She said when she turned around, she see these huge three guys. One stripped himself to rape her daughter in her presence. She was in the middle, the husband so and the daughter so. They told her look on your right. She look. Gradually cutting her husbandâs neck, gradually ⌠So she said when her husbandâs blood flashed on her she went off. She didnât know where she was ⌠and from the rape her daughter got pregnant.
It was in the refugee camps, where these women had seen the worst of the wars ⌠where I got baptized into the womenâs movement.
âVaiba Flomo, Secretary of the Liberian Womenâs Peace Initiative, interviewed in Pray the Devil Back to Hell (Disney and Reticker 2008)
In Argentina in the 1970s, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo came together in a desperate search for their missing children. Many of the original mothers were initially apolitical, socially conservative housewives with little experience in mobilization. Yet they managed to âdo the impossible,â as Fanny Brener de Benderskyâs account suggests, mobilizing against Argentinaâs violent and repressive regime as the junta began its systematic elimination of citizens suspected of subversion. In Serbia in the 1990s, a small group of transnationally networked feminists called Ĺ˝ene u Crnom, âThe Women in Black,â organized to oppose the aggressive military regime and its attack on independence movements across the former Yugoslavia. Braving the kinds of insults and threats that Jasmina TeĹĄanoviÄ describes above (and sometimes worse), they took on the ideological structure of nationalism expressed in militarization and conscription, in ethnic aggression and genocide, in sexual assault and domestic violence, and in policies that kept women in political, economic, and social subjugation. In Liberia in the 1990s and 2000s, a womenâs peace effort emerged across religious, ethnic, class, and cultural boundaries to resolutely call for an end to the countryâs brutal civil war. The womenâs movement, empowered by the solidarity and empathy illustrated in Vaiba Flomoâs statement, went on to confront gender violence as a national social evil linked to political corruption, economic suffering, and social divisions, and gained international acclaim for their grassroots programs in democratization and gender equality. In different parts of the world over four volatile decades, these politically marginalized groups of women were able to build successful, lasting social movements to stop sanctioned violence against civilians, civil war, and genocide. The Mothers grew over time into a globally renowned human-rights movement who led their country out of its âdirty warâ and into a period of democratization, reconciliation, and healing. Despite official condemnation, the Women in Black in Serbia eventually became leaders in global opposition to rape in wartime and in the development of programs for reconciliation and healing after genocide. After helping to achieve victory for Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the first elected female president in Africa, a leader of the Liberian womenâs peace movement was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011 together with President Sirleaf herself, and the women of the movement have been credited with building the foundations of democracy and peace in the postwar era.
This book explores the roots of these movementsâ experiences and successes at a time when many other, mostly male-dominated groups were violently repressed. In womenâs testimony of their personal encounters with the atrocities of military aggression, we learn how they came together to organize for an end to the suffering, in the face of ongoing and seemingly insurmountable horrors. That they met with different results than others who were targeted (often wrongfully) as subversives raises critical questions about how marginalization shapes mobilization in conflictual fields. So far, the field of social movement studies has not adequately addressed why and how different constituencies mobilize with different effects during periods of high repression. Scholars have given little attention to defining and explaining different levels of visibility in protest. Here I identify this as a key factor in explaining why, during highly repressive political periods, some social movements are attacked and swiftly suppressed, whereas others are harshly derided but then ignored. I explore these questions through the study of three cases in which an unexpected relationship between political invisibility and mobilization emerges as a significant marker of opportunity and change. Comparative assessment allows me to further consider how social visibility and status affect the outcomes of mobilizations against repression.
This book offers a theory of how political visibility shapes the trajectories of politically marginalized people who band together to resist violent repression. I define political visibility as a manifestation of social regard, relevance, and respect, which wealth, race, ethnicity, class, gender, age, and personal history all contribute to. Almost invariably, men are accorded more political power than women and are also more visible. Starting from these premises, I explore each of the case histories presented above to reveal how, during periods of violent repression, regimes cracked down on groups that they thought threatened their power and disregarded those deemed to be harmless. In each case, I trace how political threats were constituted sociologically over time and show how political invisibility went from being a social handicap to providing a serendipitous organizing space for politically marginalized groups.
This introductory chapter outlines my analytical framework for understanding the effects of political visibility on marginalized groups during periods of repression. In sociology, the social construction of agency, those historical and political processes through which some actors are given greater privileges and resources than others, significantly shapes social roles and their effects on identities, relationships, opportunities, entitlements, and constraints. Different societies constitute social status in different ways. Historical processes that are highly idiosyncratic nevertheless result in predictable patterns of inequality across diverse societies. Sociologists who study inequality have elaborated upon the historically low status of marginalized groups and how low status translates into disenfranchisement. Political and economic inequality can take on cultural forms of inequalityâthat is, the ways whole populations assume some classes of people to be more or less capable than othersâand these cultural inequalities generate feedback between ideologies and institutions that maintain the status quo.
In exploring the three case histories, I emphasize the dynamics of political invisibility as they shape each of the womenâs movements during civil war. I emphasize how, just as the sociological nature of actor status affects everyday political experiences, so too does it create unique mobilization opportunities and outcomes. My research underscores a realization that oftentimes, from those to whom little status has been accorded, little power is expected, creating for some activists an advantageous blind spot. This had an unexpected shielding effect for these politically low-status, âinvisibleâ women mobilizing through repressive civil wars. They were largely ignored, unless increasing public visibility gained them mockery and derision, and, on occasion, isolated personal attacksâwhereas, for all other suspected and targeted subversives, violence was systematic, fast-approaching, and often unavoidable. I will show how a paradoxical outcome can unfold when the radar of the regime in power fails to perceive a marginalized group as threatening, when this invisible group is highly capable of mobilizing for peace.
Political (in)visibility
Critical race and womenâs studies scholars have long recognized the problem of womenâs invisibility in social and political spheres. Lengermann and Niebrugge-Brantley explain the conceptâs definition in the history of womenâs marginalization in the academy as the experience of ânot being seen, that is, never having oneâs presence acknowledged as significantâ to the canon of knowledge production (1997, 2â3). This is a qualitatively different experience than being âwritten outâ of history or of social and political inclusion, they explain, as those marginalized individuals who are written out are first acknowledged by their contemporaries before later being effectively erased from the record for reasons of both open and unconscious bias. West and Blumberg (1990) explain of womenâs invisibility in social protest that, even when women take on prominent leadership roles behind the scenes, they fail to gain the level of recognition accorded to male leaders. There are notably negative effects of womenâs invisibility in movements. Clark and Clark (1986) note that beyond denying recognition to women, invisibility keeps them from gaining power in the political sphere. Payne (1990) explains that because womenâs work in social movements is often invisible, it is also chronically devalued. And in lesbianâgay alliances, womenâs invisibility has served to bolster male domination and privilege in ways that have ultimately damaged those alliances (Cavin 1990). But this invisibility has also had some functionally positive outcomes. In the US Civil Rights movement, it safeguarded women from losing their jobs and other important roles in the community. Former student activists in the Civil Rights movement, reflecting on the extreme levels of violence often waged against male organizers in the Deep South, note that the women were the only ones able to safely do certain forms of organizing (Holsaert et al. 2012).
Later in this chapter, I discuss in more detail the contributions of race and gender scholars to our understanding of the intervening effects of invisibility and exclusion. Here, I expand on my earlier definition of political visibility as the confluence of social regard, relevance, and respect accorded to an indivi...
