THE SOCIAL

ONTOLOGY OF SEX

AND GENDER SOCIAL

MOVEMENTS

WHAT IS A SOCIAL MOVEMENT?

We would all agree that social movements are ‘collective’

ventures, for example, but what makes a venture count as

a collective? Is it a matter of numbers? If so, how many?

[…]

Does ‘wearing the badge’ and ‘buying the T-shirt’ make one

part of a movement or must one attend monthly meetings

and engage in protest? And if the latter, what counts as

protest?

- Nick Crossley, Making Sense of Social Movements

SO WHAT DOES

‘COLLECTIVE’ MEAN THEN?

1. denoting a number of persons or things

considered as one group or whole

2. formed by collecting : aggregated

3. of, relating to, or being a group of individuals

4. marked by similarity among or with the

members of a group

5. collectivized or characterized by collectivism

6. shared or assumed by all members of the

group

Identical beliefs, identities, commitments (etc)

From subsuming individuals into a collective whole to

denying the existence of any collective reality over

and above the individuals concerned

THE OPPOSITE EXTREME

Instead looking to the connections between people and their

characteristics

BEYOND COLLECTIVES & INDIVIDUALS?

The

relationally

constituted

collective no

longer says

“join or

die”….

COLLECTIVE REFLEXIVITY

• “a collective orientation to a collective output” –

Pierpaolo Donati and Margaret Archer

• Through our interaction, we bring about

relationships with particular characteristics: a ‘we’

is generated with properties which resist the control

of any one person

• We’re concerned with what we do together, what we

could do together and what we shouldn’t do

together (and the consequences thereof)

• Converging orientation towards what we do

together rather than a shared identity, shared ideas,

shared projects

HOW WE BECOME ‘WE’

• Biographical trajectories into

collectives (as well as out of them)

• Properties of collective shaped by

but irreducible to the biographies

out of which it is constituted

• Biographical entanglement – the

overall tangle very different to the

constituent threads (ball of wool not

perfect analogy!)

• What leads people into collectives?

What keeps them there? What

causes them to leave?

ONE TYPE OF ‘WE’ RELATION

"In the networks formed by the pits, the miners' lodges, the

local Labour and Communist Party branches, the cooperative

movement, the chapels, the brass bands, the rugby clubs,

the male voiced choirs, the neighbourhoods and friendships

and extended kin, as well as the contingent solidarities of the

strike and lockouts and soup kitchens, we can find those

resources and links that sustained a viable and supportive

life”

- Jeffrey Weeks describing the Rhondda in The World We

Have Won

APPLYING THIS TO SEX &

GENDER MOVEMENTS

• Offers useful way of making sense of how ‘we’ relate to ‘they’ (as in example given by Weeks)

• Accounts for collectivity without imputing identical beliefs, identities or commitments: useful for theorising intersectionality

• Highlights how the characteristics of a collective are shaped by the emergent relations between their members (rather than aggregation)

• Useful for making sense of promotion of safe-space: collective concern for quality of relations

• Collectives are the ground for activism: recognising social underpinnings of the activity we identify with movements