Gender & Society 2009 Guenther 337 62

THE IMPACT OF EMOTIONAL OPPORTUNITIES ON THE EMOTION

CULTURES OF FEMINIST ORGANIZATIONS

KATJA M. GUENTHERUniversity of California–Riverside

A fundamental debate within feminist scholarship and activism centers on what relation-ship feminism should have with the state. This article explores this debate empirically by examining differences in the emotion cultures of a state-dependent and an autonomous feminist organization in postsocialist eastern Germany. The comparative analysis demon-strates how organizations construct specific emotion cultures in response to emotional opportunities and constraints created by their relationships with state institutions. The state-dependent organization adopts a less expressive emotion culture that assures broad public appeal and future state support, but does not build critical consciousness among participants. In contrast, the autonomous organization encourages displays of feelings as part of consciousness raising, creating an emotion culture that reduces public appeal but produces especially loyal and active constituents.

Keywords: social movements; emotions; state; feminism

The relationship between feminism and the state has long been of central concern to feminist scholars and activists, who struggle over

the degree to which feminists can use the state to achieve emancipatory goals. The debate about what type of relationship feminism should forge

AUTHOR’S NOTE: An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2007 Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association. This research was supported by the National Science Foundation (Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant #0402513 with Robin Stryker), the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and the Graduate School and Department of Sociology of the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. I thank Vanesa Estrada, Matthew Mahutga, and Tanya Nieri, as well as Gender & Society editor Dana Britton, deputy editor Bandana Purkayastha, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments on this article.

GENDER & SOCIETY, Vol. 23 No. 3, June 2009 337-362DOI: 10.1177/0891243209335412© 2009 Sociologists for Women in Society

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338 GENDER & SOCIETY / June 2009

with the state centers on several interrelated concerns. First, reflecting Foucauldian conceptualizations of state power, some feminist scholars and activists fear that working with the state may serve to reify and rein-force state power (e.g., Brown 1992, 1995). Second, state-centered femi-nism risks the depoliticization of feminism and state co-optation of feminist movements and goals. Third, some feminists emphasize that the state is bureaucratic and/or militaristic and/or patriarchal and, under any or all of these assumptions, inherently hostile to women (e.g., Ferguson 1984; Jaquette 2003). Given these concerns, many feminist organizations have eschewed state co-operation, instead advancing a platform of autonomy from the state.

Still, visible and important feminist campaigns have specifically tar-geted the state, seeking to expand notions of citizenship and to integrate women’s rights and interests—from suffrage to reproductive rights—into policy and law (e.g., Banaszak, Beckwith, and Rucht 2003; Chappell 2000; Stetson and Mazur 1995). Advocates argue that these feminist actions have the capacity to produce “women-friendly” states, like those in Scandinavia (Borchorst 2000; Hernes 1987; Mazur 2002; Skjere and Siim 2000). Proponents of state feminism in particular recognize that the representation of feminist interests within institutions can contribute to policies and practices that benefit women and challenge the norm of the masculinized citizen (Chappell 2002; Eisenstein 1995; Ferree 1995). The state is also the most viable agent of meaningful redistributive efforts (Jaquette 2003). The promotion of feminist policy machineries and coop-erative endeavors between state agencies and feminist organizations are hardly unusual, and many feminist organizations and movements around the world are explicitly state-centered or depend on the state for resources (Chappell 2000, 2002; Kantola 2006; Matthews 1995). Others decry state-centrism as reinforcement of state power and/or as the “selling out” of feminist goals.

Scholars of social movements broadly are similarly concerned with the relationship between movement organizations and the state, as this rela-tionship can shape a social movement’s capacity to advocate its interests, as well as its internal organizational dynamics. The iron law of oligarchy, which holds that organizations become less oppositional as they mature (Michels 1962), has informed perspectives on social movements for the last 30 years. Following this law, some argue that the institutionaliza-tion of social movement organizations results in depoliticization and the ascendance of nonoppositional tactics and goals (Piven and Cloward 1977; Tarrow 1994). Yet several empirical analyses have indicated that

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state-dependent, institutionalized social movement organizations can and do maintain their strength as political advocates standing in opposition to the state (Chaves, Stephens, and Galaskiewicz 2004; Landriscina 2006).

While the debate about state dependence versus autonomy has been contested in a range of subfields and disciplines, empirical analysis of how dependence and autonomy shape feminist organizations—particularly in direct comparison—is uncommon, nor has there been much attention to the mechanisms through which dependence might depoliticize feminist (and other) social movement organizations. I begin to fill this gap by empirically grounding questions about the influence of dependence and autonomy on feminist organizing in an examination of the relationship between two feminist organizations’ degree of dependence on the state and their emotion cultures, or group expectations and rules about emo-tional expression. I investigate how different relationships with the state present opportunities and constraints that encourage the construction of particular emotion cultures. Connecting the internal emotion logic of femi-nist organizations to their position vis-à-vis the state demonstrates that specific emotion cultures and their attendant rules reflect organizations’ relations with formal institutions. Responding to calls for comparative research on organizational emotion cultures (Meanwell, Wolfe, and Hallett 2008) and on the linkages between feminist organizations and the state (Martin 1990), this article provides evidence for enriching the dis-cussion about the relationship between feminism and the state, and eluci-dates some of the challenges and benefits of both feminist dependence on and autonomy from the state.

Organizational dependence on the state reflects a web of interlocks, including financial and other resource commitments and dependencies, interpersonal networks and ties, and power relations. Dependent organiza-tions share dense webs with the state, while those that are more autono-mous are connected only by a few threads. Like other types of relationships, those between the state and civil society organizations develop patterns over time, but are also capable of change.

