“Coming Out of My Shell”: Motherleaders Contesting Fear, Vulnerability, and Despair through Family-focused Community Organizing

Abstract

Women’s political engagements often look different from those of men, and they are also undertheorized and understudied. The author examines how participation in family-focused community organizing shapes women’s lives, self-perceptions, and relationships. Using 15 months of participant observations of organizing activities and 40 interviews with parent organizers the author calls motherleaders, the author demonstrates how family-focused community organizing shapes participants’ lives in ways that help them leave “shells” of fear, vulnerability, and despair within their often marginalized lives as women of color, recent immigrants, and low-income mothers. The personal narratives of motherleaders demonstrate how their collective action transcends publicly stated formal organizational goals and powerfully affects them in life-altering ways. It is important that scholars seriously consider the intersecting identities of collective action participants, the meanings participants construct of and through “politics,” and the power of collective action to transform the lives of marginalized groups.

“I Really Belong Here”: Civic Capacity‐Building among Returning Citizens

“…We extend collective identity and biographical effects scholarship (Polletta and Jasper 2001; Van Dyke et al 2000) by suggesting that capacity‐building is not merely instrumental for mobilization efforts or personal and group changes, but that it can construct notions of social belonging and meaningful relationships for highly marginalized participants. We add to emerging scholarship that emphasizes the implications of local social movements on participants’ daily routines, practices and relationships (Cossyleon 2018; Perez 2018; Gravante and Poma 2016; Terriquez 2015) by examining how a range of CBO‐supported civic capacity‐building practices, from one‐one‐ones, to meetings with policymakers, enabled participants to construct meanings of kinship, recognition and power. We argue these experiences fostered bonding and bridging social belonging within and across communities.…”

“…Similarly, Gravante and Poma (2016) argue that the ties that were created through grassroots resistance movements in Mexico and Spain offered mutual support and empowerment for participants. And last, in a study of family‐focused community organizing led by Black and Latina mothers, Cossyleon (2018) finds that local movement participation transformed the self‐perceptions and relationships of “motherleaders” with family and other community members (1). In line with this work, which shows how engaging in social movements shapes the lives and personal relationships of participants beyond movement policy goals, we explore how local capacity‐building processes facilitate these experiences and why they are important—particularly for returning citizens.…”

“…We also contribute to collective identity research, which uncovers processes that sustain movements while shaping personal, cultural, and group transformation (Farro 2014; Polletta and Jasper 2001) by homing in on the emotive aspects of social movement capacity‐building. And last, we add to recent scholarship that has begun to explore how local social movement engagement uniquely shapes the daily routines, practices, and relationships of participants from highly marginalized groups, including unemployed workers, undocumented LGBTQ youth, and women of color who face multiple forms of oppressions because of their gender, race, class, and in some cases, immigration status (Cossyleon 2018; Perez 2018; Terriquez 2015).…”

Making Structural Change with Relational Power: A Gender Analysis of Faith-Based Community Organizing

“…From a community organizing perspective, "womencentered" (Stall & Stoecker, 1998), "family-centered" (Cossyleon, 2018), and "feminine style" (Peeples & DeLuca, 2006) types of organizing include a focus on developing relationships, personal narratives as authoritative information, and other empowerment-oriented strategies: "personal tone, disclosure of personal experiences, reliance on anecdotes and analogies as primary forms of evidence, use of inductive structure, and encouragement of audience identification and participation" (Peeples & DeLuca, 2006, p. 65). Relational power requires engagement in change processes based on relationships with organizers and witnessing organizers' relationships with others (Gutierrez & Lewis, 2012) and an orientation to process over task (Mizrahi & Greenawalt, 2017).…”

Why black women activists stay in the room when they are not being heard

“…long sacrificed their mental, emotional, and physical health for the good of the greater black community (Cossyleon 2018;Lorde 1984). Given the care that black women have provided in activist spaces as community othermothers-women who catalyze black community development by demonstrating traits of care, teaching, and service-and the fact that such care often goes unmatched by the black men in these spaces, many black women activists end up experiencing burnout as they sacrifice their personal time and wellbeing for the black community's welfare as a whole (Collins 2002;James 1993).…”