Constructing Indignation: Anger Dynamics in Protest Movements

Solidarities

Collective identity has come to play a central role in sociological theories of social movements, as it has in many other fields throughout the social sciences and humanities (McGarry & Jasper, 2014), including social identity theory in social psychology (Tajfel & Turner, 1979). Its central explanatory role has been to help explain why individuals engage in collective action on behalf of their group: they love and are proud of their group, and wish to advance its respect and other advantages, even independently of their personal gains (van Zomeren, Spears, Fischer, & Leach, 2004). But collective identity is not always purely an advantage: it imposes dilemmas on organizers. Solidarity with one grouping may conflict with solidarity with others. Loyalty to an organization may undermine it to one’s family, and vice versa (Goodwin, 1997; Klatch, 2004). Efforts to arouse solidarity with an entire movement may instead result in allegiance to a small subgroup, such as a cell or affinity group, in the “band of brothers dilemma” (Jasper, 2004, p. 13), adapted from the intense loyalty that members of combat units feel toward each other. (Protest often feels like combat.)

Queer theorists and others have attacked each and every collective identity as a distortion of individual needs, on the Foucaultian assumption that all such subject positions result from systems of power (Beltrán, 2010; Butler, 1990). But all collective solidarities contain both advantages and disadvantages. Internally, they can generate pride and a sense of agency, and they can strengthen networks and trust; externally they allow a group to project strength and make demands. On the negative side, internal risks include an imperfect fit with individual identities and the reification of existing identities; external risks include the restriction of solidarities with outsiders, prevention of individual assimilation to the broader society, and the creation of overly strong leaders who are seen as representing the group. The combination of advantages and disadvantages poses an “identity dilemma” for organizers over how and how strongly they should promote a movement’s collective identity (McGarry & Jasper, 2014).

Two kinds of emotions help keep groups together (Jasper, 1998). Reciprocal emotions are what group members feel toward each other, including love, respect, trust, but also potentially envy, jealousy, or betrayal. Members of a group also experience shared emotions, toward objects outside the group. Every demonstration of shared anger or hatred toward a policy or a group reinforces the reciprocal emotions: they feel the same way I do, they must be good people. Even negative shared emotions, such as fear, can reinforce positive reciprocal emotions: we have survived this together (Eyerman, 2005, p. 43; Whittier, 2009). A successful collective identity fuses reciprocal and shared emotions by imagining an object of attachment (the group) consisting of its individual members taken as a whole. They love both the group and its members (Rupp & Taylor, 1987), often fused into a feeling of home and community (Duyvendak, 2011).

Because scholars of movements tend to study groups they admire or belong to, they have been reluctant to acknowledge the binding power of unsavory emotions such as anger, hate, or revenge. These emotions play a motivating role in murder-suicides such as the Palestinian bombers (Brym, 2007). The pleasure of revenge, particularly after a long series of humiliations, may be a sufficient motivation for individuals, especially when they are encouraged and aided by political organizations. Honor is one of the oldest of recognized motivations, prominent in the founding document of Western culture, the Iliad, and it motivates international relations and politics even today (Lebow, 2008). It is often acknowledged in the form of the need for recognition (Honneth, 1995).

Social psychologists have traced the impact of group-based emotions (Mackie & Smith, 2002). Identities become political when an external enemy can be blamed for a group’s problems and the struggle moves into political arenas (Simon & Klandermans, 2001). Some scholars see group efficacy and anger as the link between identities and action: “People who perceive the in-group as strong are more likely to experience anger and desire to take action; people who perceive the in-group as weak are more likely to feel fearful and to move away from the out-group” (van Stekelenburg & Klandermans, 2013, p. 8). Other scholars see group-based anger and group efficacy as two distinct pathways to collective action (van Zomeren et al., 2004).

Mobilization

People attend protest events because they expect a “positive” experience. Collins’s (2004) interaction ritual model is a theory of emotional energy, created in face-to-face situations, that in turn provides a sense of group solidarity and the joys of crowds that can motivate recurring participation. By describing the “emotional entrainment” of successful interactions—a shared focus of attention, bodies oriented toward each other, synchronized locomotion and singing—he can also posit the causes and consequences of failed interaction rituals. The good or bad moods created in interactions accompany us to our next interactions, affecting them in turn. The confidence and good moods that come from successful rituals are vital for political action, raising energy and activity levels, and probably boosting a feeling of group efficacy (Smith & Kessler, 2004).

