The Road Not Taken: Gendered Pathways into LGBTQ Activism in Israel

Conference canceled due to COVID

Session: Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Roundtables

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 lesse likely to mobilize into LGBTQ activism than men? 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 mobilization. They also point to the need to de-aggregate our understanding of mobilization, as generalized views obscure unique interactions between individual identities and mobilization processes.