“It’s Not Fair!”

Abstract

In developing strategies to contest the systematic efforts to dismantle progressive social and economic policies generated through decades of activism, it is important to understand how discursive frames that were significant in social justice organizing in the United States have come to be subjugated, delegitimated, or co-opted, and have lost their power for social justice activism. Using a materialist feminist approach, I first examine the processes of subjugation and explore how movement actors choose frames within bounded discursive fields that become institutionalized, but lose critical feminist or progressive intent. I then discuss the delegitimation of a citizen’s right to government support and the co-optation of progressive movement frames by conservative groups. I conclude with a materialist feminist call to attend to the multiple institutions (i.e., the state, law, market, and media) that contour the discursive field and the everyday practices of social movement organizations. This is a call for collective research, since no single case can attend to all of these dimensions and processes.

Keywords

sexuality politics/state/nationalism class/stratification collective behavior/social movements community race class gender research methodology qualitative historical/comparative

Introduction

On the evening of July 25, 2011, President Barack Obama addressed the nation to garner support for his fiscal plan to counter debt. He called for “a balanced approach,” which included raising the debt ceiling, spending cuts, and increased revenue through taxes. Mr. Obama explained:

Most Americans, regardless of political party, don’t understand how we can ask a senior citizen to pay more for her Medicare before we ask a corporate jet owner or the oil companies to give up tax breaks that other companies don’t get. How can we ask a student to pay more for college before we ask hedge fund managers to stop paying taxes at a lower rate than their secretaries? How can we slash funding for education and clean energy before we ask people like me to give up tax breaks we don’t need and didn’t ask for? That’s not right. It’s not fair. . . . What we’re talking about under a balanced approach is asking Americans whose incomes have gone up the most over the last decade—millionaires and billionaires—to share in the sacrifice everyone else has to make. (Obama 2011, n.p.)

The 2012 U.S. presidential campaign included heated debates over who should “chip in more” (Fahrenthold and Nakamura 2011) to counter the growing debt. On Wednesday, April 11, 2012, President Obama launched his election campaign with a call for tax fairness. He encouraged Congress to pass the “Buffet Rule,” which requires those earning $1 million or more to pay a tax rate comparable to that of middle-class taxpayers. Republican candidate Mitt Romney supported GOP Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan’s proposal that people who use Medicare and Medicaid should “pay a greater share, to keep the programs solvent” (Fahrenthold and Nakamura 2011).

What is fair in this current economic context? How do certain approaches to equality and fairness become dominant? And why do some definitions or approaches fail to gain political traction?

Materialist Feminism, Discourse Analysis, and Social Movements

Beginning in the 1960s, social protests organized around calls for civil rights, equal rights, reproductive rights, welfare rights, gay and lesbian rights, and disability rights contributed to changes in law and social policy. These changes expanded access to political, economic, and social resources formerly denied to those deemed undeserving. Yet many of these gains have either been dismantled or undermined by discursive strategies that delegitimate claims-making strategies utilized by these social movements. The delegitimation of a citizen’s right to government support is one part of the discursive process I consider here.

Many feminists who analyze discourse and are interested in the relationship between power and knowledge utilize Michel Foucault’s (1972) approach, which describes how powerful discourses shape institutional practices and construct subjects. Foucault’s critics argue that his analysis of discourse “turns away from the subject” (Gutting 1989, 244). Foucault’s approach also neglects the important feminist insight that social policies target gendered, racialized, and sexualized subjects (Naples 2003, 28; see, e.g., Abramovitz 1996; Orloff 1993). Therefore, we need a feminist theoretical approach to discourse that brings materialist practices and structures into focus and recognizes the agency of the subject.

A materialist feminist approach to discourse centers the dynamics of gender, race, culture, sexuality, and class more effectively than a non-feminist Foucauldian approach. Materialist feminist analyses reveal how discourse and institutional practices organize the actualities of everyday life (Smith 1999). Materialist feminist epistemology challenges the binary between discursive and material structural processes and actualities. Dorothy Smith uses the term “relations of ruling” to identify “a complex of organized practices, including government, law, business and financial management, professional organization, and educational institutions as well as the discourse in texts that interpenetrate the multiple sites of power” (Smith 1999, 2). Her explication of relations of ruling attends to the discursive formations and material structural practices that I argue contribute to the subjugation, delegitimation, and co-optation of progressive movement claims in historical and community contexts.

