1 Promoting Transitional Justice through the Politics of the Everyday: Inclusive Avenues to Social Movement Activism 1 Crystal Whetstone, Assistant Professor, Sam Houston State University
[email protected] Draft for Western Political Science Association 2021 Annual Meeting Abstract Social movement resistance is typically conceived of as public collective action. In this paper, I argue for an expanded understanding of movement resistance as outlined by James Scott, who stresses individual resistance. Building on Scott, I suggest that individual resistance can become collective (albeit private) resistance that at an aggregate finds an outlet in a counterpublic—a critical counternarrative—that challenges heteronormative discourses. Performing a feminist re-reading on a women’s group, this paper argues that everyday conversation hinging on political concerns may be viewed as a form of political engagement, and if it is oppositional, contributes to social movement resistance. The women’s group the Southern Mothers’ Front disbanded after four years of organizing. Yet former members continued to engage in political conservations that the government sought to quiet. This paper redefines former Southern Mothers’ Front members’ conversations as a form of collective resistance that fed into a counterpublic that challenged state discourses, although not never taking center-stage in public debate. This paper calls attention to these women’s post-organization resistance, which prevented the total normalization of state violence by refusing to acquiesce to the state’s 1 I would like to thank my GA Veronica Morales for reading this current draft and offering her excellent feedback. 2 version of history and demanding transitional justice. This paper contributes to participatory and deliberative democracy literature as well as social movement scholarship.