THE IMPACT OF EMOTIONAL

OPPORTUNITIES ON THE EMOTION

CULTURES OF FEMINIST
ORGANIZATIONS
KATJA M. GUENTHER
University of CaliforniaRiverside
A fundamental debate within feminist scholarship and activism centers on what relationship feminism should have with the state. This article explores this debate empirically by
examining differences in the emotion cultures of a state-dependent and an autonomous
feminist organization in postsocialist eastern Germany. The comparative analysis demonstrates how organizations construct specific emotion cultures in response to emotional
opportunities and constraints created by their relationships with state institutions. The
state-dependent organization adopts a less expressive emotion culture that assures broad
public appeal and future state support, but does not build critical consciousness among
participants. In contrast, the autonomous organization encourages displays of feelings
as part of consciousness raising, creating an emotion culture that reduces public appeal
but produces especially loyal and active constituents.

Keywords: social movements; emotions; state; feminism

he relationship between feminism and the state has long been of

central concern to feminist scholars and activists, who struggle over
the degree to which feminists can use the state to achieve emancipatory
goals. The debate about what type of relationship feminism should forge
AUTHORS NOTE: An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2007 Annual
Meeting of the American Sociological Association. This research was supported by the
National Science Foundation (Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant #0402513 with
Robin Stryker), the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and the Graduate
School and Department of Sociology of the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. I thank
Vanesa Estrada, Matthew Mahutga, and Tanya Nieri, as well as Gender & Society editor
Dana Britton, deputy editor Bandana Purkayastha, and the anonymous reviewers for their
comments on this article.
GENDER & SOCIETY, Vol. 23 No. 3, June 2009 337-362
DOI: 10.1177/0891243209335412
2009 Sociologists for Women in Society
337
Downloaded from gas.sagepub.com at COLEGIO DE MEXICO BIBL on November 10, 2015

338GENDER & SOCIETY / June 2009

with the state centers on several interrelated concerns. First, reflecting

Foucauldian conceptualizations of state power, some feminist scholars
and activists fear that working with the state may serve to reify and reinforce state power (e.g., Brown 1992, 1995). Second, state-centered feminism risks the depoliticization of feminism and state co-optation of feminist
movements and goals. Third, some feminists emphasize that the state is
bureaucratic and/or militaristic and/or patriarchal and, under any or all of
these assumptions, inherently hostile to women (e.g., Ferguson 1984;
Jaquette 2003). Given these concerns, many feminist organizations have
eschewed state co-operation, instead advancing a platform of autonomy
from the state.
Still, visible and important feminist campaigns have specifically targeted the state, seeking to expand notions of citizenship and to integrate
womens rights and interestsfrom suffrage to reproductive rightsinto
policy and law (e.g., Banaszak, Beckwith, and Rucht 2003; Chappell
2000; Stetson and Mazur 1995). Advocates argue that these feminist
actions have the capacity to produce women-friendly states, like those
in Scandinavia (Borchorst 2000; Hernes 1987; Mazur 2002; Skjere and
Siim 2000). Proponents of state feminism in particular recognize that the
representation of feminist interests within institutions can contribute to
policies and practices that benefit women and challenge the norm of the
masculinized citizen (Chappell 2002; Eisenstein 1995; Ferree 1995). The
state is also the most viable agent of meaningful redistributive efforts
(Jaquette 2003). The promotion of feminist policy machineries and cooperative endeavors between state agencies and feminist organizations are
hardly unusual, and many feminist organizations and movements around
the world are explicitly state-centered or depend on the state for resources
(Chappell 2000, 2002; Kantola 2006; Matthews 1995). Others decry statecentrism as reinforcement of state power and/or as the selling out of
feminist goals.
Scholars of social movements broadly are similarly concerned with the
relationship between movement organizations and the state, as this relationship can shape a social movements capacity to advocate its interests,
as well as its internal organizational dynamics. The iron law of oligarchy,
which holds that organizations become less oppositional as they mature
(Michels 1962), has informed perspectives on social movements for the
last 30 years. Following this law, some argue that the institutionalization of social movement organizations results in depoliticization and the
ascendance of nonoppositional tactics and goals (Piven and Cloward
1977; Tarrow 1994). Yet several empirical analyses have indicated that