Successful social justice campaigns face resistance that ranges from direct confrontation, including violent actions by white supremacist groups and anti-abortion activists, to less visible and more subtle forms, including rhetorical strategies (see, e.g., Ferree 2005). Rhetorical strategies involve reframing abortion as “murder,” undocumented immigrants as “illegals,” and same-sex marriage campaigns as efforts to “undermine the institution of marriage.” Classism, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, and sexism frame these forms of backlash against disenfranchised groups’ movement claims and misdirect individual and collective anger toward vulnerable groups such as the poor, people of color, immigrants, and women. Materialist feminists argue that backlash without repressive actions by state or other authority can never silence or discredit movement claims. Nevertheless, as movement frames such as “welfare rights,” “gender equality,” or “redistribution of wealth” are fully discredited and co-opted, progressive and radical feminist activists must create alternative discursive strategies to effect cultural and political change.

Feminist discourse analyses of social movement claims, such as equality, freedom, and justice, reveal the resonance of certain frames in broad cultural arenas which, in turn, contributes to mobilization. Chunn, Boyd, and Lessard note that “feminists, progressive activists, neo-conservatives, and neo-liberals” are likely “to use the same language to argue for very different purposes” (Chunn, Boyd, and Lessard 2007, 13). Consequently, the content of discursive contests and the process by which these claims are interpreted vary across political contexts (Ferree 2003; Naples 2003). Effective, political claims must also be tailored to the discursive frames that contour legislative and state bureaucracy. Therefore, it is necessary to contextualize analyses of subjugation, co-optation, and negation of social movement frames.

David Snow and Robert Benford define “collective action frames” as produced by social movement organizations to provide a meaning context “for constituents, antagonists, and bystanders or observers” (Snow and Benford 1992, 136). Contrastingly, my materialist feminist approach highlights the ways by which discursive frames limit the content and process of discussion within political and cultural contexts. The process of framing needs to be analyzed interactionally, namely, as a dynamic between social movement organizational goals and strategies and the wider discursive, institutional, and political fields. Snow and Benford define successful “master frames” as mobilizing engagement in collective action. My analysis explores how movement actors choose frames within bounded discursive fields that are “open to reformulation and become institutionalized in various social practices but lose the critical feminist or progressive intent” (Naples 2003, 9). In the next section, I discuss the subjugation of movement claims as they are incorporated in the state. In subsequent sections, I consider the delegitimation and co-optation of movement claims.¹

Subjugating Social Movement Claims

Mobilizing a large constituency and achieving legitimation requires broad frames that capture the attention, political energies, and values of diverse actors (see, also, Lakoff 2004) If the target is legislative or legal change, the frame must also resonate within these different institutional contexts. The broader the vision framing the political claim, the less likely it is that the specific legislative initiative or policy design will be effective in addressing the original goal. For example, the civil rights framework “separate is not equal” is translated into “integration of schools.” However, the legal success of this claim as implemented through efforts to integrate the schools did not attend to the structural changes in school financing that, if combined with desegregation efforts, would have addressed educational inequities more effectively (Dixson, Donnor, and Anderson 2011). In addition, this social movement framing did not anticipate white flight and urban disinvestment, issues that undermined integration goals.

Domestic violence legislation also illustrates the limits of institutionalization of movement claims. Despite early feminists’ analysis of gender inequality, patriarchy, and “wife abuse,” domestic violence legislation constructed a gender-neutral subject that ignores how gender inequality and patriarchy maintain women’s risk within intimate relationships. Ellen Pence’s safety and accountability audit of law enforcement responses to domestic violence calls illustrates the discursive and material practices that create an unsafe environment for women. Using Dorothy Smith’s institutional ethnographic approach, Pence examined how institutions organize workers’ jobs through forms and documents that coordinate responses to domestic violence calls (Pence 2009; Sadusky et al. 2010). Pence (2001) found that the category of “battered women” becomes institutionalized into “abstracted and generalized forms of case management which are not required to accurately reflect a women’s experience or account for her safety” (p. 226).

Women have diverse experiences of abuse and are themselves diverse in significant ways that further complicate the ways that generalized law enforcement responses fail to address. Roberta Villalón (2010) highlights this point in her work on undocumented women who experience domestic violence as they risk deportation if they report abuse. Villalón’s research speaks to the need for an intersectional approach to social movement framing, including an understanding of the different policy arenas implicated in transformative social change. Using an intersectional analysis of domestic violence and welfare reform, Lisa Brush (2011) describes the effects on battered women of welfare policy that defines women’s employment as a solution both for women’s poverty and controlling male partners. Brush reports that some male partners sabotaged women’s employment, thus compromising their welfare eligibility and safety. The popular belief that work and marriage are solutions to poverty is thus belied by the stories poor women share about their experiences navigating these institutions.