Emotions can also work to prevent mobilization. As mentioned, alternative commitments, especially to one’s family, often prevent participation. Adumbrating the band of brothers dilemma, Goodwin (1997) demonstrates how the Huk rebels in the Philippines struggled to contain the romantic dyads that formed in the jungle as well as the commitments to families that often drew participants away from the struggle. We also find emotions at work in avoidance and denial, as Norgaard (2011) shows in an ethnography of a small Norwegian town whose skiing industry was harmed by global warming. To acknowledge global warming, and by extension other social problems, would entail unpleasant emotions that most people try to avoid: feelings of helplessness; guilt over their own role in global warming; fear that their physical surroundings are no longer safe and dependable; and an unsettling threat to their own individual and collective identities. Her subjects deflected these emotions through irony, teasing humor, and cynicism, steering conversations to safer, more mundane topics. They were unable to sustain anger by finding someone to blame.

Emotions are also part of demobilization. Many disagreements over strategic dilemmas grow more accusatory when a movement is declining, as different factions attribute blame for failures. In his study of the collapse of the Amsterdam squatters’ movement, Owens (2009) shows how sadness, anger, and despair led to mutual recriminations. When turned against comrades, anger can destroy a movement. The despairing mood also exacerbated several kinds of fear, he says, and the factions arose around these: existential fear, fear of violence, and fear of isolation.

Just as group honor motivates political action, so does a desire for individual honor, in the form of dignity. Even in situations where success seems unlikely, people often join movements simply to assert their dignity as human beings who are suffering and can make some noise. Dignity can motivate even high-risk activities such as revolutionary warfare. “Through rebelling,” remarks Wood (2003, p. 18), “insurgent campesinos [in El Salvador] asserted, and thereby constituted in their own eyes, their dignity in the face of condescension, repression, and indifference.” The very act of rebelling improved their self-reputation (and reduced their reputation for passivity, at least, in the eyes of others); it was a goal in itself, as well as a means to additional demands. Some protestors have nothing left to lose except their humanity, having lost loved ones, been frustrated or attacked by their own governments, and been driven to passionate outrage (Fisher, 1989, p. 28).

Moral Shocks

Protestors must create and sustain a sense of moral obligation and justice. They use a variety of emotional processes to promote their own moral visions, suggesting that morality affects human action partly or primarily through emotions. Scholars of movements have implicitly or explicitly begun to rely on a neo-Aristotelian view of morality as character training, which guides our actions intuitively, in contrast to a Kantian view of morality as a calculation of universally desirable choices (Monroe, 2004). Our morality is more likely to be intuitive than to consist of explicit principles, although one of the tasks of movements is to develop and articulate principles from those intuitions (Jasper, 1997).

Moral shocks help explain initial and continued participation, consisting of a visceral unease in reaction to information and events which signal that the world is not as it seemed, thereby demanding attention and revaluation (Jasper, 1997). Political scientists have used anxiety in the same way: “generated when norms are violated; the more they are violated, and the more strategically central those norms are to people, then the greater the anxiety” (Marcus, Neuman, & MacKuen, 2000, p. 138). Moral shocks were originally used to account for initial recruitment in the absence of strong network ties (Jasper & Poulsen, 1995), and a number of studies have used the concept in this way to explain recruitment to the movement for peace in Central America (Nepstad & Smith, 2001), abolitionism (Young, 2001), antiracism (Warren, 2010), and the Madres of Buenos Aires (Risley, 2011).

Other studies have found that moral shocks can rekindle or radicalize the commitment of those already active in a protest movement. Gould (2009) describes the moral shock—the Hardwick decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1986—that produced radical direct action out of the desperate mood that gays and lesbians had initially felt under the onslaught of the AIDS epidemic. They formed ACT UP, based on explicit anger, when they concluded that their own government was against them, and complicit in the deaths (on the similar generation of anger by ACT UP in France, see Broqua & Fillieule, 2009). With a new attribution of blame, AIDS was no longer an epidemic but a genocide. “If you believed that AIDS was a holocaust, then ‘business as usual’ in the political realm, which by then was clearly ineffective, was not much of a response” (Gould, 2009, p. 170). Fear and grief developed into anger, outrage, and indignation. Moral emotions came to the fore.

