Eeva Luhtakallio

MSocSc, Researcher

Department of Sociology, PO Box 18

00014 University of Helsinki

eeva.luhtakallio@helsinki.fi

Are women citizens like others?

The sociology of social movements continues to be a tradition within which little attention is given to gender both as an empirical dimension, and as a theoretical and methodological viewpoint. A caricature of this state of the art is a division of labour in which gender sensitive research projects deal with feminist movements, whereas in the analysis of other social movements gender is treated as a mere contextual category, or even ignored entirely.

The world of social movements and collective action, however, is no more gender neutral than other fields of social interaction. Hence, gender-blind analysis of collective action may give insufficient and even inaccurate results. It may conceal entire dimensions of the studied activities, e.g. possible gender-based discrimination, gender-specific identity building, gendered opportunity structures and the like, that can prove crucial in understanding the studied object.

This paper takes on a feminist methodology of the study of social movements from the points of view of both choice of objects of study, and choice of theoretical and methodological frames of reference. I will discuss the issue on the one hand empirically by analysing the gendered dimensions of citizenship among political activists, and theoretically on the other by reflecting upon the consequences – and problems – of integrating gender in the analysis of collective action.

The empirical data consists of interviews of local activists in Helsinki, Finland, and Lyon, France, which deal with the respondents’ ideas of citizenship and the meanings they give to their own identities as activists.