Downloaded from gas.sagepub.com at COLEGIO DE MEXICO BIBL on November 10, 2015

Guenther / The Impact Of Emotional Opportunities339

state-dependent, institutionalized social movement organizations can and

do maintain their strength as political advocates standing in opposition to
the state (Chaves, Stephens, and Galaskiewicz 2004; Landriscina 2006).
While the debate about state dependence versus autonomy has been
contested in a range of subfields and disciplines, empirical analysis of
how dependence and autonomy shape feminist organizationsparticularly
in direct comparisonis uncommon, nor has there been much attention to
the mechanisms through which dependence might depoliticize feminist
(and other) social movement organizations. I begin to fill this gap by
empirically grounding questions about the influence of dependence and
autonomy on feminist organizing in an examination of the relationship
between two feminist organizations degree of dependence on the state
and their emotion cultures, or group expectations and rules about emotional expression. I investigate how different relationships with the state
present opportunities and constraints that encourage the construction of
particular emotion cultures. Connecting the internal emotion logic of feminist organizations to their position vis--vis the state demonstrates that
specific emotion cultures and their attendant rules reflect organizations
relations with formal institutions. Responding to calls for comparative
research on organizational emotion cultures (Meanwell, Wolfe, and
Hallett 2008) and on the linkages between feminist organizations and the
state (Martin 1990), this article provides evidence for enriching the discussion about the relationship between feminism and the state, and elucidates some of the challenges and benefits of both feminist dependence on
and autonomy from the state.
Organizational dependence on the state reflects a web of interlocks,
including financial and other resource commitments and dependencies,
interpersonal networks and ties, and power relations. Dependent organizations share dense webs with the state, while those that are more autonomous are connected only by a few threads. Like other types of relationships,
those between the state and civil society organizations develop patterns
over time, but are also capable of change.
The present comparative analysis focuses on the development of two
feminist organizations in an eastern German city since the collapse of
state socialism in 1989. One of the organizations is state dependent in that
it receives virtually all of its funding from state agencies and works
closely with local institutions and actors. The second organization is
autonomous; though it receives some state funding, it operates largely
independently. Although neither case is fully dependent or autonomous,
these organizations closely approximate such ideal types. Rather than

Downloaded from gas.sagepub.com at COLEGIO DE MEXICO BIBL on November 10, 2015

340GENDER & SOCIETY / June 2009

identifying a linear causal relationship between level of dependence and

organizational emotion culture, I document and analyze the differences in
emotion cultures between a dependent and an autonomous organization.
This article also contributes to the growing literature on womens and
feminist organization in postsocialist eastern and central Europe. Research
exploring state involvement in feminist civil society is especially critical
in the former Soviet bloc both because of womens disadvantage in many
countries in the postsocialist era and claims about the overall slow development of civil society in the region. Particular concern has emerged
about the NGOization of womens organizations in the region (Einhorn
and Sever 2003; Lang 2000), through which feminist organizations
become dependent on state funds for survival, adopt hierarchal models of
organization, and are politically neutralized. The article provides evidence
for evaluation of such arguments.1
I begin by situating the present analysis within extant discussions of
emotions in social movements, detailing how emotion cultures relate to
the development of critical consciousness and resistance, and thus figure
into dynamics of movement mobilization and maintenance. I then briefly
discuss the methodological strategies and data sources used in this project.
Next, I turn to an examination of the two feminist organizations, both of
which followed distinct paths vis--vis the state since the end of state
socialism, to uncover how dependent and autonomous organizations differ in their emotion cultures.

