists. To take an historical example from Leila’s and
my research, the feminists who carried the torch of women’s rights from the end of the suffrage
campaign in the early 1920s until the resurgence of the women’s movement in the mid-1960s
drew upon traditional women’s culture to express strong bonds of friendship and joy over
participating in the campaign for the equal rights amendment, leading one of the women to
explain that “it is as thrilling as a love affair, and lasts longer!!!!” (Rupp and Taylor 1987: 97).Movements as if People Really Mattered 119
In several articles, I have examined empirically the role that emotions play in women’s
movements, and it is not surprising that I was encouraged to move in this direction by feminist
social movement scholars, including Myra Marx Ferree, Carol Mueller, Patricia Yancy Martin,
and Kathleen Blee (Taylor 1995; Taylor 2000), as well as by Doug McAdam, Ron Amizade
(Aminzade and McAdam 2001), Bert Klandermans, and David Snow (Taylor and Whittier
1995). Drawing on Leila Rupp’s archival research on the international women’s movement from
the late nineteenth century to the Second World War, we have demonstrated how the emotion
culture of the movement created a women’s movement community that was able to transcend
international boundaries and national identities, allowing the women’s movement to survive
despite war, depression, revolution, and the rise of fascism (Rupp and Taylor 2002). In a paper
coauthored with former graduate student Lisa Leitz (Taylor and Leitz 2010), we show that
emotions are not only critical to the construction and maintenance of collective identity but,
drawing from Nancy Whittier’s work on the movement against child sexual abuse (2009), we
demonstrate that emotions are frequently deployed strategically by collective actors in political
contention. Examining a pen-pal network of women imprisoned for committing infanticide
while suffering postpartum psychiatric illness, we found that the collective identity fostered by
participating in the pen-pal network triggered profound emotional transformation, allowing
women to pursue policy change on behalf of other mothers who kill their children while in the
throes of postpartum depression. Participants used psychiatric illness to remake their identities
as good mothers, replacing guilt and shame with pride and anger toward medical authorities and
the legal system that failed to address their problems. This case illuminates how health and self-
help movements use and create emotions, identities, and new ways of framing disease and
health-related issues to politicize the illness experience (Taylor 1996; Brown 2007). It further
illustrates how the study of medical movements can contribute to theoretical advances in
understanding the role that emotion plays in collective identity construction.
In my work with Leila Rupp on drag queens and with former graduate student Katrina
Kimport and collaborators Nella Van Dyke and Ellen Andersen (2009) on same-sex wedding
protests, I have been interested in how social movements use cultural performances and rituals
as protest tactics (see also Taylor and Van Dyke 2004). Social movement scholars have long
been skeptical of the impact of culture on political change, perhaps for good reason, since little
empirical research explicitly addresses this question. In Drag Queens at the 801 Cabaret (Rupp
and Taylor 2003), we analyze drag queen performances, which have a long-history in same-sex
communities as vehicles for expressing gay identity, creating solidarity, and staging political
resistance. We argue that drag queen performances are tactical repertoires of the gay and lesbian
movement in which drag performers intentionally use entertainment both to make visible gay
identity for mainstream audiences and to challenge the biological basis of gender and the fixed
nature of sexual identity. In one of the few studies of audience reception to social protest, we
found that the diverse audiences (straight and gay) that flock to the drag shows at the 801
Cabaret come away with an experience that makes it a little less possible to think in a simple
way about gender and sexuality and to ignore the experiences of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and
transgender people (Taylor, Rupp and Gamson 2004; Taylor and Rupp 2006). Reviewers have
often accused Leila and me of having far too much fun conducting our research on the Key
West drag queens for this to be considered serious sociology. As we discuss in our Signs article,
“When the Girls are Men” (Taylor and Rupp 2005a), this research, on the contrary, could
sometimes be “field work at its hardest,” as our colleague and ethnographer France Winddance
Twine observed the first time we took her to the dark smoky bar where the 801 girls perform
into the wee hours every night of the year.
