Conceptualizing Feminist Political Activism

Feminist movements in advanced democracies are currently facing at least two challenges to collective mobilization, one internal and the other external to the movement. Neoliberalism presents an external challenge to collective action in the movement in that it has elevated the importance of individual action and responsibility over the collective. Additionally, intersectionality has introduced an internal challenge to collective mobilization in that it has been challenging for activists to implement it within their activism and in its atomising effects (Evans 2015). Linked to these and to the rise of the third wave, individual resistance has become a core and contested element of contemporary feminist activism. A clear understanding of how we ought to conceptualize what constitutes feminist activity – and the conditions required for it to be considered such – is lacking. The various pressures that have been working to expand political participation repertoires – including some of those felt by feminist movements – have also been identified by researchers focused on political participation repertories (Norris, 2002; Bennett, 2012). Lifestyle politics have been identified as one example of the how political participation repertoires have grown (de Moor 2017). Another is the growing use online of forms of activism (McCaughey and Ayers 2013). Recent work, particularly that of by van Deth (2014), has made an explicit attempt to reconceptualise political participation so as to account for this expansion. This paper has two explicit goals. The first is to classify the wide range of tactics employed by contemporary feminists, in part by focussing on the variety of strategic logics that are adopted, the multiplicity of targets to which these activities are directed, and the various arenas in which they take place. The tactical repertoire of contemporary feminists is expansive, with multiple and complex goals, and focussed on both public and private arenas. Attempting to identify and classify the range of activities within contemporary feminist movements is important for advancing our understanding of what the concept of feminist activism actually entails and how it ought to be defined. The second is to critically apply van Deth’s (2104) reconceptualization of political participation, as well as recent applications of his concept (e.g. de Moor 2017, Hosch-Dayican 2014), to feminist activism. Doing so provides an opportunity to assess its overall usefulness for understanding the various forms of feminist activity and also for gauging the degree to which it provides a comprehensive understanding of the various forms of political activity currently undertaken by activists in feminist movements.