PERSONAL STORYTELLING IN PROFESSIONALIZED SOCIAL MOVEMENTS*
Professionalized movement organizations today rely on outside expertise in fundraising, recruitment, lobbying, management, and public messaging. We argue that the risks that accompany that development have less to do with experts’ mixed loyalties to the movement than with the tendency of expert discourse to remake political problems into technical ones, thereby obscuring the dilemmatic choices movement groups must make. We focus on expert discourse around personal storytelling, a strategy that has become popular for raising funds, advocating for policy, and building public support. Our interviews with activists and consultants and content analysis of stories they rated as successful point to an expert discourse that emphatically rejects “victim” storytelling. Instead, activists are instructed to tell stories of hope and resilience, avoid referring to the graphic details of abuse, and only hint at their emotional pain. Experts justify these strategies as the best way to avoid exploiting storytellers, and only coincidentally as also appealing to audiences. However, we argue that, rather than superseding the tension between empowering movement participants and persuading those outside the movement, storytelling as currently practiced has reproduced that tension.
Contributor Notes
* Francesca Polletta is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. Tania DoCarmo is Teaching and Research Fellow in Legal Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Kelly Marie Ward is Assistant Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies and Sociology at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. Jessica Callahan is a PhD student in Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. Please direct correspondence to the authors to polletta@uci.edu.
† Thanks to the Open Society Foundations for supporting the research on which this article draws and to the interviewees who so graciously took the time to talk with us. For valuable comments on earlier versions of the article, we are grateful to Edwin Amenta, Paul DiMaggio, Mobilization editor Neal Caren, three anonymous reviewers, and participants in the UCLA Movements, Organizations, and Markets Workshop and the NYU Culture Workshop.