Over the past decade, scholars concerned with the role of culture and consciousness in
social protest have begun to document a wide range of cultural repertoires used in modern
contention—including music, street performance, ritual, art, theater, public commemorations,
and practices of everyday life (Gamson 1989; Bernstein 1997; Pfaff and Yang 2001; Roscigno
and Danaher 2004; Staggenborg and Lang 2007, Kaminski and Taylor 2008; Rupp, Taylor, and120 Mobilization
Shapiro 2010). Little attention, however, has centered on developing models that discern both
the dynamics and impact of such performances. My most recent research on the month-long
same-sex wedding protest that took place in San Francisco in 2004 reflects my continued
interest in understanding how cultural rituals can be intentionally political in their content and
impact. Most research on cultural repertoires is based on small and unsystematic samples (Rupp
and Taylor 2003; Staggenborg and Lang 2007). In an effort to address some of these prior
limitations, the study draws on a random survey of the 4037 couples who obtained licenses at
San Francisco City Hall during the protest, in addition to semistructured interviews, combining
quantitative and qualitative analysis. A 2009 coauthored article in the American Sociological
Review (Taylor, Kimport, Van Dyke, and Andersen 2009) reports the results of this research,
and editors Vinnie Roscigno and Randy Hodson allowed us to break a barrier by publishing
photographs of same-sex weddings and marriage protests in ASR.
Theoretically, our analysis integrates insights of the contentious politics approach with its
attention to contentious performances, protest repertoires, and routine claim making with social
constructionist approaches concerned with the structure, meaning, and social psychological
dynamics of contention. Building on our research on drag performances, we identify three core
features of cultural repertoires: contestation, intentionality, and collective identity. We find that
the San Francisco weddings were an intentional episode of claim making and, further, that par-
ticipants had a history of activism in a variety of other social movements, including the gay and
lesbian, HIV-AIDS, women’s, civil rights, antiwar, environmental, and pro-choice movements.
Further, our results provide compelling evidence that cultural tactics do, indeed, matter in
political contention. Our analyses demonstrate that the month-long wedding protest sparked
other forms of political action and mobilization on behalf of marriage rights, igniting a statewide
campaign for marriage equality in California. Together these findings offer powerful evidence
for moving beyond the rigid distinction between culture and politics that characterizes
mainstream theorizing in social movements in order to consider the influence of culture in
political contention.
EVERYDAY MEANING AS A SOURCE OF THEORETICAL INNOVATION:
TOWARD A MULTI-INSTITUTIONAL APPROACH TO SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
I believe that good theory is based on solid empirical evidence and that, to develop good theory,
we must make good methodological choices. Like many scholars who entered the field of social
movements in the wake of the movements of the 1960s and 70s, I pursued the study of social
movements as a way of making sense of my own personal experiences as an activist. My ap-
proach to studying social movements has been influenced by writings on feminist methodology
that reject the idea of a disengaged value-free science and seek to render visible the experiences
of women and other marginalized groups (Collins 1986; Harding 1987; Fonow and Cook 1991;
Smith 1997; Naples 2003; Sprague 2005). Over my career, I have published a series of articles
and chapters that spell out the feminist, constructivist, and activist standpoint that guided my
research (Taylor and Rupp 1996; Taylor 1998; Blee and Taylor 2002; Taylor and Rupp 2005a;
Taylor and Rupp 2005b). I draw from this body of work to propose an epistemology and
methodology for the study of social movements that relies on the everyday meanings people use
to define activism in their own settings and in their own terms. Lichterman (2002) argues that
participant observation is the best method for accessing everyday meanings in social movement
research. I, however, have used an array of different methods, primarily qualitative but also
quantitative (Van Dyke, Soule and Taylor 2004; Taylor et. al 2009), to examine everyday
meanings; and I typically use in a single study a triangulation of different methods, including
participant observation, interviews, archival evidence, content analysis, and survey data.
In the remainder of this article, I outline the features of a methodology and a logic of
inquiry and theory building that will allow scholars of social movements both to accessMovements as if People Really Mattered 121
everyday meanings of activists and to use them to address theoretical questions that have
significance far beyond the groups being studied. My research on social movements has been
guided by four strategies: attention to the everyday meanings and practices of activists; a multi-
institutional approach to politics; theoretical bridging as a source of innovation; and an action
orientation. I discuss each of these strategies, providing brief examples of how this approach to
doing research has allowed me to make middle-range theoretical innovations (Merton 1957;
Pawson 2000) pertaining to the role of collective identity, the significance of cultural tactics, and
the centrality of emotions to social movements.