The institutions that mediate between the claimants and the state further constrain the political process of making successful social justice claims. An analysis of this mediation process explains the limited successes of the Reproductive Rights Movement. Political and legal processes narrowed feminist activists’ movement claims, which included demands for affordable child care, access to reproductive health care, the end to sterilization abuse, and the legal right to abortion (Chicago Committee to End Sterilization Abuse 1977; Nelson 2003). To begin with, without access to abortion, the legal right to it has little meaning in the everyday life of many women, including those who rely on Medicaid or live in states with few or no abortion providers (Boonstra 2007). Rickie Solinger (2002) and other historians of the Reproductive Rights Movement discuss how racism structures who can exercise reproductive choice (see, also Nelson 1996; Roberts 1997; Silliman et al. 2004; Smith 2007). For example, Native American women’s access to reproductive health services is especially limited by inadequate funding and lack of health care on reservations (Gurr 2011). Choosing motherhood is a class and racial privilege in the United States (Solinger 2002). The discursive, legal, cultural, and political narrowing of “reproductive rights” to “the right to abortion,” without the guarantee of access or affordability, further contributes to the invisibility of class and racial inequalities.

The debate over coverage of contraception in the U.S. Affordable Care Act further illustrates the subjugation of women’s movement claims for “reproductive rights.” In February 2012, Congress heard testimony on the question of whether or not all employers should be required to provide contraceptives under the new law (Kliff 2012). In attempts to reframe the coverage of contraception in the U.S. national health care law as a question of religious freedom or inappropriate because the government shouldn’t be in the “business . . . to know what is going on in anyone’s bedroom” (as Rush Limbaugh stated in his “apology” for calling Sarah Fluck a “prostitute” [Bey 2012]), women’s right to choose and manage their own reproductive health is subjugated or delegitimized. Surely, especially for any women working for minimum wage, lack of access to contraception does limit women’s reproductive choice and leaves only one option if they do not wish to get pregnant, the one offered by former U.S. presidential candidate Rick Santorum, namely, abstinence. Here we see that sex as well as motherhood has become a class issue (see, also, Smith 2007).

Delegitimation: Loss of Entitlement as a Claims-Making Frame

The so-called “war against the poor” (Gans 1996; Piven 2011) includes a series of discursive strategies that discredited citizens’ right to public assistance. A historical perspective reveals how discursive formations, structures of inequality, and institutional context codetermine the provision of poor relief. Various institutional formations contributed to the process of delegitimation. In “Welfare and Legal Entitlements: The Social Roots of Poverty,” Lucy Williams demonstrates the process by which “entitlement” was connected to the poor’s legal right to government assistance and distinguished from the extensive network of other entitlements that are legally guaranteed in the United States (Williams 1998, 570). Legal discourse that separated work and welfare masked law’s role in constructing receipt of welfare as dependency. These discursive practices enabled the so-called New Right “to channel wage workers’ economic frustration toward welfare recipients” (ibid., 582). The Right’s attack on the legal entitlement to welfare reveals the perceived threat it posed to the “free” market system and ideology.

Unfortunately, 1960s welfare activists and legal advocates failed to recognize the subversive potential of a legal entitlement to welfare. As Williams explains:

In the welfare reform debates, we missed an opportunity to frame for the U.S. public something beyond just a humanitarian plea on behalf of the unfortunate. Instead, we missed an opportunity to expose poverty as a product of our legal system, a result of property and contractual rights that privilege certain parties and make certain political choices. (1998, 582)

In addition to class politics, racism and xenophobia also shaped the discourse that contributed to the delegitimation of the legal entitlement to public assistance. Ange-Marie Hancock (2004) traces the conceptualization of the “welfare queen,” tracking how it contributed to ending the poor’s entitlement to welfare. Hancock charts how the term “welfare queen” gained traction in academia and Congressional debates. She also notes how this notion became a prominent framework in mainstream discourse for discrediting public assistance for poor mothers and their children. Hancock concludes: “The political context in which legislative deliberations occur interacts critically with public identities to challenge our democracy” (Hancock 2004, 149). Lisa Sun-Hee Park (2011) provides another illustration of discursive politics in terms of immigrant health care. She describes a shift in the immigrant discourse in the 1980s. Anti-immigrant sentiment intersected with the larger discourse that constructed receipt of public support as “dependency.” Within this construction, legal immigrants become “public charges” undeserving of the welfare and Medicare benefits to which they are legally entitled.

Feminist scholarship on the welfare state demonstrates the power of the family wage model or the “family ethic” (Abramovitz 1988) for structuring social welfare policy. This model privileges a two-parent, male-breadwinner and female-caretaker model. Correspondingly, class, race, and household inequalities are woven directly into the construction of the welfare state (Mink 1998). Many jobs performed by low-income women of color were not covered by workman’s compensation. Social security insurance covered women whose husbands had died or were incapacitated but did not cover unmarried women. Single unmarried women with children or women whose spouses deserted them were covered under Aid to Families with Dependent Children. However, the grant was less than what was provided to widows or wives of disabled men. The lack of a universal approach to family assistance invited contestation about who deserves state support and under what conditions (Mink 2002).

