WHY ARE WE HERE? PATTERNS OF INTERSECTIONAL MOTIVATIONS ACROSS THE RESISTANCE*
Can a crowd of individuals who are motivated by a range of issues related to racial identity, class, gender, and sexuality mobilize around a shared issue, and, if so, how does this process work in practice? To date, limited research has explored intersectionality as a mobilization tool for social movements. This article expands recent work on how intersectional motivations influence the constituencies at protest events by comparing across some of the largest events that have taken place in Washington, DC since the resistance began. We explore the patterns of participants' motivations in marches over the first year of the Trump presidency. Our analyses demonstrate how individuals' motivations to participate represented an intersectional set of issues and how patterns of issues emerge. However, when we look across the marches, we find that the patterns are not durable, indicating the limitations of interpretations of the resistance as a unified intersectional movement.
Contributor Notes
* Direct Correspondence to Dana R. Fisher, Department of Sociology, University of Maryland, 2112 Parren Mitchell Art-Sociology Building, 3834 Campus Drive, College Park, MD, 20742 (drfisher@umd.edu).
† The authors would like to thank the many people who helped with data collection. We would also like to thank Sidney Tarrow at Cornell University and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback on this article. Previous versions were presented at the American Sociological Association Annual Meeting in Montreal, Canada, 12 August 2017 and the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting in Boston, MA, 31 August 2018.