Editorial Type:
Article Category: Research Article
| Online Publication Date: 16 Apr 2010
The Strategy of Normalization in the South African Lgbt Movement
The Strategy of Normalization in the South African Lgbt Movement
Page Range: 45 – 62
The article theorizes and presents normalization as a movement-level strategy available to social movements dealing with an internal threat. By defining themselves against an internal threat's abnormality through a process of normalization, social movement organizations assert how they and the movement operate within socially and politically respectable parameters. Drawing on ethnographic, interview, and newspaper data, I show how mainstream South African lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) movement organizations deployed normalization to marginalize and expel an internal threat, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance, between 1998 and 2006.
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