The present comparative analysis focuses on the development of two feminist organizations in an eastern German city since the collapse of state socialism in 1989. One of the organizations is state dependent in that it receives virtually all of its funding from state agencies and works closely with local institutions and actors. The second organization is autonomous; though it receives some state funding, it operates largely independently. Although neither case is fully dependent or autonomous, these organizations closely approximate such ideal types. Rather than




identifying a linear causal relationship between level of dependence and organizational emotion culture, I document and analyze the differences in emotion cultures between a dependent and an autonomous organization.

This article also contributes to the growing literature on women’s and feminist organization in postsocialist eastern and central Europe. Research exploring state involvement in feminist civil society is especially critical in the former Soviet bloc both because of women’s disadvantage in many countries in the postsocialist era and claims about the overall slow devel-opment of civil society in the region. Particular concern has emerged about the “NGOization” of women’s organizations in the region (Einhorn and Sever 2003; Lang 2000), through which feminist organizations become dependent on state funds for survival, adopt hierarchal models of organization, and are politically neutralized. The article provides evidence for evaluation of such arguments.1

I begin by situating the present analysis within extant discussions of emotions in social movements, detailing how emotion cultures relate to the development of critical consciousness and resistance, and thus figure into dynamics of movement mobilization and maintenance. I then briefly discuss the methodological strategies and data sources used in this project. Next, I turn to an examination of the two feminist organizations, both of which followed distinct paths vis-à-vis the state since the end of state socialism, to uncover how dependent and autonomous organizations dif-fer in their emotion cultures.

EmOTIONS IN fEmINIST mOVEmENTS

The role of emotions in the development and maintenance of social movements has garnered increasing attention over the last decade (Flam and King 2005; Goodwin, Jasper, and Polletta 2001; Gould 2004; Jasper 1998). This body of scholarship establishes that emotions play a signifi-cant role in social movements, where they often provide the impetus for their formation and the backbone of movement sustainability, while also contributing to organizational cultures, collective identities, framing strat-egies, and tactical reasoning. As James Jasper argues in the context of social movements, “Emotions give ideas, ideologies, identities, and even interests their power to motivate” (1997, 127).

Organizers can harness emotions to redirect focus, transforming what they see as counterproductive or dangerous emotions into feelings that support the goals and strategies of movement organizations. To this end, social movement actors engage in what Hochschild (1983) terms




emotional labor, or the work of developing, directing, transforming, and managing emotions.2 Social movements employ emotional labor to attract supporters (Perry 2002), build and maintain networks and coalitions (Taylor and Rupp 2002), identify targets and strategies for activism (Gould 2002; Kim 2002), and sustain movement organizations (Gould 2002).

Rights-based movements typically seek to harness the emotions of members of socially marginalized groups to galvanize support for their greater social inclusion and to increase group self esteem. For example, feminist movements work to transform guilt, shame, and depression—all emotions typically associated with women—from passive feelings that inhibit collective action into active and politicized emotions (Reger 2004). Anger in particular is a key emotion for mobilization (Lyman 2004), and many social movements, including feminist movements, have sought to develop and augment feelings of anger through consciousness raising (Reger 2004).

All members of a society are subject to expectations governing what emotions are considered appropriate, or feeling rules (Hochschild 1979; Thoits 1989). Those who occupy a subordinate social position may face particularly strong punishments for violating feeling rules, which, reflect-ing dominant power relations, are typically different for them than for members of dominant groups. For example, a middle-class, heterosexual white man in the United States expressing anger may be characterized by others as temperamental or grumpy, but he is unlikely to be deemed dan-gerous as a Black man might be, or a bitch as a woman might be. Since others are unlikely to perceive his emotion display as threatening, insubor-dinate, or unjustified, he is also unlikely to suffer any symbolic or material consequences for it.

Inequalities in the content and application of feeling rules may result in lost emotional energy, or an individual’s long-term, generally durable level of personal strength, connectedness with others, and/or willingness to initi-ate social interactions (Collins 1990). In her theorization of how emotional dynamics can explain both inertia and resistance, Erika Summers-Effler (2002) finds that an individual occupying a subordinate position may respond to losing emotional energy because of their low status in one of three ways. They can continue to manage their emotions by, for example, suppressing anger or resentment. Alternately, they might avoid interactions that could result in further lost emotional energy. Finally, they might engage in resistance, challenging their position as subordinate.

Experiences with social inequality and injustice can provoke feelings that either internalize or externalize blame (Kemper 1978). Women are likely to abide by gendered feeling rules that render anger and other emotions that




target blame outside of the self as off limits to them. Anger, in fact, is a deviant emotion for women in much of the western industrialized world (Hercus 1999; Lehr 1995). This is problematic insofar as anger is an emo-tional precondition for resistance and social movement engagement (Collins 1990; Hercus 1999; Taylor 2000).

Still, many women do convert their anger and other emotions into resis-tance. Summers-Effler (2002) argues that the development of a critical consciousness is the key first step in moving toward subversive emotional activity. In terms of feminism, critical consciousness involves awareness of gender as a system of subordination and the development of a sense of injustice. Experiencing solidarity and collective identity—a key goal of consciousness raising—is central to the development of critical con-sciousness, allowing women to reformulate what they heretofore viewed as personal problems into social patterns and to shift blame away from themselves and onto the broader social environment.

Once a critical consciousness has been attained, maintenance can be a struggle (Hercus 1999). Furthermore, critical consciousness alone is gen-erally insufficient for subversive activity. Hope, or the anticipation that resistance will achieve intended results, is another major precondition for mobilization (Summers-Effler 2002). Hope, in turn, depends on ongoing rituals for reinforcement, as well as on framing past experiences so that they reflect a potential for future success.