Everyday Meanings and Practices of Activists
The first principle that has guided my research, influenced by the work of feminist scholar
Dorothy Smith (1987), is to start with the everyday world. An interest in everyday meanings
requires paying attention to what and who activists say they are, instead of assuming that a
group of contentious actors are reducible to some fundamental economic or social cleavage
(whether of class, race, gender, sexuality, nationality or ethnicity) or are representative of some
concept that sociology clamps over a topic of inquiry (such as social movement organization,
political opportunity, identity, ideology, or resources). As Charles Tilly (1978: 61) once warned,
“It takes confidence, even arrogance, to override a group’s own vision of its interests in life.”
My perspective begins by acknowledging and privileging the standpoint of real activists, taking
into account the concrete social, historical, and geographical details of their lives and actions. To
provide an example of how this approach led to an important theoretical innovation, consider the
history of the National Woman’s Party, the subject of Survival in the Doldrums (Rupp and
Taylor 1987). Prior to our research scholars had considered the National Woman’s Party a group
of “ineffectual old ladies” who continued campaigning for the Equal Rights Amendment in the
1940s and 50s when there was little chance of success. Participants, however, saw themselves as
part of a “women’s movement” that was mobilizing in a hostile environment (Rupp and Taylor
1987; Rupp and Taylor 1991). Understanding the pockets of activity that kept the movement
alive and became the kernels of a new cycle at a later point in time led me to formulate the
concept of abeyance to characterize a movement that is “in the doldrums.”
Although identity is not usually an explicit topic of activists’ conversations, I have shown in
several studies that it is possible to use everyday meanings to obtain organizational and
movement-level data about the collective identity construction of activist groups (Taylor and
Whittier 1992; Taylor and Rupp 1993; Taylor 1995; Rupp and Taylor 2003; Taylor 2000;
Taylor and Leitz 2010). The notion of identity—that is, how contentious actors define them-
selves both to themselves and to others, how this influences their worldviews, and how it shapes
their tactics and strategies—lurks behind the talk, discourse, collective displays, and practices of
activist groups. In a formulation that has been widely applied to the study of other social
movements, Nancy Whittier and I set forth a model for analyzing movement collective identity
as a socially constructed, politically strategic, and continually contested process that involves the
formation of boundaries between “us” and “them,” the creation of group consciousness that
brings about an emotional investment in the identity, and the deployment of identity for strategic
and political purposes. Although the concept of collective identity has been central to the Euro-
pean new social movement tradition (Touraine 1985; Melucci 1989), our framework makes a
unique contribution by specifying conceptual tools that allow scholars to delve deeply into the
process by which challenging groups develop politicized group identities.
Finally, Leila’s and my three years of participant observation research on the drag club in
Key West (Rupp and Taylor 2003) allowed us to embed our analysis of drag performances as
protest tactics of the gay and lesbian movement in time and place, demonstrating the value of
accessing everyday meanings to understand how cultural tactics are deployed in political
contention. The specificity of the work—that is, the name and location of the bar, the identity of
the drag queens, their appearances, their backgrounds, their relationships to each other, their122 Mobilization
connection to the gay and lesbian movement, and their roles in the community—allowed us to
obtain a close view and interpretation of both the political meanings that the drag queens
attribute to their performances and the meanings their audiences take away from the shows. In
one of the rare studies of how audiences apprehend and interpret protest, Rupp, Gamson, and I
(2004) observed the construction of collective identity among focus groups composed of the
diverse audience members, gay and straight, who attended the shows (Blee and Taylor 2002).
Activist and movement-centered studies, of course, have their limitations, and I would be
the last to advocate method-driven research. I have, nevertheless, found the use of qualitative
and other methods aimed at accessing everyday meaning to be especially useful for broadening
our conception of what counts as protest and for understanding what goes on in a protest.
Multi-Institutional Approach to Politics
Although scholars continue to debate whether collective challenges that do not target the
state can rightly be considered social movements (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001), over the
past decade a less state-centered conceptualization of social movements has emerged, which
Armstrong and Bernstein (2008) describe as a “multi-institutional politics” approach (Cress and
Myers 2004; Van Dyke, Soule, and Taylor 2004; Staggenborg and Taylor 2005; Jasper 2006;
Snow and Soule 2010; Taylor and Zald 2010). The political process model is based on a Marxist
conception of power that views domination as organized by and around the economic and
political structures of society with culture playing a secondary role. This approach has led to a
narrow conception of politics as centered primarily on the government and state apparatus.