Dorothy Smith argues that the Standard North American Family (SNAF), which parallels Abramovitz’s formulation, serves as an ideological code that organizes public discourse and serves “to coordinate multiple sites of representation” (Smith 1999, 160). Hence, the nuclear family model, which includes a male breadwinner and female caretaker, not only structures social policy but also shapes institutions’ and the wider public’s imaginary of what constitutes an appropriate or legitimate family. This ideological code shaped the strategies developed by activists who fought for welfare rights.

During the 1960s, U.S. antipoverty activists organized around family assistance to women in their role as mothers, a role that was essential to a healthy society. They advocated for a poor mother’s right to food and housing, safe and sanitary neighborhoods, and quality medical care for her family (Naples 1998). They successfully contested the discriminatory and bureaucratic policies that prevented many eligible women from receiving assistance and fought for increased support by addressing differences in benefits across the United States and arbitrary decisions by welfare case workers. Their activism fueled legal challenges to the discriminatory practices, with court cases such as King v. Smith² in 1968, which ended Alabama’s denial of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) to mothers living with a man who had no legal ties to the children (Williams 1998). In 1970, Goldberg v. Kelly³ made it illegal for a state to cut off public assistance to a recipient without due process, thus firmly establishing a legal entitlement to AFDC. As a result of national activism and successful court cases, Black women, a population who had experienced systematic discrimination, were admitted to the welfare rolls in increasing numbers (Reese 2005). Despite increases in the number of Black families receiving public assistance, Black women still accounted for a smaller percentage of women receiving welfare (Neubeck and Cazenave 2001).

In her historical analysis of the “war on welfare,” Marisa Chappell explores the composition of the national coalition of welfare rights activists, which included union leaders, liberals in Congress, the National Council of Churches, and the League of Women Voters. She also discussed the effects of the coalition drawing on family wage ideology to craft their antipoverty policy approach. Chappell argues that the coalition was

blinded to alternative solutions to children’s poverty offered by some welfare rights activists and feminists, from paid motherhood proposals to comprehensive plans to enable poor single mothers to earn adequate wages; it also contributed to an anti-welfare ideology that ultimately undermined popular and political support for federal social welfare programs of all sorts, from AFDC and food stamps to Unemployment and Disability Insurance. (2009, 4)

Feminist alternatives included proposals for “paid motherhood” and “comprehensive plans to enable poor single mothers to earn adequate wages” (ibid., 4).

Reviewing the shifting frames from the 1960s to the current political debates on entitlements, I realized that poor people were missing from the discourse. This “symbolic annihilation” (Gerbner and Gross 1976) invites indifference to the structures of economic inequality. Except in the organizing efforts of antipoverty organizations, discourses centered the middle class without addressing concerns of the poor. The discourses on the U.S. housing crisis reflect this finding. For example, foreclosures received significantly more attention than evictions. Some evictions occurred as a result of middle-class landlords’ bad investments (Desmond 2012). Even progressive legislators failed to include Medicaid as a program they sought to preserve (see, e.g., Franken 2011). As Raymond Williams (1976) explains, the stratifying class discourse places the middle class in a hierarchal relationship with the poor, which limits the ways middle-class citizens understand shared interests with working-class citizens.

Access to support for the poor in the United States is made even more difficult now that claims to citizens’ entitlement to government assistance have been effectively delegitimated. In the context of decreased funding for basic human needs such as financial support and affordable health care, food, and income, the distribution of these limited funds is left to often arbitrary strategies rather than even the meager means-tested approach that accompanied earlier welfare, food, and housing assistance. The following story illustrates how the loss of entitlement affects access to affordable housing. Marie Diamond reports that: “Dallas residents in need of housing assistance showed up at the Jesse Owens Memorial complex early in the morning, hoping to be one of the lucky few to get a coveted spot on a waiting list for housing vouchers” (Diamond 2011). Under the headline “5,000 Poor Dallas Residents Stampede Each Other in Race for 100 Vouchers” she reported: “Some people had camped out since Wednesday night, and the line was at least a mile long. When hundreds of people suddenly sprinted for the doors, at least eight people were injured, and some say they feel lucky not to have been trampled to death” (Diamond 2011).

Examining the intersection and co-construction of discursive framing and material practices is a critical feminist concern. When entitlements are constructed around claims of poor people as undeserving of support, alleviation of poverty relies on the roll of the dice rather than on a systematic effort to challenge structural forces. Racism contributed to the public’s imaginary about the poor, which further delegitimizes a more general call to family assistance seen in many European countries (see, e.g., Morgan 2006; Sainsbury 1999; Soss, Fording, and Schram 2011). In contrast, certain frames were so successful that they were taken up by conservative rights groups to further discredit or drastically redefine their meanings within a large cultural and political context.

