ABSTRACT
Questions of the balance between private and public were inherent in the new social movements, of which women’s liberation and gay liberation were probably the most successful. New social movements, their theorists have argued, are located solidly in civil society, in the world of everyday life (Castells 1983, 1997; Melucci 1989). They symbolically distance themselves from the state, and from the enmeshment in state policies that characterizes the traditional great movements of labour. There was, at least at first, a retreat from or rejection of conventional politics, but they were of course highly political, both in broadening the definition of what could come within the bounds of political practice, and in the basic sense that they were concerned with power relations. They represented that form of sub-politics which forces conventional institutions to confront their limitations (Beck 1994: 20). But at the same time there were new forms of creativity at the grass-roots level. In part this represented an ‘inner migration’ to new niches of activity and identity. Sheila Rowbotham (2001) among others has seen this process as ‘prefigurative’, which suggests that they preceded a bigger change to come. But in retrospect they were the change: this new politics was creating different ways of being and relating in the here and now, not in some utopian future. These were genuine ‘life experiments’ that were remaking identities and what Bech (1997) calls ‘ways of being in the world’.
