Social Movements and the Dramatic Framing of Social Reality

Social movements are replete with drama. Some scholars go further asserting that social movements are dramas (Benford and Hunt 1992; cf., Cadena-Roa 2002; Juris 2008; McAdam 1996; Snow 1979; St. John 2008). Movements are characterized by sustained clashes between protagonists and antagonists typically enacted on a public stage witnessed by a variety of audiences. The venues for such contentious collective action can range from local to national to global arenas. Movement actors appropriate public physical spaces (e.g., Tahir Square in Cairo, Egypt; a flower market in San Salvador Atenco, Mexico; Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China; Zuccotti Park near Wall Street in Manhattan, New York) and virtual spaces in the blogosphere (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube) ¹ for strategic purposes. Regardless of the venue or stage, social movement actors seek to affect audiences’ understandings of social reality. While movement actors sometimes accomplish this meaning work by scripting, staging, and performing concerted dramatic acts such as sit-ins, die-ins, marches, pickets, chants, occupations, blockades, street theater, hunger strikes, and in extreme cases, self-immolation and acts of terrorism, the bulk of movement-related reality construction activities takes the form of dramatic framing.