The Politics of Dissent and the Labour of Civility: A Feminist Analysis

In the face of the coarsening of our public discourse and an escalation of ill-mannered politics, calls for civility in how we conduct our public life - read as a demand for more patience, politeness, rule following and compromise (Zamalin 2021) - are becoming more frequent and urgent. Not all, however, support this plea, with a growing body of literature seeking to make the case against civility as an appropriate remedy for our current democratic ills. After all, civility is hardly neutral: reflecting the views and interests of the powerful, it serves to reproduce gender, racialised and class inequalities (Zerilli 2014; Zamalin 2021; Gay 2022). Moreover, given that fighting against these injustices often requires distinctly uncivil resistance (Nyong'o and Tompkins 2018; Delmas 2018), appeals to civility must be seen for what it is - reactionary. The purpose of this paper is neither to defend nor condemn civility either as a normative goal or as a political strategy. Rather, I am interested in excavating two features of this anti-civility literature that raise questions from a feminist social movement perspective. The first concerns the narrow conception of politics animating these critiques: political struggle is reduced to a vertical, zero-sum conflict undertaken by two opposing, monolithic actors, with civility serving the powerful and incivility providing the ‘weapons of the weak’ (Edyvane 2020). But if instead we see social movements as horizontal networks of complex, intersecting power-laden relationships, we may need to rethink the conditions under which appeals to civility can arise. Compounding this ‘thin’ notion of the ‘political’ is the presumption that it is detachable from the ‘the social’ (Zamalin 2021). But if the personal is political, as feminist often remind us, and if the demands and practices of social movements traverse the public/private divide (Fraser 1997), then we must reconceptualise the place of ‘everyday life’ within these stories. The second contentious habit characteristic of these narratives is that civility/incivility tend to be framed in instrumental terms, i.e, as strategies adopted to either discipline dissent or, conversely, to resist these efforts at containment. Struggles around social justice, however, seek to do so much more than defy their opponents. Indeed, the cultivation and expression of solidarity is one such goal. Prefiguration is another. Importantly, both implicate a theory and practice of civility. Drawing on feminist theory and practice in three different contexts – a) the debate around ‘calling out’ and ‘calling in’ within black feminist circles (Ross 2025 ) b) the debate about free speech in Universities (Scott 2019) and c) the political practices of feminist anti-capitalists - I will argue that a feminist reading of the politics of dissent pushes us beyond reducing (in)civility to either a strategy to be deployed or a duty or virtue to be performed. Rather it helps us see civility as a series of embodied practices/encounters upon which any transformative politics that rests on solidarity, shared imaginings and collective actions depends.