Feminist organizations often attempt to resonate with potential recruits and existing members by stressing injustices women experience as a group, amplifying anger and frustration to galvanize participants, and offer-ing the possibility of social change (Taylor 1995). How feminist emotion cultures evolve, however, is dependent on social processes and structures of power not just within, but also outside, feminist organizations (Morgen 1995). Organizational emotion cultures are nested within larger emotion cultures that are institutionally specific or culturally dominant, and are structured by the available and acceptable emotional repertoire in the broader arena of action. These outer ring emotion cultures influence the inner ring emotion cultures. For example, when inner ring organizations interact with outer ring institutions, they may adopt the institutional norms of those institutions (Katzenstein 1998), including emotion cultures. The constraints and opportunities for developing particular emotion cultures in the inner ring represent an emotional opportunity structure imposed by their relationships with the outer ring. Like political and discursive oppor-tunity structures, emotional opportunity structures are dynamic, dialogic, and subject to interpretation. As the subsequent discussion of feminist orga-nizing in eastern Germany reveals, state-dependent feminist organizations




face an emotional opportunity structure that encourages a professional-ized emotional repertoire. Autonomous organizations, on the other hand, are dependent on an expressive emotion culture for maintaining members’ commitment and thereby ensuring survival.

mEThOD

To tease out the relationship between degree of organizational auton-omy from the state and emotion cultures, I analyze two feminist organiza-tions in an eastern German city. I conducted ethnographic fieldwork at these two organizations in the summer, fall, and winter of 2003 with continued follow-up contact through 2006 as part of a larger study of the development of local feminist movements in eastern Germany since the end of socialism there in 1989 (Guenther 2006; 2008). Participant obser-vation, formal and informal interviews, and archival research provided me with a longer-term, worm’s eye view of these two organizations and allowed me to explore multiple aspects of the emotion cultures of the organizations, including how staff and volunteers represent and express feelings, how they teach newcomers about the organizational emotion culture and learn it themselves, and how they develop and utilize vocabu-laries and ideologies about emotions. My focus on emotion cultures is aligned with emotionology rather than with the study of emotions in that attention to emotion cultures invokes professed values and norms for emotional behavior, but does not necessarily capture the experienced emotions of the actors involved (Stearns and Stearns 1985).

Although the present analysis is informed by data collected as part of the larger research program, it focuses on two organizations for sev-eral reasons. First, the 16 feminist organizations from this city fall along a continuum in their relationship with the state, such that trying to classify them into two groups would create complex measurement problems. The two organizations on which the current analysis centers represent the furthest points on a continuum of autonomy and depen-dence, allowing for a direct comparison that illuminates trends identi-fied in the larger sample. Second, these organizations are a particularly well-matched pair for comparison because, as I will discuss in more detail shortly, they have a great deal in common. The primary differ-ence between them has been their relationship with the state. Their similarities along other core dimensions of goals, ideology, and struc-ture allow for control over the other usual suspects that could explain variations in emotion cultures.




Finally, these two organizations are the largest and most visible feminist organizations in the city. This is important because I was able to collect far more data from these two organizations than from any others. While at virtually all other organizations I spoke with one or maximally two staff members—generally because they represented the full staff—the two organizations at the heart of this analysis had large enough staff groups and service offerings that I was able to speak with multiple informants, collect archival materials, and participate in both routine and special events. I completed semi-structured, in-depth interviews with seven mem-bers of one organization and five of the other.3 Respondents were eager to speak with me and to have their voices heard. This eagerness reflects their structural location as doubly marginalized in the unified Germany as women and as easterners, and in some cases also as lesbians and/or immi-grants. The women wanted to tell their stories to someone interested in documenting their experiences. My personal background as a German American with high levels of cultural and linguistic fluency and as a self-identified activist also provided me with a degree of insider status.

During interviews, which generally lasted 90 minutes to three hours, respondents and I discussed a range of topics, including their involvement in feminist organizing, the history of their organization and their role in that history, and their feelings about German unification, other social movement actors, and the state, among other topics. Interviews with 20 additional activists and feminist state officials who did not work directly with either of the two organizations analyzed in this article were helpful for providing diverse perspectives on the emotion cultures of the two organizations that I analyze in depth. Virtually every respondent in the sample was familiar with and had contact with the two organizations analyzed here, and they offered their impressions and insights into the emotion cultures of these groups.

Through participant observation, I obtained an insider’s view of the rou-tine operation of the emotion cultures of the organizations. Observation allowed me to experience the emotion cultures of the organizations first hand and to witness emotional labor and management in practice. I observed during classes, groups, and lectures, as well as during routine activities at the organizations. I was able to spend time and observe interactions and their emotional dynamics in public spaces where women congregate dur-ing the day and evening. In these settings, I met and spoke informally with roughly a dozen clients, volunteers, and staff other than those included in the interview sample for each organization. In addition, I collected archi-val data, including documents like brochures, fliers, and other outreach




materials, and some internal documents, like minutes from meetings. These documents reflect the development of emotion cultures, and pro-vided stimuli for interviews, during which I would often ask respondents to elaborate on written materials.

The women I met at these two—and other—organizations joined the feminist movement in eastern Germany during the tumult of 1989-1990, when state socialism in East Germany ended and East and West Germany unified. German unification was a shock for these women, resulting in feelings of elation at their expanded political rights and of anger and frus-tration at their suddenly lowered status. They turned to local-level orga-nizing, coupling political advocacy with service provisioning to help women cope with the transformation from socialism to capitalism. Although sometimes wary of being identified as feminists—which the socialist rul-ing party of the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany) insisted was a western, bourgeois import—eastern German feminists quickly joined together to protect women’s rights and interests. Most feminist orga-nizing in eastern Germany since German unification in 1990 has focused on keeping women in the workforce by advocating for the continuation of East German policies and programs that produced the highest labor force participation rate for women in the world, like state-funded day care, gen-erous maternity leaves, and affirmative action. Feminists also developed educational organizations where women retrain for new careers or receive assistance in finding jobs, and created services that were needed, but largely unavailable, in East Germany, such as shelters for battered women and counseling for survivors of sexual violence.

