Identity/Politics: Intersection and Distinction in Digital Publics

by

Dmitri Seals

A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the

requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

in

Sociology

in the

Graduate Division

of the

University of California, Berkeley

Committee in charge:

Professor Neil Fligstein, Chair Professor Kim Voss Professor David Bamman

Spring 2020

Abstract

Identity/Politics: Intersection and Distinction in Digital Publics

by

Dmitri Seals

Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Neil Fligstein, Chair

This study tests and sharpens the widely shared consensus that something meaningful changed during the 2016 election cycle in the United States. Both online and in person, highly partisan actors ventured out of comfortable ideological homes to mainstream forums, in many cases acting without support from formal organizations. The apparently new character of their mobilization gave rise to narratives of social and political realignment and suggested the possibility of radical change to the structure of affiliations and identifications in the American public. What realigned in this tumultuous time and what stayed the same? Why do any shifts that occurred matter to the future of advocacy and democracy in the United States? To address these questions, the study brings together tools of concept and method from a wide range of influences including cultural sociology, intersectionality studies, social psychology, philosophy, and political science. The study produces two toolkits to support further work on boundary realignment and political inequality: intersectional boundary analysis and a new typology of participatory publics based on their level of diversity and emotional intensity. The empirical work of this study is a mixed-methods analysis drawing from the discussions of over 1.7 billion comments on the social media platform Reddit from 2015-2017 to reveal connections between discourse, culture, and inequality. The first chapter lays out the conceptual framework of intersectional boundary analysis, distinguishing forms of boundary work and developing tools for measuring boundary work and emotional language in text. It then measures the relative prevalence of different forms of boundary work to reveal shifts in the salience of symbolic boundaries over the 2016 election cycle and uses network analysis to show shifts in how these boundaries align. The second chapter develops intersectional boundary analysis by zooming in on the intersectional complexity of discourse on class inequality in online advocacy forums, using qualitative coding and close readings to critique and move past simplistic narratives like the rise of populism and the white working class. The final chapter explores inequalities of political power by tracking rates of attrition and advocacy activity among the wave of new authors who joined these advocacy forums after the elections. Results connect debates on the role of diversity and polarization, rationality and emotion in participatory publics online to inequalities of political engagement. 1

Table of Contents

Introduction ...... 1 Chapter 1: Intersectional Boundary Analysis ...... 19 Chapter 2: The Intersectional Complexity of Class Distinction ...... 46 Chapter 3: Emotion, Diversity, and Inclusion in Online Publics ...... 70 Conclusion ...... 96 References ...... 100 Appendix A: Glossary ...... 127 Appendix B: Methodology ...... 131

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Acknowledgements True thanks to the committee of scholars - Neil Fligstein, Kim Voss, and David Bamman - whose eternal patience, insightful comments, and kind humanity made this dissertation possible. Six years working to found and develop movements and nonprofits in the Bay Area enriched this work but interrupted my progress through graduate school, and I do not take for granted that this committee welcomed me back with honest guidance and open arms. My deepest and most eternal gratitude to my partner Alisa Catalina Sanchez, whose brilliance, generous heart, and writing expertise enlivens every page of this document. I am also indebted to the wise voices from one generation up and one generation down: I am inspired every day by my parents, who faced down much greater obstacles than I did to get their educations; I am also lifted up by the lively spirit of Orozco, now little but already hinting at the wonderful adult they will become. Thanks also to the many friends and collaborators at UC Berkeley, Cal State LA, and elsewhere who have read drafts and offered thoughtful comments along the way. My heart goes out especially those who read the early drafts I produced as I was just getting back in the academic groove. I want to give special appreciation to every author whose comments enter into the analysis of this study and everyone out there working to make their voice heard and claim a seat at the slanted table of democracy in this country.

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Introduction Identity/Politics: Intersection and Distinction in Digital Publics

A wave of mass mobilizations during the 2016 US presidential campaign confounded political pundits, rattled established organizations, and raised a challenge to traditional understandings of political action. Both online and in person, highly partisan actors ventured out of comfortable ideological homes to contest for control in mainstream forums, in many cases acting without support from formal organizations. The apparently new character of their mobilization suggested the possibility that 2016 saw a critical election causing radical change to the structure of affiliations and identifications in the American public sphere. What realigned, what stayed the same - and most importantly, why does it matter to the future of advocacy and democracy in the United States? Scholars and pundits focused attention on a wide range of narratives - populism, the white working class, the rise of the alt-right - and so often they contradicted each other, highlighting the importance of one social category and ignoring or downplaying others. This study argues that the best chance of assembling these contradictory narratives into an understanding of how realignment works and why it matters is to combine perspectives and tools of intersectionality studies and cultural sociology, and to pair close readings with big data analysis. Crucially, the analysis directs attention away from the discourse of elites, avoiding the traditional study of political speeches and mass media and instead focusing on informal discourse - the everyday discussions of everyday people. Informal discourse is a crucial site for the study of large-scale shifts in identity and group membership. Elites do not dictate political and social directions so much as tap into forces already present in the broader public (Bourdieu 1991; Norton 2017). Developing methods to measure patterns in informal discourse directly and at scale can reveal patterns that studies of elite discourse would miss - and reveal trends and complexities that elites themselves tend to miss. As boundaries and publics realign and evolve under the influence of charged political events, they contribute to shifts in how people view themselves - or don't - as active and engaged advocates and participants in democracy. The subjective experience of participating in advocacy and political discussion can have long-term consequences for political and power inequalities: many who find their participation ignored or dissonant withdraw in a form of self-censorship (Schwalbe et al. 2000), shying away from politics even in their personal lives (Bennett et al. 2013; Eliasoph 1996, 1998). Still, the great body of work mapping discursive opportunity structures has left relatively untouched a vital question that is essentially quantitative: which styles and structures of communication cause people to remain or drop out more than others? These sociological questions are grounded by my own experiences engaging and observing advocacy in online spaces but also person to person. Before the 2016 election, advocacy on national policy in my city of Los Angeles sat at a low simmer. After the election, I saw neighbors with a wide range of backgrounds and perspectives take up political engagement with a new seriousness. Within a month of the election, at least eight new grassroots advocacy groups were founded within a 2-mile radius of my home. By the end of 2017, most of these groups were gone, and the remaining members looked seemed more privileged than the group that first mobilized a year before.

