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Degree

Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Sociology, 2008.

Abstract

The purpose of this dissertation is to demonstrate how both the structural process of institutionalization and the internal processes of identity conflicts have a deep and perhaps irrevocable impact on the deradicalization of the antirape social movement. I studied this issue by conducting two case studies of antirape social movement organizations in Columbus, Ohio during the time period of 1972-2002. I expected to find in this research that the deradicalization of the antirape social movement has led both to a stronger focus on the delivery of crisis and intervention services, as well as to a decreased emphasis on the broad (i.e., social change) goals of the radical feminist movement as conceived in the early 1970s. While much work on the antirape social movement thus far has tended to focus either on the effects that the external political context has on the institutionalization of rape crisis centers or on the successes of rape crisis centers that are already institutionalized, this dissertation takes that work a step further. Rather than focusing solely on institutional-level processes within antirape organizations, I also analyze both individual- and societal-level contexts. By assessing longitudinally the relative importance of these factors in influencing the lifecycles of antirape social movement organizations, as well as by incorporating a feminist methodological perspective throughout the analysis, I explicitly link the bodies of literature on gender and social movements. I show in this dissertation how identity conflicts within antirape social movement organizations (over issues of racial/ethnic, sexual, and feminist identity) occur not just because of individual-level conflicts, but also because of the external social, cultural, and political contexts in which rape crisis centers are situated at different points in time. The major finding of the dissertation, which I discuss as being contrary to my hypothesis, is that these identity conflicts were as a whole both more salient and more devastating in the institutionalized antirape organization than they were in the grassroots antirape organization that I analyzed.

Subject Headings

Sociology

Keywords

antirape; social movement; gender; feminism; radical

Committee / Advisors

J. Craig Jenkins, PhD (Advisor)
Townsand Price-Spratlen, PhD (Committee Member)
Timothy Curry, PhD (Committee Member)
Verta Taylor, PhD (Committee Member)

Pages

172p.

Document number: osu1211996569
Permalink: http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1211996569

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