Co-Optation of Movement Frames

Conservative politicians and think tanks draw on notions of justice and freedom to bolster their arguments against public support for the poor and taxation and for limited government. Indeed, several pro-business and conservative groups promote the frame “economic freedom” to advance their anti-tax and small government agenda. The Charles Koch Institute (2011) defines it as “the freedom to choose how to produce, sell, and use your own resources, while respecting others’ rights to do the same” (n.p.).⁴ The Heritage Foundation further defines economic freedom as “the fundamental right of every person to control his or her own labor and property. In an economically free society, individuals are free to work, produce, consume, and invest in any way they please, with that freedom both protected by the state and unconstrained by the state.”⁵

The Heritage Foundation, in collaboration with the Wall Street Journal, created an index of economic freedom and rated countries around the world. They concluded that in 2010, “the U.S. suffered the largest drop in overall economic freedom” to date.⁶ The Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal used “labor freedom” as one measure of “economic freedom.” They defined “labor freedom” as the extent to which a country regulates minimum wage, hiring additional workers, rigidity of hours, difficulty of firing redundant employees, legally mandated notice period, and mandatory severance pay (Miller and Holmes 2010).

Neoliberal politicians, pundits, and conservative talk show hosts are especially concerned about any government program that “takes from the rich and gives to the poor” as exemplified by H.R. 6411, the Inclusive Prosperity Act, which poses a tax on trading transactions.⁷ H.R. 6411, informally called “The Robin Hood Tax,” was introduced by U.S. Democratic Representative Keith Ellison of Minnesota during the 112th Congress (2011-2012). It calls for restitution from the Wall Street financial sector to cover some of the damages caused by their fiscal behaviors that contributed to the economic crises of 2008-2009. Unsurprisingly, conservatives attacked this effort as another misguided and unfair attempt to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor, who did not create the wealth.

Redistribution of wealth is a long-discredited movement frame used by progressive and politically left activists. It surfaced in the early part of the twenty-first century in conservative attacks against President Obama that utilized a “redistribution of wealth framework” to discredit Obama’s approach to the fiscal crisis and health care. In response to these attacks, Obama adopted the frame and redefined it. In a 2008 interview with Bill O’Reilly on Fox News, Obama redefined redistribution as “neighborliness” (Fox News 2008). “Neighborliness” is a far cry from the class-based arguments that shape progressive and leftist activists’ understanding of “redistribution of wealth.” It misses the historical continuity of redistributive governance, which is the focus of a recent New York Times article by economist Uwe Reinhardt: “The fact is that redistributive government policy—mainly through benefits-in-kind programs, agricultural policy and the like—has been very much a characteristic of American life, just as it has been in every economically developed nation, albeit at different levels” (Reinhardt 2012).

The passage of “right to work” laws, a weakened labor movement, and the lack of a labor party leave a dearth of places where class politics, working-class identities, and structural analyses of redistributive government policies are discussed. Ironically, over the last few years, “class warfare” has appeared as a frame in response to the protests begun by Occupy Wall Street (OWS) in 2011. OWS framed their protest as “We are the 99%” to call attention to the concentration of wealth in the top 1 percent of the income distribution in the United States. Conservative commentators and neoliberal groups charged OWS activists with waging “class warfare.” Republican groups applied this frame to Obama’s effort to increase taxes on individuals earning more than $250,000. In a Forbes article titled “Class Warfare: The Mortal Enemy of Economic Growth and Jobs,” Jim Powell, a fellow at the Cato Institute, explains: “Obama’s priority is class warfare. That’s why he relentlessly denounces job creators as ‘millionaires and billionaires.’ That’s why he demands that they be punished with higher tax rates” (Powell 2012). Referring to Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) and Obama as “class warriors,” Powell considers what “drives” them:

“Fairness,” of course, is the familiar battle cry, but according to the IRS the top 1 percent of taxpayers pay about 36 percent of federal income taxes. . . . By any standard, that’s a lot—especially considering that as we have heard, 47 percent of taxpayers don’t pay any income tax. (Powell 2012)

Powell’s reference to the “47 percent” harkens back to a remark that Romney made at a private fundraiser during the 2012 presidential campaign. Romney said that the 47 percent of nontaxpayers who depend on government “believe they are victims” and “believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it” (Hunt 2012). However, as Obama pointed out in the second 2012 presidential debate:

When he said behind closed doors that 47 percent of the country consider themselves victims who refused personal responsibility, think about who he was talking about. Folks on Social Security who’ve worked all their lives. Veterans who’ve sacrificed for this country. Students who are out there trying to hopefully advance their own dreams but also this country’s dreams. Soldiers overseas fighting for us right now. People who are working hard every day, paying payroll taxes, gas taxes, but don’t make enough income. (ABC News 2012)

Obama’s response to Romney does not acknowledge the many people who for a variety of reasons cannot contribute to payroll taxes. Obama neglects the caretakers of young, elderly, and ill individuals who are also unable to work for pay. Furthermore, he fails to highlight wealthy individuals’ and corporations’ dependence on tax breaks and other forms of government assistance.