Reflecting the migration of young people out of eastern German cities in search of employment in the West, the average age of respondents in the full sample from this city is 52 years. Of the 32 women I formally interviewed in this city, all had completed a degree beyond high school, and three held Master’s-level degrees. Twenty-three respondents either primarily work(ed) or volunteer(ed) with a nonprofit women’s organiza-tion, while eight were feminist-identified women who serve as either elected or appointed government officials responsible for gender issues.Three women were noneastern German: two are western Germans who moved to eastern Germany after unification, and one woman is a Russian immigrant who has lived in the city since the early 1980s. With the excep-tion of one interviewee who requested an interview largely in English to practice her English-language skills, I conducted, transcribed, and ana-lyzed the interviews in German aided in part by the use of a software program for sorting and coding qualitative data.4 All translations here are




mine. Although I use pseudonyms to obscure individual identities, I retain the real names of organizations because they are significant, respondents wanted them used, and there would be no clear benefit to disguising them other than to protect me as a researcher (Guenther forthcoming).

ThE DEVElOpmENT Of TWO fEmINIST CENTERS

Since the collapse of state socialism in the former German Democratic Republic in 1989 and the unification of East and West Germany in 1990, women in eastern Germany have experienced massive social upheaval, including welfare state retrenchment and the introduction of West Germany’s more traditional understanding of gender relations (for detailed discussions of the impact of German unification on eastern German women, see Brown, Jasper, and Schröter [1995]; Dölling [1991]; Frink [2001]; Rosenfeld, Trappe, and Gornick [2004]; Rudd [2000]; Trappe [1995]). Women in eastern Germany suffer from disproportionate un- and underemployment and numerous changes in state policy since 1989 make it more challenging than in the former East Germany for women to work outside of the home and to combine paid employment with parenting. Feminist attempts at effecting change in the political arena since the early 1990s overwhelmingly focus on municipal politics and the local state rather than on the federal state or the European Union (EU). Although the feminist movement in eastern Germany is localized and decentralized, local feminist movements are quite vibrant and in most cit-ies in eastern Germany have developed rape crisis centers and battered women’s shelters, and coordinate job training and placement programs, public education campaigns, and social events. Grassroots feminist orga-nizations are typically heavily subsidized by the state, especially through municipal and provincial state agencies.

Such is the case in this city of just under 200,000 residents, where since unification local women have founded over a dozen nonprofit feminist organizations, most of which receive at least some funding from local state coffers. Many feminist activists first encountered one another in feminist and/or dissident groups sheltered by the Catholic or Evangelical Lutheran churches before 1989. Over half of the activists in this sample had some involvement with Women for Change (Frauen für Veränderung), the city’s first visible women’s organization, which formed in early 1989 in the period of growing public unrest leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Involvement with Women for Change was life-altering for many women. Through the group’s leader, they heard about the status of women




in West Germany and were horrified when they learned how little West German women participated in the paid labor market and how paltry state support for day care was in West Germany compared to the widely avail-able, virtually free day care offered in East Germany (for data on work–family policies in the unified Germany, see Shaible, Schweiger, and Kaul [2005]). They heeded their leader’s call for resistance, and steeled them-selves for an assault on the East German gender order which was, on the whole, more egalitarian than that of West Germany.

As German unification proceeded and became inevitable in the win-ter and spring of 1990, many activists began to feel that Women for Change’s broad platform of peace and reform required greater specifica-tion, and they worked to develop explicitly feminist organizations addressing a wide range of issues. Ultimately, at least half a dozen sepa-rate organizations in the city trace their point of origin back to Women for Change. Of these, two are especially prominent, having opened large women’s centers in 1990.

From January until August, 1990, the city was under the control of a transitional government. Among other duties, this governing body was charged with determining the fates of various properties owned by the city, including the former headquarters of the state secret police, which Women for Change had taken over in December 1989. The transitional government considered proposals from various political and social service actors, and ultimately determined that the headquarters should become the home of the city’s new municipal women’s center (Kommunales Frauenzentrum, here-after the Women’s Center) under the leadership of a group of women who had been active in Women for Change. As a municipal institution, the new Women’s Center was overseen by the city’s Gender Equity Representative (Gleichstellungsbeauftragte), who was herself active with Women for Change (for a discussion of the development of these German femocrats, see Ferree [1995]). Day-to-day operations were managed by staff members whose salaries were indirectly paid by the city, but who applied for their positions through more conventional routes than political appointees. Although most eastern German municipalities with more than 150,000 residents provide financial support to women’s organizations, the creation of a municipal women’s center is unusual; I am aware of only two others. For 13 years, the Women’s Center existed as a municipal institution employ-ing up to a dozen full-time staff.

Because of budget shortfalls and a desire to reduce the city’s obliga-tions to social service agencies, in early 2003, just a few months before I began my fieldwork there, the city transferred control over, and financial responsibility for, the Women’s Center to an independent nonprofit




organization already operating in the city. Subsequent to the transfer, virtu-ally all of the remaining original staff left the organization.5 Although no longer a municipal institution, the Women’s Center still receives funding from the city (amounting to about €80,000 in 2007, or roughly US$130,000), maintains its residence in a facility renovated at the city’s expense, and the city’s Gender Equity Representative continues to be influential in the governance of the Women’s Center. The Women’s Center thus remains dependent on, and tied to, the city.

