ABSTRACT
Camp Courage is a training experience designed to organize progressive activists and to mobilize grassroots support for LGBTQ equality. Based on the author’s experience at Camp Courage in Washington, DC, this chapter examines how the training uses “choric communication,” or activities in which participants are asked to move, speak, or sing in unison. Through these practices, participants embody and physically enact their common membership in a group; Camp Courage therefore performatively produces, within the limited time and space of the training, a choric collectivity that depends on synchronized action, but does not assume similarity or uniformity of identity. This chapter begins with a history of Camp Courage’s organizing tactics, which have roots in the civil rights movement, the United Farm Workers of America, and Barack Obama’s successful 2008 presidential campaign. Next, it discusses the role of choric communication in fostering embodied collectivity and group identification. The remainder of the chapter takes up three specific tactics of choric communication utilized in the Camp Courage training: storytelling, chanting and call and response, and applause. This chapter argues that Camp Courage highlights the importance of embodied, affective, performative experiences in the formation of a cohesive group necessary for building and maintaining a movement.
