Social Movement Selves

Abstract

This article discusses Holstein and Gubrium's (2000) analytic for understanding the production of postmodern selves and suggests that it is a means by which to further understandings about the construction of social movement selves. According to Holstein and Gubrium's perspective, the construction of postmodern subjectivity is an interplay between circumstantial resources and self-constituting work. As an example, I discuss research about a social movement organization in the GLBT (gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender) movement, Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG). I begin by illustrating how PFLAG parents can be understood as drawing on the narrative resources of the GLBT movement, in particular the dominant narrative of coming out. Next I discuss how PFLAG parents also do selves (as heterosexual parents), through everyday interactional identity work to construct affiliation. In so doing, I illustrate a key process of Holstein and Gubrium's analytic—the interplay between cultural constraints and artful agency in the production of postmodern selves—and show how it can help to explain the production of subjectivity in today's social movements. I close with a discussion of the significance of understanding the production of social movement selves for social movement literature.

Disrupting Cultural Selves: Constructing Gay and Lesbian Identities in Rural Locales

“…Narratives also work at cultural and institutional levels in a number of ways. Through storytelling, collective identities and social movements are forged (Armstrong 2002;Bernstein 1997;Ghaziani 2008;Plummer 1995), and allies are created (Broad 2002). The narrative about geography and sexuality is one such narrative that constructs cultural understandings about gay and lesbian identities.…”

Radical Normals: The Moral Career of Straight Parents as Public Advocates for Their Gay Children

“…Being unashamed as a parent and declaring love for child is a meaningful form of public advocacy as defined by PFLAG members. Broad () argues “PFLAG parents must go through a process of coming out, of reconsidering and reconstructing a personal self” (324). As Broad () notes “PFLAG constructs parental coming out in terms of grief in need of support and eventual advocacy that can be done through love” (400).…”

“…For Broad (), social movements and organizations like PFLAG offer resources in the production of new selves. PFLAG's framing practices help to promote the idea that coming out for parents is a personal and political process that may begin with grief talk and support group promises, but ends with acceptance (Broad :404).…”

“…A growing body of research has focused on the process of coming out, identifying both the perils and promise of the movement from silence to public recognition and its consequences for identity claims and intimate group life (Adams ; Ben‐Ari ; Broad ; Boxer, Cook, and Herdt 1995; Hutson ; Myers ; Saghir and Robins 1973; Waldner and Magruder ). Yet much less is known about the impact that coming out has on the identities and self‐conception of significant others sharing close ties with those who identify as gay or lesbian.…”

Organizing a Coincidence

“…According to Robnett, leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a 1960s Civil Rights organization, used identity justification work as a mechanism to overcome the partial alignment between their biographical and movement identities to construct a personal movement identity. Broad's (2002) study of members of an organization in the GLBT (gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender) movement, Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG), concludes that the PFLAG members utilized GLBT movement resources to self-construct through an interpretative practice a "postmodern self"-which included a modified personal identity supportive of the movement's collective identity. Recent studies of identity construction in cultural or postindustrial movements illustrate how personal conceptions of self are reordered as a result of participant affiliation with a movement organization (Jasper 1997).…”