The second group of women who founded a women’s center were dis-enchanted with Women for Change’s, and later the Women’s Center’s, willingness to work directly with the state. Feminists involved with this organization view East, West, and unified Germany as patriarchal societ-ies, and established a nonhierarchical, consensus-driven organization that rebukes masculine models of decision making and power. Members named the new organization Autonomous Brennessel (Autonome Brennessel, hereafter simply Brennessel). In German, Brennessel means stinging nettles, which grow rampant as weeds through most of Germany. Instantly painful to the touch, stinging nettles are also believed to have healing properties. The choice of name is oppositional and yet offers a prospect of reconciliation.

At their inception, the Women’s Center and Brennessel shared core similarities and some important differences. Both organizations focus on violence against women, including rape, incest, and battering; women’s social and professional networking; their work in the paid labor force; and political representation. Both organizations identify as feminist and recog-nize women’s status as oppressed by men and patriarchal institutions, and while the Women’s Center has come to propagate a more liberal feminist ideology and to welcome men’s involvement in some programs (both organizations initially prohibited men from their premises), both groups adopt core beliefs from radical feminism. Both seek to empower women by helping them become aware of gender inequalities and emboldening them to take action to change their lives at the personal and societal level. The two organizations started out with the joint goals of political empow-erment and service provisioning. They are also both quite professional-ized. Although only the Women’s Center has adopted a hierarchical organizational model for day-to-day operations,6 both organizations are incorporated as nonprofits; employ staff who have advanced degrees in relevant fields such as social pedagogy, social work, or counseling; are housed in professional facilities; and are fiscally accountable to grant-making agencies.




Differences include five interrelated issues. First, while the Women’s Center developed under the protection of the state, Brennessel has been largely autonomous from the state from its inception. This is not to say that Brennessel has never asked for or received state assistance. After unification, federal unemployment programs subsidized or paid salaries for many workers in eastern Germany, including at Brennessel, typically in combination with funds from local state agencies or employers. The city also contributed financial resources to help Brennessel with overhead costs, and the organization has applied for other grants through the pro-vincial government with mixed success. The amount of state support varied significantly each fiscal year between 1990 and 2007, but never approached the levels of state support for the Women’s Center.

Second, as a result of these funding disparities, the material conditions at the two organizations are notably different. While the Women’s Center enjoys a roomy facility with current technology, women at Brennessel work in dilapidated offices with inadequate technology and under the constant threat of budgetary crises that threaten the security of their jobs. When I presented one staff member at Brennessel with information about informed consent, she tossed the consent form back at me, laughing that I should be signing a release of liability in the event I was struck down by a collapsing ceiling.

Third, the structure of leadership at the Women’s Center is hierarchical while that at Brennessel is based on consensus. Fourth, while lesbian and bisexual women have been involved with both groups from the outset, sexuality is more of a political issue at Brennessel than at the Women’s Center. Finally, the two organizations have distinct emotion cultures.

ThE STaTE Of EmOTIONS aT ThE WOmEN’S CENTER aND BRENNESSEl

The Women’s Center occupies a beautifully restored house tucked along a quiet side street in the city’s historic center. The first floor has a café and lounge area, as well as smaller meeting rooms, and most of the windows face out into the serene garden behind the building. The Center offers talks, discussion groups, and classes, as well as individual referrals and counseling with the mission of supporting women’s individual and collective development and creating a more gender egalitarian society.

The emotion culture at the state dependent Women’s Center is reserved and contained. During my visits there, I never witnessed significant emotional




displays. Staff members speak in quiet, soothing voices, exuding an aura of calm and caring. Whenever I left the Women’s Center, I was startled by how loud the world was since during my visits I quickly became accus-tomed to the stillness of the Women’s Center.

Emotion states, particularly those involving anger, grief, shame, and discouragement, were conspicuously absent during interviews with cur-rent and former staff members. Outreach materials contain no mention of emotions, nor do they seek an emotional response from readers. Classes and groups avoid emotional and psychological topics. Instead, curricular offerings stress practical skills and issues ranging from wreath making to how to navigate the employment market.

Staff routinely bemoan the challenges women have faced in eastern Germany, describing women in the community as “disheartened,” “disap-pointed,” “lonely,” “disengaged,” “disoriented,” “overwhelmed,” “lost,” and “withdrawn.” In interactions within the Women’s Center, these feelings are positioned as obstacles to be overcome, not through expression and engagement, but through repression. Importantly, while there was fre-quent reference among staff to the connection between these feelings and broad social phenomena such as German unification, unemployment, and globalization, staff help their clients cope with the feelings and—with the exception of intrafamilial violence—do not explore the underlying causes of the feelings.

The Women’s Center advertises services as “gender sensitive,” and staff members proudly listed their feminist credentials during my con-versations with them, frequently stressing their interest in advancing women’s rights and interests. Still, service provisioning available there is not obviously feminist or gender critical. Staff members focus on individual problems and do not help clients identify the structural roots of those problems. While many feminist organizations in Germany— as elsewhere—engage in consciousness raising to help women connect their experiences and emotions with structured inequality and to trans-form emotions into more empowering feelings, this is not the case at the Women’s Center. Instead, services are pragmatic, focusing on immediate practical, material concerns. The counseling strategy involves staff encouraging clients to learn to “cope” with their emotion states and work through them. The goal of counseling is to learn how to compartmentalize and hide emotions to maximize what staff called “functioning.”