EMOTIONS IN FEMINIST MOVEMENTS

The role of emotions in the development and maintenance of social
movements has garnered increasing attention over the last decade (Flam
and King 2005; Goodwin, Jasper, and Polletta 2001; Gould 2004; Jasper
1998). This body of scholarship establishes that emotions play a significant role in social movements, where they often provide the impetus for
their formation and the backbone of movement sustainability, while also
contributing to organizational cultures, collective identities, framing strategies, and tactical reasoning. As James Jasper argues in the context of
social movements, Emotions give ideas, ideologies, identities, and even
interests their power to motivate (1997, 127).
Organizers can harness emotions to redirect focus, transforming what
they see as counterproductive or dangerous emotions into feelings that
support the goals and strategies of movement organizations. To this
end, social movement actors engage in what Hochschild (1983) terms
Downloaded from gas.sagepub.com at COLEGIO DE MEXICO BIBL on November 10, 2015

Guenther / The Impact Of Emotional Opportunities341

emotional labor, or the work of developing, directing, transforming, and

managing emotions.2 Social movements employ emotional labor to attract
supporters (Perry 2002), build and maintain networks and coalitions
(Taylor and Rupp 2002), identify targets and strategies for activism (Gould
2002; Kim 2002), and sustain movement organizations (Gould 2002).
Rights-based movements typically seek to harness the emotions of
members of socially marginalized groups to galvanize support for their
greater social inclusion and to increase group self esteem. For example,
feminist movements work to transform guilt, shame, and depressionall
emotions typically associated with womenfrom passive feelings that
inhibit collective action into active and politicized emotions (Reger 2004).
Anger in particular is a key emotion for mobilization (Lyman 2004), and
many social movements, including feminist movements, have sought to
develop and augment feelings of anger through consciousness raising
(Reger 2004).
All members of a society are subject to expectations governing what
emotions are considered appropriate, or feeling rules (Hochschild 1979;
Thoits 1989). Those who occupy a subordinate social position may face
particularly strong punishments for violating feeling rules, which, reflecting dominant power relations, are typically different for them than for
members of dominant groups. For example, a middle-class, heterosexual
white man in the United States expressing anger may be characterized by
others as temperamental or grumpy, but he is unlikely to be deemed dangerous as a Black man might be, or a bitch as a woman might be. Since
others are unlikely to perceive his emotion display as threatening, insubordinate, or unjustified, he is also unlikely to suffer any symbolic or material
consequences for it.
Inequalities in the content and application of feeling rules may result in
lost emotional energy, or an individuals long-term, generally durable level
of personal strength, connectedness with others, and/or willingness to initiate social interactions (Collins 1990). In her theorization of how emotional
dynamics can explain both inertia and resistance, Erika Summers-Effler
(2002) finds that an individual occupying a subordinate position may
respond to losing emotional energy because of their low status in one of
three ways. They can continue to manage their emotions by, for example,
suppressing anger or resentment. Alternately, they might avoid interactions
that could result in further lost emotional energy. Finally, they might
engage in resistance, challenging their position as subordinate.
Experiences with social inequality and injustice can provoke feelings
that either internalize or externalize blame (Kemper 1978). Women are likely
to abide by gendered feeling rules that render anger and other emotions that
Downloaded from gas.sagepub.com at COLEGIO DE MEXICO BIBL on November 10, 2015

