Gendered Pathways into LGBTQ Activism in Israel
Date:
Conference Presentation at The Canadian Sociological Association at the 2020 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, London, ON, CA
Conference canceled due to COVID.
Session: Political Sociology and Social Movements: Gender and Sexuality
Abstract:
Existing scholarship on social movement mobilization is overly structural and takes an aggregated perspective on activists’ pathways into activism. Consequently, researches overlook why individuals embedded within similar structuralist circumstances differ in their mobilization outcomes. In this study, I take a micromobilization narrative approach to the study of LGBTQ activism in Israel. Despite repeated attempts to diversify, Israeli LGBTQ social movement organizations are still populated predominantly with men. I ask, why are Israeli queer women less likely to mobilize into LGBTQ activism than man? Building on interviews with ten Israeli LGBTQ activists, my findings reveal two distinctly gendered pathways into LGBTQ activism in Israel. The pathway preferred by the men values dominance and conflict, while women preferred a pathway that leads into activism through egalitarian communities of belonging and collaboration. The dominance of the male pathway in Israeli LGBTQ mobilization explains why so few women are mobilized, as it both limits opportunities for collaborative communities to emerge and devalues the contribution of women to social movement activism. These findings demonstrate the impact of gender norms on social movement processes, namely mobilization. They also point to the need to de-aggregate our understanding of mobilization, as generalized views obscure unique interactions between individual identities and social movement participation.