The emotion rules at the Women’s Center discourage staff members from expressing their feeling states. The language of professionalism dominates, and squelches strong displays of emotion. The notable




exception to this is compassion, an emotion that is frequently invoked in reference to interactions with clients. Although compassion has the poten-tial to be a mobilizing emotion for demands for social change, it does not serve this function at the Women’s Center, where it is instead emphasized as a mode of caring that motivates individual assistance. In German, com-passion is called Mitgefühl or Mitleid, words that translate more literally into English as “feeling with” or “suffering with.” Indeed, staff describe their care work as giving women in the community the opportunity to open up to someone who will bear witness to what they have experienced with-out judgment or imposition of their own interpretations of these experi-ences. Doing so can be taxing: Staff at the Women’s Center reported feeling “weighed down” by the emphasis on listening to and caring for others without being able to express their emotional or political responses to the stories they hear. One woman sighed as she explained to me that her job was to “listen and listen, but not to react.”

The women who work at the Women’s Center engage in the emotional labor of suppressing feelings that violate the Center’s emotion culture and highlighting the Center’s core emotion, compassion. Expressing compas-sion at the expense of other emotions became exhausting for some staff members who feel pressured to demonstrate a caring and optimistic per-sona. One staff member noted somewhat wistfully that, “We’re not sup-posed to get mad about how things have turned out . . . We’re always supposed to look on the bright side, which isn’t always easy when for many women, life has become so difficult.” A former staff member described work at the Women’s Center “draining and exhausting,” and told me she left the organization because she found it “politically and emotionally stifling.”

In my conversations with Silke and Anja, two of the original staff mem-bers at the Women’s Center, neither of whom was still working at the Center when I first met them in 2003, the effects of dependence on the state were evident across many domains. On the one hand, being institu-tionalized as a municipal entity provided critical validation. Staff and volunteers felt that the city was taking their concerns as women seriously. At the same time, as city employees, staff at the center felt depoliticized and emotionally repressed. As Anja comments:

I was also aware that a city-run women’s center is different from an auton-omous organization. Naturally, we weren’t funded to be politically active. Many of us were uncertain—even our directors were uncertain: On the one hand, they wanted us to be political, but, on the other hand, they didn’t know how to activate us politically as public employees . . . An attachment to a structure like that [of the state] hobbled us in many ways.




In Anja’s mind—and her former colleagues echoed the sentiment—being dependent on the state functioned to deradicalize the Women’s Center as an organization and had the same effect on often the individual women who worked there. Instead of embracing emotions as a legitimate form of expression or tool for mobilization, the Women’s Center draws on a dis-course of professionalism in which detached indifference is considered appropriate. Emotions run counter to professionalization and therefore to the public reputation and state support of the Women’s Center. A staff member summed up the situation: “As a state-funded institution, we couldn’t look like a group of hysterical women.”

Largely motivated by concern over maintaining a positive relationship with the city government, which indirectly paid employee salaries, as well as the cost of overhead and equipment, staff members at the Women’s Center adopted an unemotional presentation of self and organization. While none of the staff I spoke with could recall an instance of a state agent explicitly advising them of emotion rules, respondents consistently reported feeling constrained in their emotional expression because of their status as a dependent organization. The staff at the Women’s Center per-ceive an emotional opportunity structure in which violating the norms of their benefactor, namely the state, would place them at risk for soft repres-sion through stigmatization, ridicule as “hysterical women,” and loss of funding (Ferree 2004). The Women’s Center has relied on its ability to elicit support from local state leaders and agencies, which involves main-taining broad appeal to justify public financial support. As staff consis-tently noted, the emphasis on public appeal translates into a nonthreatening, nonemotional organizational culture where clients pass through rather than become committed constituents.

State officials, too, recognized that dependence on the state influenced the capacity of the Women’s Center to utilize emotions for political pur-poses. One city official told me that she was simultaneously proud of her involvement with the Women’s Center, but also “disappointed that it couldn’t be more political and more passionate because of its reliance on the city.” Like staff members at the Women’s Center, she conflates politics with passion, asserting that because the city deactivated the political impulses of the women who founded the Women’s Center by co-opting the organization, it also “drained them of passion.”

In contrast, at Brennessel, emotional displays are welcome, and emo-tion rules require expression. Feelings are viewed as authentic, real, legitimate, and important. Rejecting fears about women being represented or understood as irrational and overly emotional, activists at Brennessel




encourage the expression of emotions as a path to self-discovery and feminist empowerment and, ultimately, to challenging existing power rela-tions. In this emotion culture, expression is a key part of consciousness raising, through which women become aware of the inequalities they face, their unity with other women, and their efficacy as political actors. Events at Brennessel, like a regular cabaret and an extensive menu of self-help and discussion groups, focus on the expression of a range of emotions including anger, grief, shame, despair, happiness, love, and lust. The only emotion ever framed as one to be “overcome” at Brennessel is fear, which self-defense classes, as well as support groups work to obliterate.

To promote and maintain an expressive emotion culture, Brennessel’s calendar includes workshops that focus on topics like getting in touch with feelings and emotional self-expression. Brennessel is also unique among feminist organizations in that it has offered a special certificate in feminist counseling. Most staff members there have completed this pro-gram in addition to any training they may have from mainstream educa-tional institutions. In this feminist curriculum, counselors are urged to encourage emotional expression among clients, and to recognize anger and grief especially as empowering feelings. The curriculum stresses emotional expression as a route to self actualization and feminist con-sciousness for both clients and counselors. In working with survivors of gender-based traumas such as rape, incest, and domestic violence, Brennessel promotes emotional displays and the maintenance of emotion states among clients as stages of healing and feminist awakening. A range of emotions, but especially anger and sadness, are welcomed and under-stood among staff members as part of the process of healing from trauma, and of becoming a feminist. One staff member described Brennessel’s approach to emotions in counseling by noting, “Healing requires feeling feelings.” Reflecting this philosophy, staff members work to elicit emo-tional responses from clients. “Sometimes a client really needs to be pushed in order to get in touch with her feelings,” one staff member mused. “Our role is to provide that push to make sure they really feel what they need to feel.”

