Between community and sectarianism: calling out and negotiated discipline in prefigurative politics

ABSTRACT

This paper examines how activists negotiate tensions in disciplining offenders who transgress norms in prefigurative politics. Through the disciplinary process of calling-out, activists negotiate a key tension between building a community that is extensive and inclusive or intensive and exclusive for its members. Derived from consciousness raising groups in New Left activism, call-outs are a rhetorical tactic that expose oppressive acts in etiquette, action, or procedure. This tactic, used in physical and virtual space, is a form of normative discipline where challengers, offenders, and any third parties negotiate between reintegrating the accused or expelling them from the spaces. Drawing on in-depth interviews with queer activists and allies in Austin, TX, a city with deep New Left activist legacies, this paper illuminates how offenders react to call-outs and how these responses shape whether the process leads to a redemptive, purgative, or dialogic resolution. From passive acceptance, belligerence, and dialogic dispute, different modes of the call-out enable and constrain how challengers, offenders, and third parties can negotiate a resolution to these transgressions. Call-outs nevertheless risk creating sectarian dynamics when they are used to berate, eliminate dialogue, and fracture groups by weaponizing identities. By drawing on Gorski’s theory of discipline, this paper contributes to the study of the disciplinary practices of prefiguration. In doing so, it explores tensions internal to movements between leniency and stringency, inclusion and exclusion.

KEYWORDS:

• Prefiguration
• discipline
• inclusion
• community
• sectarianism

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my respondents and informants that have provided much of their time and experiences in making this research possible. I owe you a lot and look forward to reciprocating my work in service to what they have contributed. I would also like to extend my gratitude to colleagues that have helped me polish numerous drafts of this paper significantly: Michael P. Young, Mounira Maya Charrad, Maricarmen Hernandez, Amina Zarrugh, Luis Romero, and Daniel Jaster. I also thank graduate students at University of Texas at Austin Sociology: Maro Yousef, Andrew Messamore, and Alejandro Marquez. Everyone provided great feedback as I made sense of interview data and helped me reach a coherent theme for this paper.

Author Links

https://web.sonoma.edu/sociology/faculty/mario-venegas.html

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. All names are pseudonyms to guarantee anonymity for respondents.

2. While a ‘call-out’ may refer to public announcements in European activist contexts, respondents in a US context use the term to refer to rhetorical devices of challenging oppression in any manifest form: speech, act, procedure, etiquette.

3. ‘Woke’ is a US slang term, originally used by African American communities, that refers to those who are awakened and have a constant awareness of social justice and oppression in their daily life and political practice. To be ‘woke’ demands vigilance of oppression in everyday life.

4. Chola is a US slang term that refers to a Latina urban aesthetic and expression of street femininity among Mexican-American women living in US cities. This aesthetic draws on Mexican-American symbology and has historically been a means to express an urban identity in the context of racial and gender violence. That a white gay drag troupe chose to dress in that aesthetic drew condemnation from Latina activists in the community who are aware of the violence they have historically faced.

Additional information

Funding

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Notes on contributors

Mario Venegas

Mario Venegas is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University. He studies internal politics and practices of organizing in US social movements with attention to Left movement such as the labour movement, LGBTQ activism, and Mexican-American movements. His growing direction for research is exploring biographies of Left organizing and the role of political economy in shaping how people enter organizing.