From the 1960s onward, the left unsuccessfully attempted to broaden the discourse on state aid by inserting “corporate welfare”⁸ into the lexicon. Mitt Romney inadvertently brought that frame back into focus. In his commentary on the financial page of the New Yorker, business columnist James Surowiecki explains:

Yet even as he assails people on Medicaid and Social Security, and those who receive the earned-income tax credit, for being “dependent upon government,” Romney has had strikingly little to say about another prominent group that’s “dependent upon government”: the many American companies whose profits rely, in one form or another, on government assistance. (Surowiecki 2012)

Surowiecki describes the governmental benefits that corporations receive and concludes, “Companies that benefit from these policies are just as dependent on the government as the guy who gets the earned-income tax credit.” Despite analyses that identify the extensive government support given to corporations, discursive framing of government assistance remains tied to support programs for the poor. This discursive framing constructs the poor’s reliance on government support as personal failure and unhealthy dependency, which hinges on racism and neoliberal ideology (Naples 1997).

In 2008, Andrew McCarthy, a conservative lawyer and former Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, wrote an article titled “Obama’s ‘Redistributive Change’ and the Death of Freedom.” McCarthy warned readers to “Beware the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights”:

There should no longer be any dispute that Barack Obama’s aim is to socialize the American economy—as he vaporously puts it, to bring about “redistributive change.” The real question is how he’ll go about it. Very likely, the answer lies in a potentially cataclysmic treaty that has gotten virtually no attention during the campaign: the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

Perhaps McCarthy should be concerned since, given the failure of domestic movements for social and economic justice, feminists and other radical and progressive activists are turning their attention to international governance structures and covenants to reinvigorate antipoverty and other social justice campaigns (see, e.g., Ferree and Tripp 2006; Naples and Desai 2002).

Local Activism, Globalization, and Gender Politics

Antipoverty frames utilized during the 1960s and 1970s have lost legitimacy, and problems faced by poor women and their families have deepened. Therefore, antipoverty activists have linked their efforts with activists in other parts of the world. The growth of a transnational social justice movement and the Internet facilitated this process. For example, in their summer 2011 letter to friends and allies, the Milwaukee-based Welfare Warriors note that their newsletter, Welfare Mothers’ Voice, grew from eight pages in 1986 to 56 pages in 2011. Newsletter readership expanded to Canada, Ireland, Tanzania, Chad, Israel, Hungary, Germany, and Australia.

While Welfare Warriors continue to use “welfare rights” in their organizing, they link their activism to the human rights framework.⁹ One of their recent claims is “Mothers ought to have equal rights.”¹⁰ Another frame is the notion “Mother’s work is work.” Selma James, coordinator of Global Women’s Strike, conducted a tour of the United States in 2007 to celebrate the 35th anniversary of her campaign, the International Wages for Housework Campaign. The vitality of the campaign is a testament to the power of the framework “wages for housework” and to James’s activism.

Admittedly, I am struck by the growing similarity between the economic challenges of contemporary welfare rights organizations in the United States and those of women internationally. The dismantling of the welfare state and disinvestment in the infrastructure supporting access to water, fuel, housing, and food is evidence that structural adjustment is coming home to roost (Naples 2002). Structural adjustment policies enforced on Third World countries in exchange for loans needed to sustain their economies accompany neoliberal global economic restructuring. Following the recent economic crisis in the United States, structural adjustment policies are under way in European and other Western countries.

Women’s daily lives in the United States now include struggles for survival similar to those experienced by women in other parts of the world. National implementation of austerity measures might explain the urgency with which other countries took up the Occupy Movement. Fueled in part by the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street activists called attention to corporate greed and the “corrupting effect of money on politics.” The slogan “We are the 99%” captured the attention of those who contested the concentration of wealth and growing inequality in the United States and elsewhere. Occupy protests include calls to Occupy Homes to challenge banks’ predatory loan practices and their subsequent treatment of homeowners, end fuel subsidies in Nigeria, resist tuition increases in Colombia, and counter economic inequality and the role of the European Central Bank and IMF in government in Italy. Australia, Canada, Germany, Malaysia, Mexico, South Africa, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and other countries have held Occupy-inspired protests.

