Compromise as a Relation: Social Change, Mobilization of Norms, and Experiences of Loss
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1285/i20356609v19n3p882-899Keywords:
Autotheory, compromise, critical phenomenology, social change, social norms, trans rights movement, powercubeAbstract
What does it mean for social movements to change their self-conception, presentation, demands, goals, or strategies to engage with dominant actors, institutions, or publics? This is a question I was faced with when doing trans rights advocacy work in an institutional setting as an extra-institutional actor in Estonia. In social movement studies and activist literature, such dynamics are often described and analyzed, condemned or commended, as “compromises.” Yet less attention has been paid to clarifying conceptually what kind of compromise this is. Tracing my lived experience as a trans rights advocate through autotheory and bridging social movement studies with political theory, I develop the notion “compromise as a relation” to make sense of compromises that are neither interpersonal settlements nor intrapersonal trade-offs, but a way of orienting oneself toward others under constraint. Following critical phenomenology, I argue that such compromises are constituted by both experiential and structural features: first, by an uncertain misalignment between the desirable change and the potentially achievable change, and second, by sociopolitical conditions characterized by perceived opportunities for change on the one hand and restrictions on the other.
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