342GENDER & SOCIETY / June 2009

target blame outside of the self as off limits to them. Anger, in fact, is a
deviant emotion for women in much of the western industrialized world
(Hercus 1999; Lehr 1995). This is problematic insofar as anger is an emotional precondition for resistance and social movement engagement
(Collins 1990; Hercus 1999; Taylor 2000).
Still, many women do convert their anger and other emotions into resistance. Summers-Effler (2002) argues that the development of a critical
consciousness is the key first step in moving toward subversive emotional
activity. In terms of feminism, critical consciousness involves awareness
of gender as a system of subordination and the development of a sense of
injustice. Experiencing solidarity and collective identitya key goal of
consciousness raisingis central to the development of critical consciousness, allowing women to reformulate what they heretofore viewed
as personal problems into social patterns and to shift blame away from
themselves and onto the broader social environment.
Once a critical consciousness has been attained, maintenance can be a
struggle (Hercus 1999). Furthermore, critical consciousness alone is generally insufficient for subversive activity. Hope, or the anticipation that
resistance will achieve intended results, is another major precondition for
mobilization (Summers-Effler 2002). Hope, in turn, depends on ongoing
rituals for reinforcement, as well as on framing past experiences so that
they reflect a potential for future success.
Feminist organizations often attempt to resonate with potential recruits
and existing members by stressing injustices women experience as a
group, amplifying anger and frustration to galvanize participants, and offering the possibility of social change (Taylor 1995). How feminist emotion
cultures evolve, however, is dependent on social processes and structures
of power not just within, but also outside, feminist organizations (Morgen
1995). Organizational emotion cultures are nested within larger emotion
cultures that are institutionally specific or culturally dominant, and are
structured by the available and acceptable emotional repertoire in the broader
arena of action. These outer ring emotion cultures influence the inner ring
emotion cultures. For example, when inner ring organizations interact
with outer ring institutions, they may adopt the institutional norms of
those institutions (Katzenstein 1998), including emotion cultures. The
constraints and opportunities for developing particular emotion cultures
in the inner ring represent an emotional opportunity structure imposed by
their relationships with the outer ring. Like political and discursive opportunity structures, emotional opportunity structures are dynamic, dialogic,
and subject to interpretation. As the subsequent discussion of feminist organizing in eastern Germany reveals, state-dependent feminist organizations
Downloaded from gas.sagepub.com at COLEGIO DE MEXICO BIBL on November 10, 2015

Guenther / The Impact Of Emotional Opportunities343

face an emotional opportunity structure that encourages a professionalized emotional repertoire. Autonomous organizations, on the other hand,
are dependent on an expressive emotion culture for maintaining members
commitment and thereby ensuring survival.

METHOD
To tease out the relationship between degree of organizational autonomy from the state and emotion cultures, I analyze two feminist organizations in an eastern German city. I conducted ethnographic fieldwork
at these two organizations in the summer, fall, and winter of 2003 with
continued follow-up contact through 2006 as part of a larger study of the
development of local feminist movements in eastern Germany since the
end of socialism there in 1989 (Guenther 2006; 2008). Participant observation, formal and informal interviews, and archival research provided me
with a longer-term, worms eye view of these two organizations and
allowed me to explore multiple aspects of the emotion cultures of the
organizations, including how staff and volunteers represent and express
feelings, how they teach newcomers about the organizational emotion
culture and learn it themselves, and how they develop and utilize vocabularies and ideologies about emotions. My focus on emotion cultures is
aligned with emotionology rather than with the study of emotions in that
attention to emotion cultures invokes professed values and norms for
emotional behavior, but does not necessarily capture the experienced
emotions of the actors involved (Stearns and Stearns 1985).
Although the present analysis is informed by data collected as part
of the larger research program, it focuses on two organizations for several reasons. First, the 16 feminist organizations from this city fall
along a continuum in their relationship with the state, such that trying
to classify them into two groups would create complex measurement
problems. The two organizations on which the current analysis centers
represent the furthest points on a continuum of autonomy and dependence, allowing for a direct comparison that illuminates trends identified in the larger sample. Second, these organizations are a particularly
well-matched pair for comparison because, as I will discuss in more
detail shortly, they have a great deal in common. The primary difference between them has been their relationship with the state. Their
similarities along other core dimensions of goals, ideology, and structure allow for control over the other usual suspects that could explain
variations in emotion cultures.
Downloaded from gas.sagepub.com at COLEGIO DE MEXICO BIBL on November 10, 2015

