Deconstructing Symbolic Boundaries: Cultural Strategies of New Social Movements.

Research on new social movements has largely focused on cultural processes surrounding the creation, maintenance, and deployment of collective identities. Although sociologists argue that new social movements seek to change symbolic and cultural codes, few studies illuminate the processes that lead to such changes. Moreover, they typically characterize cultural change as an unintended consequence of social movements. Rather than investigating how activists attempt to change obvious, public cultural codes, in this paper I focus on activists' attempts to change a specific type of cultural structure—symbolic boundaries. I argue that activists in new social movements attempt to enact such cultural change by employing four main cultural strategies of symbolic boundary deconstruction: focusing, transgression, victimization-association, and contention-association. I use the animal rights movements in France and the United States as my primary cases, with data from participant observation and interviews with activists in both countries, but I also demonstrate the broader applicability of these concepts with examples from other new social movements. This study contributes a new theoretical and empirical example to the cultural changes studied by scholars of social movements, and it also provides a useful counterpoint to studies of symbolic boundary construction and maintenance in the sociology of culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]