Groups are often most shocked when something is taken away that they take for granted (Heirich, 1971). For instance Taylor, Kimport, van Dyke, and Anderson (2009) found that same-sex marriage became a much more central issue for the LGBTQ community in California when the right was suddenly rescinded by the courts in 2010, generating moral shock and anger.

This view of emotions as embedded in flows of action, stabilized by resources, organizations, and routines, appears implicitly in Munson’s (2009) account of recruitment to the U.S. antiabortion movement. He shows that new recruits do not usually have a well-developed ideology or moral system, but only develop these once they have begun to participate. Instead, they are drawn into protest activities through their social networks, which are themselves a combination of structural opportunities and emotional solidarity with selected others.

Massed demonstrators are always playing with or against traditional images of crowds as angry, dangerous, and irrational. Most groups wish to undermine this image through displays of calm and purpose and a commitment to nonviolence, but some hope to appear threatening enough to be taken seriously. According to Piven and Cloward (1977), poor people only attain concessions when they disrupt activities valued by elites, through riots, sit-down strikes, and other aggressive activities. They have to frighten and not just inconvenience their targets. Although Piven and Cloward were writing in a period when scholars denied the emotions of protestors, the insurgent mood they describe can only be explained on the basis of anger and outrage.

Gender and Indignation

Because the women’s and LGBTQ movements challenged emotion rules in political arenas, they encouraged scholars to reevaluate the emotions of protest. In the 1970s and 1980s, feminist scholars criticized liberal theories of autonomous individuals, modeled on market transactions, in favor of models of humans as emotionally connected to others, inspired instead by the paradigm of nurturing family ties (Ruddick, 1989). At the same time feminist activists battled against the norms by which women were not supposed to express anger, realizing that anger is essential to demanding rights and fighting in political arenas (Hochschild, 1975). As we saw, queer activists formed ACT UP to overcome similar constraints. Anger is a pathway to indignation, pride, and other ingredients of self-assertion. A lesbian separatist group from the early 1970s, the Furies, used its own name to both acknowledge the importance of political anger and to play on classical stereotypes demeaning angry women.

Feminists fought against other emotion norms that constrained and damaged women, including forms of shame that had traditionally been attached to women’s bodies, as during menstruation. The bestselling Our Bodies, Ourselves (Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, 1973), for instance, was meant to demystify women’s bodies in their own eyes. Taylor (1996) attacked the norm of the happy mother in examining the politics of postpartum depression, as mothers formed self-help groups to deal with having the “wrong” feelings. In research on survivors of child sexual abuse, Whittier (2009, p. 68) observed their efforts to deal with shame by making abuse a public problem, so that “undertaking emotional work in self-help groups and speaking publicly about one’s experiences was not simply psychological change, but social change.” Campbell (1994) observes that women’s anger is often framed by others as bitterness, inappropriate to public arenas.

In many cases women remain reluctant to express anger. Research has documented a gendered division of labor in many social movements, which implies an emotional specialization as well. Women especially provide the glue for social-movement networks through their emotion work (Robnett, 1997), while men are more likely to deploy their anger in militant tactics (Fillieule & Roux, 2009) and angry public rhetoric (Roberts, 2013, p. 119). In a classic work on an alternative health organization, Kleinman (1996) found that men were more likely than women to be rewarded for expressing their emotions, breaking gender role expectations, although it seems likely that women are still punished for being too “masculine” when they display anger.

Combinations and Sequences

We rarely experience a single emotion at a time, so that research has begun to examine combinations of emotions in protest. For purposes of clarity, the focus has been on pairs of emotions. Jasper (2011, 2012) suggests that pairs of positive and negative emotions form “moral batteries” that indicate a direction for action, away from the unattractive state and toward the attractive one. These batteries might be nothing more than a condemnation of the status quo combined with a utopian hope for an alternative future, a pair that defines protest for Castells (2012).

