Gendered Mobilizations and Intersectional Challenges: Contemporary Social Movements in Europe and North America

A long and ongoing challenge for social justice movements has been how to address difference. Traditional strategies have often emphasized universalizing messages and common identities as means of facilitating collective action. Feminist movements, gay liberation movements, racial justice movements, and even labour movements, have all focused predominantly on respective singular dimensions of oppression. Each has called on diverse groups of people to mobilize, but without necessarily acknowledging or grappling with other relevant dimensions of identity and oppression. While focusing on commonality can be an effective means of mobilization, universalist messages can also obscure difference and can serve to exclude and marginalize groups in already precarious positions. Scholars and activists, particularly those located at the intersection of these movements, have long advocated for more inclusive approaches that acknowledge the significance and complexity of different social locations, with mixed success.

Gendered Mobilizations and Intersectional Challenges provides a much-needed intersectional analysis of social movements in Europe and North America. With an emphasis on gendered mobilization, it looks at movements traditionally understood and/or classified as singularly gendered as well as those organized around other dimensions of identity and oppression or at the intersection of multiple dimensions.

Jill Irvine is Presidential Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Oklahoma. She is founding director and currently co-director of the OU Center for Social Justice. Irvine received her Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University. Her teaching and research interests include social movements, political mobilization, and transnational activism, with a focus on gender. She has written numerous books, articles, chapters andgovernment reports on ethno-religious movements and democratic transformations in Eastern Europe. Her work has been supported among other funding agencies by the National Science Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, The Fulbright Scholar Program, the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, and the International Research and Exchanges Board.

Sabine Lang is Associate Professor of International and European Studies at the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies of the University of Washington. She is Director of the Center for West European Studies at UW. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the Free University in Berlin and has held previous teaching positions at the University of Leipzig and at the J. F. Kennedy-Institute of the Free University Berlin, Germany. Her areas of research are gender politics and comparative politics with an emphasis on NGOs and coalition building among transnational movements. Her latest book NGOs, Civil Society, and the Public Sphere was published by Cambridge University Press in 2013 and she contributes to journals such as femina politica, European Journal for Women’s Issues, Publius, and German Politics.

Celeste Montoya is Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is Director of the Miramontes Arts & Science Program. Montoya received her Ph.D. in Political Science at Washington University, St. Louis. Her teaching and research interests focus on the politics of marginalized groups, with an emphasis on intersectionality. She studies social movements, institutions, and policies in the United States and Europe, in both domestic and transnational context. She is author of From Global to Grassroots (Oxford University Press) and has published in such journals as International Organizations, Politics & Gender, Social Politics, Publius, and Urban Affairs Review.