344GENDER & SOCIETY / June 2009

Finally, these two organizations are the largest and most visible feminist
organizations in the city. This is important because I was able to collect
far more data from these two organizations than from any others. While at
virtually all other organizations I spoke with one or maximally two staff
membersgenerally because they represented the full staffthe two
organizations at the heart of this analysis had large enough staff groups
and service offerings that I was able to speak with multiple informants,
collect archival materials, and participate in both routine and special
events. I completed semi-structured, in-depth interviews with seven members of one organization and five of the other.3 Respondents were eager to
speak with me and to have their voices heard. This eagerness reflects their
structural location as doubly marginalized in the unified Germany as
women and as easterners, and in some cases also as lesbians and/or immigrants. The women wanted to tell their stories to someone interested in
documenting their experiences. My personal background as a German
American with high levels of cultural and linguistic fluency and as a selfidentified activist also provided me with a degree of insider status.
During interviews, which generally lasted 90 minutes to three hours,
respondents and I discussed a range of topics, including their involvement
in feminist organizing, the history of their organization and their role in
that history, and their feelings about German unification, other social
movement actors, and the state, among other topics. Interviews with
20 additional activists and feminist state officials who did not work
directly with either of the two organizations analyzed in this article were
helpful for providing diverse perspectives on the emotion cultures of the
two organizations that I analyze in depth. Virtually every respondent in
the sample was familiar with and had contact with the two organizations
analyzed here, and they offered their impressions and insights into the
emotion cultures of these groups.
Through participant observation, I obtained an insiders view of the routine operation of the emotion cultures of the organizations. Observation
allowed me to experience the emotion cultures of the organizations first
hand and to witness emotional labor and management in practice. I observed
during classes, groups, and lectures, as well as during routine activities at
the organizations. I was able to spend time and observe interactions and
their emotional dynamics in public spaces where women congregate during the day and evening. In these settings, I met and spoke informally with
roughly a dozen clients, volunteers, and staff other than those included in
the interview sample for each organization. In addition, I collected archival data, including documents like brochures, fliers, and other outreach

Downloaded from gas.sagepub.com at COLEGIO DE MEXICO BIBL on November 10, 2015

Guenther / The Impact Of Emotional Opportunities345

materials, and some internal documents, like minutes from meetings.

These documents reflect the development of emotion cultures, and provided stimuli for interviews, during which I would often ask respondents
to elaborate on written materials.
The women I met at these twoand otherorganizations joined the
feminist movement in eastern Germany during the tumult of 1989-1990,
when state socialism in East Germany ended and East and West Germany
unified. German unification was a shock for these women, resulting in
feelings of elation at their expanded political rights and of anger and frustration at their suddenly lowered status. They turned to local-level organizing, coupling political advocacy with service provisioning to help women
cope with the transformation from socialism to capitalism. Although
sometimes wary of being identified as feministswhich the socialist ruling party of the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany)
insisted was a western, bourgeois importeastern German feminists quickly
joined together to protect womens rights and interests. Most feminist organizing in eastern Germany since German unification in 1990 has focused
on keeping women in the workforce by advocating for the continuation of
East German policies and programs that produced the highest labor force
participation rate for women in the world, like state-funded day care, generous maternity leaves, and affirmative action. Feminists also developed
educational organizations where women retrain for new careers or receive
assistance in finding jobs, and created services that were needed, but
largely unavailable, in East Germany, such as shelters for battered women
and counseling for survivors of sexual violence.
Reflecting the migration of young people out of eastern German cities
in search of employment in the West, the average age of respondents in
the full sample from this city is 52 years. Of the 32 women I formally
interviewed in this city, all had completed a degree beyond high school,
and three held Masters-level degrees. Twenty-three respondents either
primarily work(ed) or volunteer(ed) with a nonprofit womens organization, while eight were feminist-identified women who serve as either
elected or appointed government officials responsible for gender issues.
Three women were noneastern German: two are western Germans who
moved to eastern Germany after unification, and one woman is a Russian
immigrant who has lived in the city since the early 1980s. With the exception of one interviewee who requested an interview largely in English to
practice her English-language skills, I conducted, transcribed, and analyzed the interviews in German aided in part by the use of a software
program for sorting and coding qualitative data.4 All translations here are

Downloaded from gas.sagepub.com at COLEGIO DE MEXICO BIBL on November 10, 2015

346GENDER & SOCIETY / June 2009

mine. Although I use pseudonyms to obscure individual identities, I retain

the real names of organizations because they are significant, respondents
wanted them used, and there would be no clear benefit to disguising them
other than to protect me as a researcher (Guenther forthcoming).