The second principle embedded in my choice of research topics and methods over the years
has been to look for politics in unlikely places. My conception of social movements and
contentious politics has been strongly influenced by the feminist view of power that questions
the notion of the public and the private as distinct spheres of social life (Fraser 1989; Spague
1997; Ward 1983). Contemporary approaches to power and politics, as set forth by European
new social movement theory (Giddens 1991; Touraine 1992; Melucci 1996), feminist theory
(Collins 1990; Smith 1990; Naples 1998), and contemporary cultural theory (Bourdieu 1977;
Foucault 1977; Fligstein 1991; Friedland and Alford 1991; Powell and DiMaggio 1991; Sewell
1992; Crossley 2002), view power in late modern societies as multidimensional and as both
symbolic and material. Conceiving of power as structurally and culturally based justifies a more
inclusive definition of social movements and allows us to understand how shifting repertoires of
contention, such as groups mobilized around identity classifications and distribution, are linked
to the multidimensional nature of power in modern society.
This view of power and politics has led me to research movements and movement-like
phenomena that some of my colleagues have seen as peculiar or tangential, such as women’s
self-help groups, health movements, lesbian feminism, drag performances, and same-sex
marriage protests. My goal, however, was to use this research, sometimes in relatively small
sites, to expand the conceptualization of social movements and political protest and to address
neglected questions pertaining to the role of identity, culture, and emotions in contention. In
American society, protest has become a conventional form of political expression used by all
groups excluded from the power structure—whether in the form of a demonstration, self-help
movement, an internet petition, or a performance of a transgressive gender or sexual identity.
Social movements are, as Castells puts it, the “embryos of a new society” where change is
hatched slowly outside the nests of power, wherever that might be (1997: 362). Social
movements spawned during the 1960s and 70s cycle of contention have spilled over into
virtually every institutional arena in American society and have had a profound impact on public
opinion and institutional practices. In the United States social movements have proved their
capacity to bring to light hidden forms of domination and to pressure the state and other
institutions to respond to the demands of an increasingly pluralistic, multiracial, multicultural,
and complex society (Taylor 2000; Fetner and Smith 2007; Piven 2008).Movements as if People Really Mattered 123
While many movements do target the state, I have been one of the most ardent critics of
state-centered and political process approaches that tend to overlook both the multiple institu-
tions in society that intersect and reproduce power relations and inequality and the variety of
forms of collective action people use to target institutions, such as education, religion, medicine,
science, the media, and the military (Taylor 2003). To examine the targets of protest in the U.S.,
Van Dyke, Soule, and I (2004) analyzed data on 4654 protest events related to women’s, civil
rights, gay and lesbian, environmental, peace, women’s human rights, ethnic, and other policy
movements that occurred between 1968 and 1975. We provide empirical evidence to show that,
although the state was the target of just over half of the events in this period, slightly under half
of all the protests were directed at other institutions and/or public opinion.
There are signs that the field of social movements may be moving toward a more multi-
institutional approach (Taylor and Raeburn 1995; Raeburn 2004; Cress and Myers 2004; Snow
2004; Brown and Zavestoski 2005; Rojas 2007; Armstrong and Bernstein 2008; Snow and
Soule 2010; Soule 2009; Taylor and Zald 2010). Nevertheless, the excessively state-centered
focus of the political process and contentious politics approaches has caused us to overlook, for
the most part, the role that social movements play in broader processes of social and cultural
change. Drag Queens at the 801 Cabaret (2003) takes up this question, continuing in the same
vein as our earlier work on lesbian feminism and my work on women’s self-help, by expanding
our thinking about tactics of contention to incorporate cultural forms of political expression. In
the last chapter of the book, we offer a theoretical definition of tactical repertoires that Van
Dyke and I (2004) develop further and that my collaborative work on the San Francisco same-
sex marriages utilizes (Taylor, Kimport, Van Dyke, and Andersen 2009). Our conception com-
bines Tilly’s attention to claim-making routines with social constructionists’ concern with the
structure, meaning, and social psychological dynamics of political contention. This framework
allows us to understand how culture is brought to bear in episodes of political contention, and it
allows us to get beyond the distinction between expressive and instrumental action, identity and
strategy, and cultural and political that has characterized mainstream social movement theory.
