Protests as critical junctures: some reflections towards a momentous approach to social movements

In the late 1970s to the early 1980s, the Italian transsexual movement began gaining visibility in the public sphere, also making use of the feminist political lexicon. This contamination emerged in the life stories of some trans pioneers, who consider feminism a fundamental element of their political and individual trajectory of subjectivation. In contrast, historiographical reconstructions of Italian feminist movements as well as feminists' accounts never mention the transsexual movement. During battles for the right to change one's gender, transsexuals were supported by only a few feminist members of Left parties. The article analyzes the reasons that prevented Italian feminist and transsexual movements from establishing an open alliance against the patriarchal system deeply rooted in the Italian society of the time.

Recent times have been defined as momentous: great transformation, great recession as well as great regression have been frequently used short-cut terms to characterize the period following the financial breakdown of 2008. As for contentious politics in these times, we frequently hear references to crisis as well as eventful protests, as calls for what was expected to be routine protest triggered portentous waves of contentious politics. Reference to moments of change can be found in different approaches addressing social movements from the macro, meso, and micro levels. While neoinstitutional approaches have looked at extraordinary times from a macro perspective, the Chicago School adopted a micro perspective, looking at the sudden breaking of established paths, the reproduction of ruptures, and their stabilization. An emerging concern in social movement studies with ‘great transformations’ that triggered big mobilizations can also be seen at the meso level Drawing on these perspectives, I argue that some eventful protests trigger critical junctures, producing abrupt changes which develop contingently and become path dependent. While routinized protests proliferate in normal times, under some political opportunities, some protests – or moments of protest – act as exogenous shocks, catalyzing intense and massive waves of contention. Referring to the debate on critical junctures, and bridging it with social movement studies, I thematize a sequence of processes of cracking, as the production of sudden ruptures; vibrating, as contingently reproducing those ruptures; and sedimenting, as the stabilization of the legacy of the rupture. With the aim of mapping some relevant questions, rather than providing answers, I refer for illustration to research I carried out on movements in democratic transitions during economic, political, and social crises, as well as their legacy and memory.