{"title":"The Activist Character: Power and Empowerment in Bestselling Activist Memoirs in the United States","authors":"J. Gøtzsche-Astrup","doi":"10.1177/17499755241249620","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"This article introduces the activist as a widely disseminated character within the culture of social movement societies. Drawing on studies of activist identities, Alasdair MacIntyre on characters, and the sociology of critique, it argues that the activist provides one way of imagining unjust structures of power and the possibilities of critical empowerment. The article unpacks this character in 20 bestselling activist memoirs in the United States. Across the memoirs, the structures of power are understood as total, decentred, and internalised by the individual. Empowerment involves a work on the self that taps into a disruptive source of power outside these structures. While this construction of the activist is shared, it is also inflected through two distinct repertoires in which the activist is empowered through their authenticity or a transformative love that transcends the individual.","PeriodicalId":46722,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Sociology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4000,"publicationDate":"2024-06-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Cultural Sociology","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17499755241249620","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"SOCIOLOGY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This article introduces the activist as a widely disseminated character within the culture of social movement societies. Drawing on studies of activist identities, Alasdair MacIntyre on characters, and the sociology of critique, it argues that the activist provides one way of imagining unjust structures of power and the possibilities of critical empowerment. The article unpacks this character in 20 bestselling activist memoirs in the United States. Across the memoirs, the structures of power are understood as total, decentred, and internalised by the individual. Empowerment involves a work on the self that taps into a disruptive source of power outside these structures. While this construction of the activist is shared, it is also inflected through two distinct repertoires in which the activist is empowered through their authenticity or a transformative love that transcends the individual.
期刊介绍:
Cultural Sociology publishes empirically oriented, theoretically sophisticated, methodologically rigorous papers, which explore from a broad set of sociological perspectives a diverse range of socio-cultural forces, phenomena, institutions and contexts. The objective of Cultural Sociology is to publish original articles which advance the field of cultural sociology and the sociology of culture. The journal seeks to consolidate, develop and promote the arena of sociological understandings of culture, and is intended to be pivotal in defining both what this arena is like currently and what it could become in the future. Cultural Sociology will publish innovative, sociologically-informed work concerned with cultural processes and artefacts, broadly defined.