It was my longstanding interest in the impact of cultural forms of contention on political
change that led me to the project on same-sex wedding protests. Our research on the civil
disobedience that took place in 2004 in San Francisco relies on qualitative data, which allowed
us to access the everyday meanings of participants and to obtain in-depth insight into the
dynamics of the protest and the mobilization effects of participating in the protest, and survey
data, which allowed us to demonstrate the significance of the cultural protest for subsequent
forms of political action that ignited a statewide campaign for marriage equality in California.
During the month-long protest, images of gay and lesbian couples standing in line for mar-
riage licenses, then marrying in civic buildings and other public locations, appeared on the
evening news, front pages of newspapers, and covers of weekly news magazines, giving viewers
the impression that the couples were lined up simply for the purpose of gaining access to the
rights of marriages. It was only through a detailed and close reading of these protests that we
discovered the origins of same-sex weddings as a form of collective claim making and were able
to understand their significance for increasing the pace of protest surrounding same-sex marriage.
In San Francisco, the tactic of same-sex couples showing up at City Hall to demand
marriage licenses originated on February 12, 1998, when the Lambda Legal Defense and Edu-
cation Fund, a national organization of the lesbian and gay rights movement, sponsored
“Freedom to Marry Day.” Gay rights groups held small actions in more than forty cities that
year. In San Francisco, Molly McKay and her partner Davina Kotulski went to the marriage
counter to request a marriage license. When they were denied, they decided to make it an annual
protest. The spirited political contest over Proposition 22, a ballot measure supported by a
coalition of conservative and religious-right groups to amend the family code to limit marriage
to a relationship between a man and a woman, led the two women to found Marriage Equality
California (MECA), which later became Marriage Equality USA. They decided to ritualize the
marriage counter demonstration. Each year on Freedom to Marry Day, McKay donned a wed-124 Mobilization
ding dress and went to City Hall with her partner and a contingent of same-sex couples to render
visible the discrimination that occurs at the marriage counter every day. Each year they were
turned away, and each year they returned, joined by ever more same-sex couples, until 2004
when Mayor Gavin Newsome directed the Assessor-Recorder’s office to begin issuing marriage
licenses to gays and lesbians. McKay explained that she borrowed the idea of the marriage-
counter protest from the lunch-counter sit-ins used by the civil rights movement:
We were very inspired by the grassroots organizers in Greensboro, North Carolina, the four
college students that sat in at the lunch counters, and rendered visible segregation and the
ugliness of white-only lunch counters. And we thought, you know, the only way to render
visible the discrimination that crosses across the marriage counter every single day is to go
and request a marriage license. We’ll do it with dignity. We’ll do it very peacefully.
By making their annual request for marriage licenses in mid-February, the couples who
went to City Hall to get married were taking advantage of the cultural meaning of Valentine’s
Day as a holiday that celebrates love in order to make a public statement about the unequal
treatment of same-sex couples that they hoped would win public sympathy. When City Hall
began issuing marriage licenses, the couples assembled for the first time were among the first to
marry. The interview and survey data are remarkably consistent with respect to the motivations
of the couples who married. The overwhelming majority of participants considered their
marriages acts of protest in which they were confronting the identity categories, values, and
practices of heteronormative society.
Although this project focuses on a protest event that targets the state, the study confronts the
debate over the role of culture in political contention more directly than previous studies by
analyzing the attributes, dynamics, and impact of the 2004 same-sex wedding protest. Politics is
as much a discursive struggle as it is a contest over resources (Alexander, Giesen, and Mast
2006), and our findings show that cultural repertoires not only play an important role in the
internal life of social movements, but cultural symbols, rituals, and practices can be used to
convey powerful political messages to the multiple targets of social movements and to mobilize
actors to engage in other forms of political contention.
THEORETICAL BRIDGING AS A SOURCE OF INNOVATION
The third principle that has guided my work, and the approach that I have taken to theory
building, has been to build theoretical bridges between different perspectives within the field of
social movements, as well as between different areas of sociology in order to bring to light new
and unresolved questions about social movements and contentious politics. Over the course of
my career, the field of social movements has been characterized by a tension between
structuralist and constructivist perspectives. Rather than come down firmly on one side of this
debate, I have sought to further the dialogue between these approaches through theoretical
syncretism that incorporates concepts such as collective identity from new social movement
theory with resource mobilization and political process theory’s attention to the structure of
opportunity, resources, and organization. For the most part, I have not proposed entirely new
concepts, but rather have aimed to expand the body of social movement theory created over the
past three decades into new terrain by drawing on theoretical developments within other
subfields of sociology, including gender, emotions, culture, and organizations, using their
precepts to fill in gaps in our understanding. To take just a few examples, the concept of
abeyance, as noted above, was derived from Ephram Mizruchi’s organization theory (1983).
