Reconsidering Occupy Oakland and Its Horizons
Reconsidering Occupy Oakland and Its Horizons: Media Misframing, Decolonizing Fractures, and Enduring Resistance Hub Madison Marie Alvarado Research Supervisor: Frances Susan Hasso Reader: Jennifer Christine Nash This thesis is submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for Graduation with Distinction in the Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies Duke University Durham, North Carolina 2021 Abstract Reconsidering Occupy Oakland and Its Horizons is an archival study of the creation, reception, evolution, and remembrance of Occupy Oakland using a feminist lens. I investigate how Occupy Oakland’s radically democratic mobilization against economic violence, racism, and police violence was undermined by local and regional news coverage—namely in the San Francisco Chronicle and Oakland Tribune—through framing devices that demonized protesters and delegitimized the movement. I nevertheless found differences between local and regional coverage. Occupy Oakland challenged existing hegemonic boundaries regarding participatory democracy as its activists –seasoned and less experienced people from multiple generations – experimented with horizontal world-building through community structures, methods, and processes. This horizontal radical movement nevertheless struggled with the same divisions and inequalities that existed outside its camps: heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and classism. The “stickiness” of embodied and structural inequalities persisted in Occupy Oakland camps despite efforts to create a radically egalitarian community. The nature of this stickiness can only be understood by taking seriously the local material and institutional conditions, obstacles, and histories that shaped the spaces of protest and its participants. Though news coverage often describes the movement as a failure, several new projects and coalitions formed during and after Occupy Oakland, illustrating its dynamic legacy and challenging social movement scholarship that reproduces temporal demise frameworks in its analysis.
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