THE DEVELOPMENT OF TWO FEMINIST CENTERS

Since the collapse of state socialism in the former German Democratic
Republic in 1989 and the unification of East and West Germany in
1990, women in eastern Germany have experienced massive social
upheaval, including welfare state retrenchment and the introduction of
West Germanys more traditional understanding of gender relations (for
detailed discussions of the impact of German unification on eastern
German women, see Brown, Jasper, and Schrter [1995]; Dlling [1991];
Frink [2001]; Rosenfeld, Trappe, and Gornick [2004]; Rudd [2000];
Trappe [1995]). Women in eastern Germany suffer from disproportionate
un- and underemployment and numerous changes in state policy since
1989 make it more challenging than in the former East Germany for
women to work outside of the home and to combine paid employment
with parenting. Feminist attempts at effecting change in the political arena
since the early 1990s overwhelmingly focus on municipal politics and the
local state rather than on the federal state or the European Union (EU).
Although the feminist movement in eastern Germany is localized and
decentralized, local feminist movements are quite vibrant and in most cities in eastern Germany have developed rape crisis centers and battered
womens shelters, and coordinate job training and placement programs,
public education campaigns, and social events. Grassroots feminist organizations are typically heavily subsidized by the state, especially through
municipal and provincial state agencies.
Such is the case in this city of just under 200,000 residents, where since
unification local women have founded over a dozen nonprofit feminist
organizations, most of which receive at least some funding from local
state coffers. Many feminist activists first encountered one another in
feminist and/or dissident groups sheltered by the Catholic or Evangelical
Lutheran churches before 1989. Over half of the activists in this sample
had some involvement with Women for Change (Frauen fr Vernderung),
the citys first visible womens organization, which formed in early 1989
in the period of growing public unrest leading up to the fall of the Berlin
Wall. Involvement with Women for Change was life-altering for many
women. Through the groups leader, they heard about the status of women
Downloaded from gas.sagepub.com at COLEGIO DE MEXICO BIBL on November 10, 2015

Guenther / The Impact Of Emotional Opportunities347

in West Germany and were horrified when they learned how little West
German women participated in the paid labor market and how paltry state
support for day care was in West Germany compared to the widely available, virtually free day care offered in East Germany (for data on work
family policies in the unified Germany, see Shaible, Schweiger, and Kaul
[2005]). They heeded their leaders call for resistance, and steeled themselves for an assault on the East German gender order which was, on the
whole, more egalitarian than that of West Germany.
As German unification proceeded and became inevitable in the winter and spring of 1990, many activists began to feel that Women for
Changes broad platform of peace and reform required greater specification, and they worked to develop explicitly feminist organizations
addressing a wide range of issues. Ultimately, at least half a dozen separate organizations in the city trace their point of origin back to Women for
Change. Of these, two are especially prominent, having opened large
womens centers in 1990.
From January until August, 1990, the city was under the control of a
transitional government. Among other duties, this governing body was
charged with determining the fates of various properties owned by the city,
including the former headquarters of the state secret police, which Women
for Change had taken over in December 1989. The transitional government
considered proposals from various political and social service actors, and
ultimately determined that the headquarters should become the home of the
citys new municipal womens center (Kommunales Frauenzentrum, hereafter the Womens Center) under the leadership of a group of women who
had been active in Women for Change. As a municipal institution, the new
Womens Center was overseen by the citys Gender Equity Representative
(Gleichstellungsbeauftragte), who was herself active with Women for
Change (for a discussion of the development of these German femocrats,
see Ferree [1995]). Day-to-day operations were managed by staff members
whose salaries were indirectly paid by the city, but who applied for their
positions through more conventional routes than political appointees.
Although most eastern German municipalities with more than 150,000
residents provide financial support to womens organizations, the creation
of a municipal womens center is unusual; I am aware of only two others.
For 13 years, the Womens Center existed as a municipal institution employing up to a dozen full-time staff.
Because of budget shortfalls and a desire to reduce the citys obligations to social service agencies, in early 2003, just a few months before
I began my fieldwork there, the city transferred control over, and financial
responsibility for, the Womens Center to an independent nonprofit
Downloaded from gas.sagepub.com at COLEGIO DE MEXICO BIBL on November 10, 2015