In 2009, the Tea Party also mobilized mass protests against the U.S. government’s response to the economic crisis. As Richard Eskow, member of Campaign for America’s Future, notes:

This country is discouraged, angry, and frightened. That’s the mood that the Tea Party has successfully tapped. The words of the Tea Party song were written by millionaires, but the frustrations behind it comes from millions of frightened households. (Eskow 2011)

Political claims shaping Tea Party protests center on limits to taxation and smaller government, which leads commentators to question whether it is repackaging traditional Republican and populist politics. Ironically, as Jill Quadagno and Debra Street (2005) explain,“the idea of antistatism as a driving political force was first asserted by socialist theorists at the turn of the twentieth century to explain the seeming absence of working-class radicalism and the lack of a socialist movement or labor party in the United States” (p. 52). In its contemporary use, Quadagno and Street point out that anti-statism “provided enduring symbols and meanings that have been ‘available’ in political debates over the U.S. welfare state” and national health insurance (2005, 67).

Despite the drastic differences¹¹ in their approach to the U.S. government’s intervention in the economy, the Tea Party and Occupy Movement share many themes that contributed to mobilization. Both movements share anger over the bailouts of banks and other corporations, tax policy, and the handling of the debt crisis. Another similarity between the two movements is the media’s minimal portrayal of the role of women.

In honor of International Women’s Day, March 8, Mimi Yahn, a self-defined feminist social justice activist, issued a statement titled “Whose Occupy?” She argued:

The vast majority of images, interviews, videos and articles feature men as the dominant face and brains of the Occupy Movement, as if only the men’s opinions matter as the important experts and thinkers of Occupy. Worse yet, it is one race that predominates, even in the images of women: the white race. As if whites, and especially white men, represent the 99%. (Yahn 2012)

According to the media, the typical Tea Partier is male, white, and working class, although pictures of Tea Party protests often include Michele Bachman and Sarah Palin (Zernicke 2010). As Skocpol and Williamson (2012) assert, men comprise between 55 and 60 percent of Tea Party members (see also Zernicke 2010). They also note women’s active involvement at the local level. However, women who do participate in the Tea Party Movement may, as Akwugo Emejulu (2011) explains, construct their activist identities around “concerned motherhood” and therefore invested in preserving “traditional social relations” in addition to reducing “the role of the state in the lives of women and their families.”

Women’s empowerment is important, but maintaining a feminist framework is more critical than merely increasing women’s numbers as members or in leadership roles in different social movements. In her study of progressive popular movements, Emejulu examines how the theory and practice of populism contributes to the displacement of “transformational feminist politics of social justice” (2011, 127). She explains that “generalised appeals to ‘the people’ do not appear to recognize differences and inequalities among and between individuals and groups due to ‘race,’ ethnicity, gender and class, and may make it difficult to incorporate feminist analyses or practices” (129-30). Populist appeals to “the people” often avoid critical analyses of “the structural nature of social problems and solutions” (133). Progressive populist group movements harness broad appeal and target “winnable issues” but do not provide explicit political analysis. Therefore, they fail to join in solidarity around antipoverty, antiracist, or feminist demands. As Emejulu persuasively demonstrates, a socially and economically just movement outcome cannot be achieved within coalitions or collaborations that require the co-optation or suppression of “a transformational feminist politics of social justice” (127).

This is not to say that feminist participation in these efforts should be discouraged. As Nancy Fraser argues, there are “gender dimensions” to all struggles for social justice, and “feminists better be in these struggles and bring out those dimensions because certainly nobody else will” (Fraser and Naples 2004, 1121). Yet, it is important to remain mindful of working within social justice coalitions that do not retain feminist insights in framing movement goals. In the United States, where women’s reproductive rights are placed in competition with “fetal rights,” food stamps and access to health care are framed as causing “dependency,” calls for redistribution of wealth are redefined as “neighborliness,” and a privatized national health care plan is called “socialist,” the discursive field is already so compromised that it requires constant vigilance. However, this vigilance as a form of critical reflexivity needs to be conducted in solidarity with other activists and scholars committed to transformational social justice goals (see, e.g., Desai, Bouchard, and Degournay 2010).

A Return to Materialist Feminist Praxis

I have utilized a materialist feminist analysis to highlight some of the processes by which movement frames lose their radical intent through subjugation, delegitimation, and co-optation by conservative political groups and media outlets. I also conceptualized these processes not only as discursive politics but also in terms of economic, political, and historical structures and practices. An epistemological stance that argues for the power of praxis informed by materialist feminism anchors my approach. This approach is designed “to remain critical of exclusionary practices in movement politics and organizations, to work simultaneously against capitalist globalization, patriarchal, [racist, heterosexist,] and other forms of oppression, and to offer new alternatives to the dominant forms of globalization” (Naples 2009, 14).

As we attempt to insert radical feminist frames into contemporary social movement demands, we must remain reflexive of the symbolic power of claims like “fairness,” “rights,” and “equality” as they travel across ideologically diverse arenas and become narrowly defined or co-opted. Reflexive practice includes attending to how the larger “discursive opportunity structure” (Ferree et al. 2002) and multi-institutional context silence radical demands (Armstrong and Bernstein 2008).¹² And how have feminists participated in these silences? Hester Eisenstein argues that “the demands of feminism have been absorbed and coopted within the U.S. capitalist system.” She calls for “the U.S. women’s movement to put the issue of socialism back on the agenda” and to generate “alternatives to the current economic world order” (2009, 16). Eisenstein’s words beg the following question: How can we draw insight from a historical materialist praxis while recognizing that the socialist discursive frame has been rendered illegitimate as an effective social movement frame in the American context?