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These chapters push toward answers to the broad question of why and how polities change in unsettled times, but always with an eye to the future of mobilization and political inequality. The answer to these questions has become deeply important as concerns over increasing challenges to democratic institutions in both theory and practice (Brown 2015; Foa and Mounk 2016, 2017) clash against assertions that participatory democracy is on the rise (Nabatchi and Leighninger 2015; Polletta 2013, 2014). At stake in debates over what changed in informal discourse during unsettled times like those of the 2016 election cycle are much more than questions of theory. Understanding realignments in discourse and making them rapidly measurable can be a crucial part of diagnosing inequality and intervening for meaningful inclusion. Shifts in how people negotiate social categories on Reddit are certainly important for the people who directly participate in the platform - and because these shifts can be rapidly measured at scale, they can increase our capacity to diagnose broader shifts that implicate millions more people. In these times, vanishingly few publics operate without becoming entangled with a global network of publics; patterns that pertain in a massively networked public like Reddit often signal or directly influence patterns emerging in other systems. Addressing questions of identity, inclusion, and inequality on social media is in no way sufficient on its own. As part of a broader network of research and intervention, this work can enrich conversations on how to create spaces of discourse that meaningfully bridge symbolic boundaries and work against inequalities of power and mobilization.

INTERSECTIONAL BOUNDARY ANALYSIS

Symbolic and formal boundaries The boundaries people construct in everyday informal discourse are crucial to collective action and social change. When people make decisions about how to communicate and how to act, whether consciously or not, they refer to a collective understanding of ingroups and outgroups, allies and enemies, drawn from their experience and their understanding of the social context in which they operate. Every arena of social action - in the terms of Pierre Bourdieu, every field - has a specific configuration of ingroups and outgroups that exists as a pattern in the memory traces of the people who participate in it, which are the aftermath and product of prior communicative action in that context (Latour 2005). The specific configuration of ingroups and outgroups matters a great deal to mobilization, whether in politics, social movements, or other arenas. Though history is often written as if heroic leaders spark movements through raw charisma or talent, whether or not any person rises into leadership depends on their capacity to resonate with the beliefs, values, and dispositions of the people they seek to lead; indeed, that capacity may be one of the strongest elements of what we perceive as charisma (Bourdieu 1985; Bourdieu and Wacquant 2013). One way to capture this configuration is to study symbolic boundaries: collectively imagined cultural line by which social actors divide people and other entities into groups. Specific symbolic boundaries like man|woman and black|white are often part of boundary systems like race or gender. Symbolic boundaries are strongly related to formal boundaries: laws or policies that treat people differently based on their membership in the social groups defined by symbolic boundaries. 2

Indeed, policies that formally treat groups differently often arise from boundaries that first circulated in discourse, as when segregation laws draw on racist narratives already circulating in political discussion and popular culture (Marx 1997). The racial formation perspective has generated a large toolset for the analysis of how symbolic boundaries relate to formal boundaries as well as to economic and power inequality, not taking for granted the reality of race but showing how action from the micro to macro alternatively reifies, contests, and refigures racial groups (Omi and Winant 2014). This perspective is ripe for application across social categories, and indeed scholars inside the field have already called for extending the approach across settings and scales (Saperstein, Penner, and Light 2013) and beyond race and ethnicity (Brubaker 2014).1 Though the importance of symbolic boundaries in informal discourse is not to be taken for granted - for instance, in the presence of strong formal boundaries active reconstruction of symbolic boundaries can subside (Silva 2016) - it is a crucial site of research into the connection between culture and inequality. Most promising is the articulation by Patricia Hill Collins of an intersectional approach to lines of division that reveals conventional social groups as reciprocally constructing phenomena and attends to how power relations and social inequalities flow in the "recursive relationship between social structures and cultural representations" (Collins 2015).