348GENDER & SOCIETY / June 2009

organization already operating in the city. Subsequent to the transfer, virtually all of the remaining original staff left the organization.5 Although no
longer a municipal institution, the Womens Center still receives funding
from the city (amounting to about 80,000 in 2007, or roughly US$130,000),
maintains its residence in a facility renovated at the citys expense, and the
citys Gender Equity Representative continues to be influential in the
governance of the Womens Center. The Womens Center thus remains
dependent on, and tied to, the city.
The second group of women who founded a womens center were disenchanted with Women for Changes, and later the Womens Centers,
willingness to work directly with the state. Feminists involved with this
organization view East, West, and unified Germany as patriarchal societies, and established a nonhierarchical, consensus-driven organization that
rebukes masculine models of decision making and power. Members
named the new organization Autonomous Brennessel (Autonome Brennessel,
hereafter simply Brennessel). In German, Brennessel means stinging
nettles, which grow rampant as weeds through most of Germany. Instantly
painful to the touch, stinging nettles are also believed to have healing
properties. The choice of name is oppositional and yet offers a prospect of
reconciliation.
At their inception, the Womens Center and Brennessel shared core
similarities and some important differences. Both organizations focus on
violence against women, including rape, incest, and battering; womens
social and professional networking; their work in the paid labor force; and
political representation. Both organizations identify as feminist and recognize womens status as oppressed by men and patriarchal institutions, and
while the Womens Center has come to propagate a more liberal feminist
ideology and to welcome mens involvement in some programs (both
organizations initially prohibited men from their premises), both groups
adopt core beliefs from radical feminism. Both seek to empower women
by helping them become aware of gender inequalities and emboldening
them to take action to change their lives at the personal and societal level.
The two organizations started out with the joint goals of political empowerment and service provisioning. They are also both quite professionalized. Although only the Womens Center has adopted a hierarchical
organizational model for day-to-day operations,6 both organizations are
incorporated as nonprofits; employ staff who have advanced degrees in
relevant fields such as social pedagogy, social work, or counseling; are
housed in professional facilities; and are fiscally accountable to grantmaking agencies.

Downloaded from gas.sagepub.com at COLEGIO DE MEXICO BIBL on November 10, 2015

Guenther / The Impact Of Emotional Opportunities349

Differences include five interrelated issues. First, while the Womens

Center developed under the protection of the state, Brennessel has been
largely autonomous from the state from its inception. This is not to say
that Brennessel has never asked for or received state assistance. After
unification, federal unemployment programs subsidized or paid salaries
for many workers in eastern Germany, including at Brennessel, typically
in combination with funds from local state agencies or employers. The
city also contributed financial resources to help Brennessel with overhead
costs, and the organization has applied for other grants through the provincial government with mixed success. The amount of state support
varied significantly each fiscal year between 1990 and 2007, but never
approached the levels of state support for the Womens Center.
Second, as a result of these funding disparities, the material conditions
at the two organizations are notably different. While the Womens Center
enjoys a roomy facility with current technology, women at Brennessel
work in dilapidated offices with inadequate technology and under the
constant threat of budgetary crises that threaten the security of their jobs.
When I presented one staff member at Brennessel with information about
informed consent, she tossed the consent form back at me, laughing that
I should be signing a release of liability in the event I was struck down by
a collapsing ceiling.
Third, the structure of leadership at the Womens Center is hierarchical
while that at Brennessel is based on consensus. Fourth, while lesbian and
bisexual women have been involved with both groups from the outset,
sexuality is more of a political issue at Brennessel than at the Womens
Center. Finally, the two organizations have distinct emotion cultures.