Is it possible to generate a new discursive framing that is designed to contest the concentration of wealth, incorporates an intersectional lens, and a feminist emphasis on “compassion and caring” (Messner 2007)? The dominant political and economic culture values profits over people which inhibits discursive traction of frames that center relations, caring, and social responsibility. The populist framing “We are the 99%” was an effective discursive strategy for challenging the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few in the United States and elsewhere (Dunn 2012). However, it cannot do the discursive work to contest the relations of ruling more broadly defined to address the “asymmetries” of race, gender, sexuality, ability, and other dimensions of inequality.

One lesson from this analysis is that efforts to seek the most inclusive and comprehensive frame are misguided. There is no single discursive frame that can encompass the diverse claims and analytic insights needed for large societal transformation across time, space, and varied sociopolitical and cultural contexts. For example, in their comparative study of abortion discourse in the United States and Germany, Myra Marx Ferree and coauthors (2002) found that similar frames have a different resonance in each country. They examine what they term the “discursive opportunity structure” and demonstrate how different historical, cultural, and political contexts shape the effectiveness of similar political frames. This highlights another insight from feminist praxis, namely, the importance of keeping long-term goals in mind while generating frames for particular movement goals. Activists can resist the co-optation or narrowing of their political claims by framing their political interventions in a way that is less resonate but still retains the radical message (see, e.g., Ferree 2003, 2012).

Face-to-face organizing has proven more effective in activist efforts to retain control over movement goals and discursive strategies, as Sarah Sobieraj (2011) demonstrates in her study of movement organizing during the 2000 and 2004 U.S. presidential campaigns. She found that most social movement organizations focused their efforts on attracting media attention in an attempt to influence mainstream political discourse. However, they retained little power in controlling their image or their message (see also Gitlin 1980). Rather, Sobieraj argues, they could have harnessed the political energies that surfaced during the campaigns to foster face-to-face relationships with those who shared similar goals in order to help sustain mobilization beyond the presidential campaign.

A final materialist feminist lesson is that social movements and social justice activists do not operate outside the discursive fields that contour what can be said and what can be heard within different institutional and political arenas. It is misguided to believe that there is an ideal movement frame that would not be subject to processes of subjugation, delegitimation, or co-optation. When a movement frame is successful, social movement activism remains vital to ensure effective interpretation and maintenance of feminist goals.¹³ In contrast to the approach to framing utilized by Snow and Benford (1992), a materialist feminist approach attends to the wider historical and cultural discursive field and the material practices and structures that contour the choice of specific frames as well as the processes of subjugation, delegitimation, and co-optation of these frames. As this brief analysis demonstrates, a materialist feminist approach to movement framing and mobilization requires attention to the multiple institutions (i.e., the state, law, market, and media) that contour the discursive opportunity structure and the everyday practices of social movement organizations. This is a call for collective research, since no single case can attend to all of these dimensions and processes (see, also, Smith 2005).

Footnotes

Author’s Note:

Many thanks to the Sociologists for Women in Society for the honor of serving as Feminist Lecturer. Thanks to Mary Bernstein for many helpful discussions and inspired feedback on previous versions of the article. My gratitude to Joya Misra, Judy Rohrer, and Cathy Schlund-Vials for their helpful comments and Cameron Kiely Froude for her valuable editorial assistance. I would also like to thank Clare Weber and Cynthia Anderson for hosting my SWS Feminist Lecture. Special thanks to the students at California State University–Dominquez Hills and Ohio University for their warm reception and enthusiastic response to my campus visit. Finally, thanks to Myra Marx Ferree for her ongoing support and insightful analyses of feminist praxis.

Notes

Nancy A. Naples is professor of sociology and women’s studies at the University of Connecticut where she also directs the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program. Her research on citizenship, social policy, feminist methodology, immigration, and community activism has been published in numerous journals and edited books. She is author of Grassroots Warriors: Activist Mothering, Community Work and the War on Poverty and Feminism and Method: Ethnography, Discourse Analysis and Activist Scholarship; and editor of Community Activism and Feminist Politics: Organizing Across Race, Class, and Gender; and coeditor (with Karen Bojar) of Teaching Feminist Praxis; Women’s Activism and Globalization: Linking Local Struggles and Transnational Politics (coedited with Manisha Desai); and The Sexuality of Migration: Border Crossing and Mexican Immigrant Men by Lionel Cantú (coedited with Salvador Vidal-Ortiz).

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