Doing Gender in Activist Spaces: Intersectionality and the Limits of Change

How do youth activists perform and challenge gender norms within their groups? To what degree are activist spaces opportunities for activists to enact reimagined gendered identities and practices? Based on research with activists from three groups in Aotearoa New Zealand working on sexual violence, queer rights, and climate change, we analyze both self-reported gender performances discussed in interviews and our own observations of activists’ gender interactions at group events. Our goal is to think about the ways intersectional gender norms are critiqued, reworked, and sometimes upheld. Our interviews and observations took place from 2018 to 2021, a period in New Zealand marked by great optimism with the Labour Party, under Jacinda Ardern’s leadership, pushing a politics of hope, state feminism, and community spirit in the face of local and global crises (natural disasters, terrorism, and a pandemic), as well as the beginning of the backlash against Labour’s policies and pandemic lockdowns. Given this context, we demonstrate how social justice activism is a complementary and contradictory eco-system of ‘doing’ and ‘undoing’ normative practices of gender, sexuality and race, and how this eco-system is shaped by changing political conditions. This analysis helps illuminate features of activist spaces that can be more amenable to redoing, if not undoing, gender norms. It is also useful because understanding what social justice groups can achieve when political conditions are relatively favourable is important for informing how to prepare for the resistance that inevitably follows.