Boundary work If boundary structures matter to inequality even when they occur in informal discourse, it is crucial to develop frameworks and methods that enable us to understand, measure, and ultimately intervene to change them. Key to this process is the study of boundary work: everyday acts by which people activate, define, or frame symbolic boundaries. Does not need to be discursive or consciously intended. This study differentiates between 3 stages of boundary work and differentiates at each stage between discourse with positive, neutral, and negative charge, as in the table below: • boundary activation makes symbolic boundaries salient by directly Table. Forms of boundary work by step and emotional charge.

referencing boundary systems (race, Emotional charge gender) or the groups that constitute Positive Neutral Negative them (black people, women). Stage Activation • group definition assigns people to Activating "group Y" one side or the other of the relevant boundaries symbolic boundary "system XYZ" Inclusion Categorization Exclusion • group framing associates groups with Defining "x is one "y is in "z is one of symbols and emotional charges groups (either negative or positive) to of us" group Y" them" intervene in the collective Upframing Interpretation Downframing Framing understanding of what groups mean. "group X "group Y "group Z groups The positively charged (upframing) is good" is…" is bad" and negatively charged (downframing) instantiations of group framing play a particularly large role in the formation of symbolic boundaries.

1 Brubaker references a particularly compelling passage from Weber, who asserted that a precise and differentiated analysis would ‘surely throw out the umbrella term “ethnic” altogether’, for it is ‘entirely unusable’ for any ‘truly rigorous investigation’ (Weber 1922:394–95). 3

This systematic understanding of boundary work by its function and emotional charge builds on a productive synthesis emerging in the study of symbolic boundaries that situates boundary work with negative, neutral, and even positive emotional charges in broader processes of collective valuation (Lamont 2012). This work aligns cultural sociology with recent syntheses in social psychology and neuroscience that trace show processes of inclusion and exclusion work together to drive the formation of stereotypes (Amodio 2014), political ideologies (Jost et al. 2014; Jost, Federico, and Napier 2009), and broader identities (Hogg 2016). These steps often happen simultaneously, but their combinations are worth analyzing independently. The qualitative analysis of Chapter 2 captures all forms in the activating boundaries and framing groups steps - activation, upframing, interpretation, and downframing. The quantitative analysis of Chapter 1 targets only 2 forms that lend themselves to accurate computer-assisted analysis at large scale: 1. Boundary activation with neutral emotional charge: Refer to categories that divide people into groups Examples: “Black people talk differently than white people.”; “Women sometimes wear dresses.” 2. Downframing with explicit boundary activation: Attach negative value (emotional charge) by directly naming a category Examples: “Southern people have funny accents”; the N word; “Men have no fashion sense”

The examples above are chosen to be minimally offensive, but clearly many instances of downframing in real discourse are extremely offensive and by design: strong emotional charge produces strong symbolic boundaries. Conceptually distinguishing forms of boundary work only becomes useful when matched to methodological work to distinguish them in the practice of communication. Developing and validating a series of codes and lexicons that could reliably distinguish between boundary activation, upframing, and downframing in informal discourse is a crucial contribution of this study.

Intersectionality studies The core insight of intersectionality studies has been that all systems of symbolic boundaries - whether it is race, class, gender, or the many other boundaries explored here - are deeply connected. When intersectionality rose to the public consciousness in the latter half of the 20th century, it was to challenge legal systems that could not handle more than one form of discrimination at once (Crenshaw 1991). In one of the cases that spurred this intellectual movement, DeGraffenreid v. General Motors of 1976, a group of black women who brought lawsuits on the basis of simultaneous racial and sexual discrimination had those lawsuits thrown out on the basis that combining the two would open a "Pandora's Box" of complaints on behalf of groups that experienced multiple forms of oppression, "governed only by the mathematical principles of permutation and combination" (Crenshaw 1989). Since then, intersectionality studies has opened that box with great results, emerging as a diverse field in which a multitude of scholars study a great many forms of social difference in addition to race and gender (Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall 2013; Hancock 2016). Intersectionality studies is a vital 4

intellectual movement shedding light on how boundaries combine in arenas from the informal discourse explored here to formal discrimination and violence; it has also been a crucial tool in building coalitions that bring movements together across differences (Hancock 2013b; Milkman 2017; Terriquez, Brenes, and Lopez 2018) This study combines insights and methodological tools from intersectionality studies and the study of symbolic boundaries to target intersectional boundary structure, particularly the relative prevalence, clustering, and function of symbolic boundaries in discourse. This follows calls in intersectionality studies to push beyond showing that categories intersect in discourse but to investigate how and why intersections matter, along with how they change over time (Choo and Ferree 2010; Hancock 2013a). Measuring the intersection of symbolic boundaries quantitatively has been rare both in intersectionality studies and cultural sociology. Indeed, quantitative work has often masked and misrepresented the dynamics of inequality (Hancock 2007; Zuberi and Bonilla-Silva 2008). Most studies of intersectional difference in online spaces have been qualitative so far (e.g., Gray, Buyukozturk, and Hill 2017; Gray 2012). Similarly, students of symbolic boundaries have most often employed qualitative tools to reveal the language with which people communicate their identity by distinguishing