Emotions are also important for building solidarity between women at Brennessel. An ethic of care through which staff and clients express their feelings and acknowledge, encourage, and discuss one another’s emotion states is central. What American feminists commonly term “processing” is fundamental to Brennessel’s emotion culture. Individuals share and discuss their emotional states frequently. Conversations about emotional responses to events within and outside the organization are a normal part




of interactions. For example, a staff member might express anger at an experience with sexism on the way to work, or anger at a colleague for failing in some task. Those who witness these emotional displays are then expected to manage their own emotional responses by offering support and validation, even in the face of conflict. Through such “processing,” as well as in other interactions with colleagues and clients, staff and volun-teers are expected to engage in the emotional labor of amplifying their emotion states and/or validating one another’s emotions.

Reflecting this expressive emotion culture, activists at Brennessel rou-tinely made reference to emotion states. They described specific events or points in time as “exciting,” “exhilarating,” “tumultuous,” or “frustrating.” They also framed their own responses to events and encounters in emo-tional terms, and recognized that their motivation as activists was grounded in specific feelings and emotion states. One staff member who became active in women’s issues in 1989 recalled her development as an activist in largely emotional terms. After unification, she explained, she took a job in a government office addressing women’s issues. From what she learned there, however, coupled with her experiences with underemploy-ment as a consequence of unification, she became “angry—even enraged. It wasn’t a choice anymore to do this work. I had to do it. Otherwise, I would be complicit in the patriarchy.”

Emotions are also obvious in the public face of the organization. Brennessel’s printed matter utilizes the language of emotions, especially anger, grief, and courage. For example, their monthly newsletter is rife with politicized emotions, regularly calling women into action by inciting anger and outrage and directing those emotions at specific targets. Headlines routinely urge women to “stand up,” “take charge,” and “fight back,” often with the added emphasis of an exclamation point. While many newsletter items are purely informational, most request some type of action on the part of the reader, and the authors—the staff and volun-teers at Brennessel—politicize emotions by provoking and invoking emotions to encourage action, such as participation in protests that require the transformation of negative or inhibitive feelings into empow-ering, confrontational emotion states. Brennessel’s emotion culture cen-ters on the emotional labor of frequent expression of intense emotions for individual and collective empowerment.

The cost is that Brennessel’s emotion culture scares away some poten-tial participants, and the likelihood that a woman will seek services there in the first place is lower than at the Women’s Center, which has a much larger clientele. Several women in the broader sample, for example, said they do not feel comfortable at Brennessel because, in their words, they




perceive the women there as alternately “too angry” or “too confronta-tional.” One feminist-identified policy maker admitted she had success-fully urged the city leadership to deny a request for funds from Brennessel because she thought their approach to feminism appealed only to a limited group of women whereas the organizational culture at the Women’s Center was more accessible and less threatening to women in the com-munity. Her position—which was widely known to staff at both organiza-tions—reinforces fear of being cut off from state funding at the Women’s Center and anger toward the state at Brennessel.

Ultimately, although its initial appeal is lower, Brennessel does more than the Women’s Center to awaken and maintain mobilizing emotion states among clients, staff, and volunteers. This is critical precisely because Brennessel is an autonomous organization and suf-fers the very real material consequences of this status. Brennessel’s organizational survival depends on the commitment of its members as many activists ping pong between paid and unpaid positions according to the organization’s finances and their own eligibility for government-subsidized salaries. Validation of un- and underemployment is particu-larly important in the eastern German context where there is no history of or appreciation for volunteerism and where women consider it an affront not to be paid for their labor. Brennessel’s expressive, intense emotion culture has narrower appeal than the more neutral, unexpres-sive emotion culture of the Women’s Center, but produces greater commitment and a stronger sense of solidarity among those who become members.

CONCluSION: EmOTIONal OppORTuNITIES aND fEmINIST EmOTION CulTuRES

Emotions are central to the mobilization and maintenance of social movements and social movement organizations. Emotions galvanize sup-port for protest and build commitment and collective identity. Rights-based movements like feminism typically translate deviant or socially undesir-able emotions to empower movement actors. Extant perspectives on femi-nist organizations have posited that they can be identified in part based on similarities in their emotion cultures (Martin 1990; Taylor 1995), yet feminist organizations develop diverse emotion cultures in response to opportunities and constraints. Comparing the emotion cultures of the Women’s Center and Brennessel reveals only one common element of their emotion cultures, namely an ethic of care.




The differences in the emotion cultures of the Women’s Center and Brennessel emerged in spite of similar internal dynamics including goals, ideologies, and levels of professionalization. Differences in the external context offer a better explanation of the observed variation in emotion cultures than internal dynamics. Emotion cultures develop out of emo-tional opportunity structures constituted by the specific social, economic, and political environments in which organizations operate. Conceptualizing emotion cultures as the outcomes of emotional opportunity structures analogous to political and discursive opportunity structures draws attention to how emotion cultures are constructed in response to structured con-straints and opportunities, including existing emotional repertoires and expectations of emotion emanating from funders. The social and economic realities organizations face are key in shaping their emotion cultures.

Returning to Summers-Effler’s (2002) framework of strategies for coping with the emotional energy lost as a consequence of a subordinate social status, the Women’s Center promotes emotion management that centers on the suppression of anger and resentment. This depoliticizes emotions and inhibits the development of a critical consciousness, which in turn reduces the probability that clients, staff, or volunteers will organize to demand political change. Such an emotion culture also reinforces mascu-line ideals of professional, appropriate behavior and leaves gendered expectations of emotions undisturbed. In contrast, Brennessel adopts an alternate strategy for coping with gender inequality, namely politicizing emotions by using and amplifying a range of emotions to foster solidarity, commitment, and a desire to protest gender inequality.