The concept of social movement emotion cultures, which brought a much-needed affective
dimension to research on the forms and dynamics of contention, was borrowed from
Hochschild’s work on emotion norms (Hochschild 1979), and my writings on the significance of
emotions for collective identity construction have been informed by Smith-Lovin’s and Heise’sMovements as if People Really Mattered 125
affect control theory (1988). Whittier’s and my theory of collective identity (Taylor and Whittier
1992; Taylor 1989) combined Gerson and Peiss’s theory of gender stratification (1985) with
Melucci’s formulation of collective identity as a process and outcome of contention (1989) to
understand the dynamics of identity politics, and Leila Rupp’s (Rupp and Taylor 2003) and my
writings on drag queen performances as tactical repertories of the gay and lesbian movement
drew on Butler (1990) and West and Fenstermaker’s (1995) conception of gender as
performance to broaden existing conceptions of protest tactics to include cultural tactics and
repertoires.
Two examples from my recent work on health movements further illustrate how concepts
from other areas can be used to broaden our understanding of the pervasiveness of contention in
modern social life. In a paper with Mayer Zald (2010), I draw on insights from organizational
theory, specifically the concept of institutional fields (Bourdieu 1991; Friedland and Alford
1991; Friedland forthcoming), to challenge the state-centered bias of mainstream social
movement theory. In this paper, we argue that social movement analysis can be useful for
understanding institutional transformation, and we identify variable structural and cultural dimen-
sions of institutions that shape the context of social movements targeting health institutions. We
also join other scholars who have advocated using the concept of field of contention (Crossley
2006; Brown 2007; Klawiter 2008) to emphasize that in modern societies, social movements
target a wide range of institutions, both governmental and nongovernmental, and that every
arena of struggle has it “own logic, rules, and regularities” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992:104).
In another recent paper coauthored with Lisa Leitz (Taylor and Leitz 2010), we attempt to
connect social psychological theory and research on emotions with social movement theories of
collective identity in order to demonstrate that emotion is fundamental both to the politicization
of grievances and to the relational dynamics of contention between claim makers and their
targets. Although the relationship between emotions and perceptions of injustice is complicated
(Goodwin et. al. 2001; Jasper 1998), a substantial body of research demonstrates that anger,
when framed as righteous indignation, motivates individuals and groups to participate in protest
(Gould 2001; Hercus 2005; Klandermans, van Dertoorn and van Stekelenburg 2008). Anger
moves people to adopt a more challenging relationship to authorities than subordinate emotions,
such as fear, shame, and despair. I propose that the 1960s and 70s cycle of protest created a
changing context for contentious politics by amplifying participants’ feelings of efficacy through
the creation of new emotional framings and collective identities conducive to protest. Numerous
studies, including my own research on women’s movements (Taylor 1995; Taylor 1996; Taylor
and Rupp 2002), describe the distinctive emotion cultures of antiracist, feminist, gay and
lesbian, health, and self-help movements that define anger as an appropriate emotional response
to injustice and interpret emotional disclosure as political and strategic (Whittier 2009;
Srivastava 2006; Gould 2009).
My recent research on the same-sex marriage protest further illuminates the role of emotion
in protest (Taylor, Kimport, Van Dyke, and Andersen 2009). We found that political efficacy
influenced individuals’ decisions to participate in the mass matrimony as an act of protest, as
well as subsequent participation in the marriage equality movement when their marriages were
voided by the courts. Organizers of the wedding protest viewed their actions as an opportunity to
channel participants’ anger over passage of the federal Defense of Marriage Act that defines
marriage as a legal union between a man and a woman. Participants who received marriage
licenses during the “month of marriages” fully expected that the marriages would be halted and
eventually overturned by the courts. The majority of the couples who participated in the
marriage protest had a history of participation in prior social movements, and anger was a
mobilizing affect in what Gould (2009) terms the emotional habitus of all of the movements in
which the marriage protest participants had previous experience.
If we are to understand the spread of contentious processes into so many different
institutional contexts, including medicine, religion, education, and the workplace, it is necessary
to investigate how individuals acquire and learn to express emotions conducive to protest. ButYou can also read
