We Fight To Win: Inequality and the Politics of Youth Activism

6: Gendering Political Power: Gender Politics in Youth Activist Networks

By the early summer of , the SRU network had begun to fracture because of internal struggles over how to project the groups’ aims, identity , and political visions to multiple adult publics. This struggle was due in large part to these young activists’ overreliance on mainstream media, whose contours refused to recognize their political outrage or their critique of U.S. foreign policy as anything but pathological and corrupted. After the early street protests in Portland and the “incident on the bridge” during the tumultuous Day of Bombing, SRU activists found themselves split between two sides of a seemingly irreconcilable dilemma: do they proceed to openly engage in antiwar activism and risk losing the adult support of parents and teachers? Or do they sever their antiwar activism from their proeducation activism and compromise their vision for social justice and their collective identity as radical youth? SRU activists were split on either side of this dilemma, and it was not accidental that the dividing line was a gendered one. Boys were overwhelmingly in favor of openly engaging in antiwar activism as the same SRU network that had previously rallied for education funding at the State Capitol. Girls proposed that SRU students salvage whatever parental and teacher support that they could, hiding their more radical orientation from this adult public and establishing their antiwar activism as both covert and secondary to the network’s overt educational activism. This fracture in SRU revealed more than just the problems of distorted social visibility and the adult gaze. The split also signified the culmination of 176 6 Gendering Political Power Gender Politics in Youth Activist Networks deeper gender politics that slowly manifested within the organization: politics that were not discussed openly between boy and girl SRU activists, politics that quietly and privately stemmed from their different positions in family life, politics that were not even interpreted as gendered but nevertheless were powerful enough to tear the group apart. Boys and girls are situated differently within institutions such as schools (Orenstein ; Thorne ) and families (Taylor et al. ; Weitzman et al. ). The gender split in SRU stands as evidence that young people’s orientation to civic and political organizations in their communities, and their participation within civil society more generally, are also profoundly affected by gender. Without a consideration of how gender affects teenage political participation, gender-neutral strategies to engage youth in social justice campaigns will fail by overlooking the particular ways in which girls’ and boys’ possibilities to emerge as public, political actors are strongly tied to their different positions in their families , schools, and other institutions. The revelation that gender shapes social movement participation is by no means a new one. Gender inequality can channel women away from leadership roles and into more informal positions within social movements . Gender can shape the informal and formal social networks that serve as bases for movement mobilization. Women’s roles as caretakers, mothers, and community members profoundly shape their activist commitments in ways that are both empowering and problematic. Although many studies have revealed the ways in which gender structures social movements—especially women’s participation—almost all of these studies focus exclusively on adult women’s activism. The question remains: do the same gendered forces that shape women’s political participation also explain the struggles that teenage girls face as they try to transform from citizens-in-the-making into actual political forces? What is missing from many of these gendered analyses of women’s activism is the key issue of spatial and civic mobility: the basic but essential ability of an activist to access public spaces, insurgencies, and conversations about political issues. Being a social movement participant requires that one attends community meetings, participates in protests and demonstrations, and forms alliances with allied activists, among many other activities. There is a fundamentally public character to these social GENDERING POLITICAL POWER 177 movement activities and a requisite mobility needed to engage in them. It is worth considering that young people, as a demographic, are spatially constrained in ways that differ from adults, and thus face age-related obstacles to participating in political and public life. It is this key issue of spatial and civic mobility, and the barriers to this mobility faced by young people, that render teenage girls’ struggles with activism qualitatively different from women’s struggles. While youth movements help to facilitate girls’ participation in a mostly adult-dominated sphere of community...