The most studied moral battery is the combination of shame and pride: groups with stigmatized identities often form movements to replace one with the other. Although identified in other groups as well (Jasper, 2010), this dynamic has been most thoroughly studied in the lesbian and gay rights movements, where “coming out” has been a dramatic and empowering transition from the passivity of shame to more active pride (Whittier, 2012). Gould (2009) shows how unacknowledged shame first led to an assimilative politics of respectability, but was replaced after the moral shock of Hardwick with an angry, defiant, often separatist assertion of pride. American “dreamers” (whose parents brought them to the US illegally when they were young) also speak of “coming out” in their efforts to transform shame into pride (Nicholls, 2013). Britt and Heise (2000) show that anger can aid the transition from shame to pride.

Pride often depends on externalizing instead of internalizing anger and blame for a group’s plight. In a study of women incarcerated for infanticide, Taylor and Leitz (2010, p. 267) show that writing to pen pals helped the women to blame an illness, postpartum depression, for their actions. This “allowed women to minimize their shame and emotional distress and to shift blame for their actions to the medical and legal systems, enabling them to remake their identities as mothers.” Whether individuals internalize or externalize their anger has broad implications for their mental health (Rosenfield, Phillips, & White, 2006).

Some combinations of emotions resolve themselves into sequences, often carefully orchestrated by activists who understand how to recruit and retain participants. Lively and Heise (2004) discuss emotional segues, including the important transformation of shame or fear into anger. Williamson (2011) examined “emotion chains” deployed by a feminist New Age religious group to ensure that members returned to future events. Initial confusion, followed by understanding and hope, increased the odds of someone’s returning. Those who ended with hope were more likely to return, those who ended up feeling fear were less likely. The transformation of frustration into the joy of accomplishment, even in simple tasks, is an example that applies far beyond protest (Walby & Spencer, 2012).

Some of the most important emotions of protest arise out of interactions with authorities (Gamson, Fireman, & Rytina, 1982). Government repression of protest (through police ineptitude as well as regime policies) can infuriate more participants than it intimidates, and can draw newcomers who are angrier about governmental actions than about the original grievance (Brockett, 2005). These “procedural grievances” can be powerful, as they involve a sense of betrayal by one’s own government, the same agent that is supposed to protect citizens and process complaints (Gordon & Jasper, 1996; Tyler & Smith, 1998). In such cases blame shifts from third parties to government (Hess & Martin, 2006). Much protest involves a standard cycle of interaction: public protest, police repression, even more protest, and so on, reflecting waves of indignation over procedural grievances (Kurzman, 2004, Chapter 6).

Conclusions and Challenges

Attention to emotions, and especially to combinations and interactions among emotions, challenges the means-end models that have dominated research on protest movements. There is a constant stream of emotions in any flow of action, and the balance between positive and negative emotions largely determines whether the action is continued. It is difficult to distinguish between the emotions involved in the efforts to attain certain goals and those that come from their accomplishment. The abilities to express righteous anger and to avoid debilitating shame are ends in themselves, but also the means to further political activity. Each victory yields a good mood of confidence, upon which the next round of action can build.

Anger is the core of many of the processes we have observed. Shame must be transformed into pride in order to allow oppressed groups to feel indignant; the paralysis of shock must become activating anger; inchoate anger must be directed at someone to blame; and anger must take on a moral basis, becoming indignation. Activists deploy apparatuses to create anger during interactions, and to display it to audiences (Broqua & Fillieule, 2009). But we need to know far more about the many forms that anger can take, the many ways it can be displayed.

Scholars of protest can incorporate the study of emotions into most of the techniques they already use: depth interviews; ethnographic fieldwork; surveys, often conducted at protests; the interpretation of texts and other artifacts; and participant introspection. In addition, there are innumerable video recordings of crowds and protests, allowing careful scrutiny of facial expressions and other signs of mutual entrainment, often through slowing the videos down to capture and code relatively fleeting emotion displays (Collins, 2004).

Even though most sociologists of protest work in natural settings, other social scientists have successfully reproduced a number of emotional dynamics in experimental settings (e.g., Sanfey, Rilling, Aronson, Nystrom, & Cohen, 2003), and conducted sophisticated analyses of surveys completed by protestors (van Stekelenburg & Klandermans, 2013). This young field needs dialogue with these other traditions so that our concepts can be made more rigorous and our insights from the field can better inform experiments and surveys.