Both organizations are constrained in how they cultivate their emotion cultures because of their specific relationships with the state. The Women’s Center responded to implicit demands made by the local state to be unemo-tional. Because its own survival is dependent on state support and not on the emotional resources and commitment of its staff and clients, the Women’s Center has not needed to use emotions to cultivate critical con-sciousness or collective identity. However, the absence of an emotion cul-ture that can sustain a sense of outrage and commitment among potential supporters will become increasingly problematic for the Women’s Center as the city government continues to cut back its financial commitments to the Center and to all social services. Without the lure of stable employment and other resources, and without an emotion culture that effectively mobi-lizes participants and ensures their commitment, the Women’s Center could lose much of its appeal for staff, volunteers, and clients.

At Brennessel, the absence of state support necessitated the creation of a highly emotive emotion culture that galvanizes staff and volunteers and




legitimizes their un- and underemployment. Brennessel’s emotion culture benefits the organization by allowing it to survive in spite of its autono-mous status. This emotion culture enhances the development of critical consciousness among members and the development of a constituency, while simultaneously inhibiting widespread public appeal.

To date, concerns about the effects of state dependence and co-optation have focused on issues of agenda setting, ideology, and political efficacy (Landriscina 2006). Yet emotion cultures are important mechanisms through which state dependence can lead to political neutralization. Given the impor-tance of emotions for mobilization, scholarship on feminist and other social movements must attend to the pragmatic foundations of emotion cultures and to how dependencies may operate through emotion cultures to effect other types of organizational and movement change, like depoliticization.

Overall, these findings support what the logic of feminist perspectives on social movements would predict: Dependence on the state and the neutralization of emotions as mobilizing agents go hand-in-hand. Simultaneously, the complexity unearthed through this analysis of femi-nist emotion cultures offers no easy answers to feminist debates about autonomy and dependence, and instead challenges advocates of both dependent and autonomous models of feminist organizing. Both depen-dence and autonomy create opportunities and limitations and emotion cultures that are at once functional and problematic. Dependence results in a depoliticized emotion culture in which service provisioning focuses on individual coping rather than consciousness raising, but which presents an open and unthreatening introduction to feminist organizing to the uniniti-ated. Echoing accounts of the importance of emotions during periods of movement abeyance (Taylor and Whittier 1992; Whittier 1995), autonomy creates a need for mobilizing emotions to maintain commitment in the face of adversity, thereby contributing to an expressive, politicized emo-tion culture that appeals to fewer adherents but which produces more loyal and committed constituents.

The trend toward welfare state retrenchment and reduced state expen-ditures for social services, which may be accelerated by the economic downslide of the early 2000s, seems likely to endanger dependent organi-zations like the Women’s Center. To ensure their survival, such organiza-tions may need to cultivate emotion cultures that foster solidarity and commitment. Alternately or additionally, feminist activists should engage in more open discussion about dependence and autonomy and, if desired, pursue a strategy of organizing for greater state support. This appears especially urgent in many postsocialist European contexts where much of feminist civil society relies at least partially on the state for support.




To build improved models for theorizing organizational relationships with the state, emotion cultures, and political energies, future research should further examine cases like that of the Women’s Center where one organization has different linkages with the state over time. Such research could help clarify the exact mechanisms through which varying levels of state dependence influence or interact with the emotion cultures of femi-nist organizations. Another path for complicating—and improving—knowledge about the relationship between the state and feminist emotion cultures would be to consider interactions between feminist organizations and different state agencies. In this article, I have taken a narrow view of the state, which is itself comprised of multiple branches and levels, not all of which will necessarily expect, implicitly or explicitly, the same type of emotion cultures among dependent and/or state-centered feminist organi-zations. Comparative research on the interactions between movements and various branches of the state should further illuminate these dynam-ics. Feminist organizations are also often dependent on institutions other than the state (see Incite! Women of Color against Violence [2009] for critiques of dependence on foundations). Future studies should examine whether dependence broadly or dependence on the state in particular explains variations across feminist and other movement organizations, including in their emotion cultures.

NOTES

1. Interactions between feminist movements and states are embedded in par-ticular historical and cultural contexts. My findings cannot be uncritically extrap-olated to other contexts, but the discussion here should provide a building block for further investigation in other settings.

2. Although others use the terms emotional labor, emotional management, and emotion work interchangeably, Hochschild limits emotional labor to emotional efforts that are sold for a wage, or which, in Marxist terms, have an exchange value. Many of the respondents in this study do not specifically exchange their emotion work for wages because they are volunteers, but they do exchange it for other things, like external funding and grants and higher status within an organi-zation.

3. I did not exclude men from my sample; however, no men ultimately met the criteria for participation in the research, namely involvement in a feminist orga-nization at some point since 1989. At the organizational level, the study includes all feminist organizations that have existed in the city since 1989.

4. Two research assistants assisted with transcription.




5. I interviewed three women who helped found and/or who worked at the Women’s Center before it was reorganized as a private organization, two women who worked there after it was no longer a municipal institution, and two women who were actively involved with the organization during both stages.

6. For purposes of dealing with state funding agencies and legal issues, Brennessel also has an executive director, but decisions are in fact made through consensus.

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Katja M. Guenther is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California–Riverside, where she conducts research on gender, social movements, and the state in comparative perspective. Her primary research project focuses on the development of local feminist movements in eastern Germany since the collapse of state socialism in 1989.



Documents

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