Materialist Feminist Discourse Analysis and Social Movement Research: Mapping the Changing Context for “Community Control”

Abstract

Abstract How do progressive frames achieve wide acceptance and become institutionalized in social practices but lose their critical feminist or progressive intent? Examples of this process can be found throughout feminist praxis, from the transformation of “battered women” into the “battered woman syndrome” to the depoliticization of “sexual harassment” (e.g., Loseke 1992; Walker 1994). My goal in this chapter is to demonstrate the value of a materialist feminist discourse analysis for explicating how social movement frames gain wide appeal but, over time, can lose the progressive formulation that incited their production or can even be used to counter progressive goals. I incorporate discursive, cultural, and structural factors in social movement research (see, e.g., Gamson 1988; McCarthy 1994; Taylor and Whittier 1995: 185; Steinberg 1999b). A materialist feminist approach focuses on the social and political context, subject positions, and power relations through which social movement frames are generated, circulated, and then reinscribed within different discursive and institutional practices (e.g., Landry and Maclean 1993; Ramazanoglu 1993), as well as the shifting discursive fields surrounding the production of specific movement frames (also see Donati 1992).