Between community and sectarianism: calling out and negotiated discipline in prefigurative politics

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper examines how activists negotiate tensions in disciplining offenders who transgress norms in prefigurative politics. Through the disciplinary process of calling-out, activists negotiate a key tension between building a community that is extensive and inclusive or intensive and exclusive for its members. Derived from consciousness raising groups in New Left activism, call-outs are a rhetorical tactic that expose oppressive acts in etiquette, action, or procedure. This tactic, used in physical and virtual space, is a form of normative discipline where challengers, offenders, and any third parties negotiate between reintegrating the accused or expelling them from the spaces. Drawing on in-depth interviews with queer activists and allies in Austin, TX, a city with deep New Left activist legacies, this paper illuminates how offenders react to call-outs and how these responses shape whether the process leads to a redemptive, purgative, or dialogic resolution. From passive acceptance, belligerence, and dialogic dispute, different modes of the call-out enable and constrain how challengers, offenders, and third parties can negotiate a resolution to these transgressions. Call-outs nevertheless risk creating sectarian dynamics when they are used to berate, eliminate dialogue, and fracture groups by weaponizing identities. By drawing on Gorski’s theory of discipline, this paper contributes to the study of the disciplinary practices of prefiguration. In doing so, it explores tensions internal to movements between leniency and stringency, inclusion and exclusion.