THE STATE OF EMOTIONS AT THE WOMENS

CENTER AND BRENNESSEL
The Womens Center occupies a beautifully restored house tucked
along a quiet side street in the citys historic center. The first floor has a
caf and lounge area, as well as smaller meeting rooms, and most of the
windows face out into the serene garden behind the building. The Center
offers talks, discussion groups, and classes, as well as individual referrals
and counseling with the mission of supporting womens individual and
collective development and creating a more gender egalitarian society.
The emotion culture at the state dependent Womens Center is reserved and
contained. During my visits there, I never witnessed significant emotional

Downloaded from gas.sagepub.com at COLEGIO DE MEXICO BIBL on November 10, 2015

350GENDER & SOCIETY / June 2009

displays. Staff members speak in quiet, soothing voices, exuding an aura

of calm and caring. Whenever I left the Womens Center, I was startled by
how loud the world was since during my visits I quickly became accustomed to the stillness of the Womens Center.
Emotion states, particularly those involving anger, grief, shame, and
discouragement, were conspicuously absent during interviews with current and former staff members. Outreach materials contain no mention of
emotions, nor do they seek an emotional response from readers. Classes
and groups avoid emotional and psychological topics. Instead, curricular
offerings stress practical skills and issues ranging from wreath making to
how to navigate the employment market.
Staff routinely bemoan the challenges women have faced in eastern
Germany, describing women in the community as disheartened, disappointed, lonely, disengaged, disoriented, overwhelmed, lost, and
withdrawn. In interactions within the Womens Center, these feelings
are positioned as obstacles to be overcome, not through expression and
engagement, but through repression. Importantly, while there was frequent reference among staff to the connection between these feelings and
broad social phenomena such as German unification, unemployment, and
globalization, staff help their clients cope with the feelings andwith the
exception of intrafamilial violencedo not explore the underlying causes
of the feelings.
The Womens Center advertises services as gender sensitive, and
staff members proudly listed their feminist credentials during my conversations with them, frequently stressing their interest in advancing
womens rights and interests. Still, service provisioning available there
is not obviously feminist or gender critical. Staff members focus on
individual problems and do not help clients identify the structural roots
of those problems. While many feminist organizations in Germany
as elsewhereengage in consciousness raising to help women connect
their experiences and emotions with structured inequality and to transform emotions into more empowering feelings, this is not the case
at the Womens Center. Instead, services are pragmatic, focusing on
immediate practical, material concerns. The counseling strategy involves
staff encouraging clients to learn to cope with their emotion states
and work through them. The goal of counseling is to learn how to
compartmentalize and hide emotions to maximize what staff called
functioning.
The emotion rules at the Womens Center discourage staff members
from expressing their feeling states. The language of professionalism
dominates, and squelches strong displays of emotion. The notable
Downloaded from gas.sagepub.com at COLEGIO DE MEXICO BIBL on November 10, 2015

Guenther / The Impact Of Emotional Opportunities351

exception to this is compassion, an emotion that is frequently invoked in

reference to interactions with clients. Although compassion has the potential to be a mobilizing emotion for demands for social change, it does not
serve this function at the Womens Center, where it is instead emphasized
as a mode of caring that motivates individual assistance. In German, compassion is called Mitgefhl or Mitleid, words that translate more literally
into English as feeling with or suffering with. Indeed, staff describe
their care work as giving women in the community the opportunity to open
up to someone who will bear witness to what they have experienced without judgment or imposition of their own interpretations of these experiences. Doing so can be taxing: Staff at the Womens Center reported
feeling weighed down by the emphasis on listening to and caring for
others without being able to express their emotional or political responses
to the stories they hear. One woman sighed as she explained to me that her
job was to listen and listen, but not to react.
The women who work at the Womens Center engage in the emotional
labor of suppressing feelings that violate the Centers emotion culture and
highlighting the Centers core emotion, compassion. Expressing compassion at the expense of other emotions became exhausting for some staff
members who feel pressured to demonstrate a caring and optimistic persona. One staff member noted somewhat wistfully that, Were not supposed to get mad about how things have turned out . . . Were always
supposed to look on the bright side, which isnt always easy when for
many women, life has become so difficult. A former staff member
described work at the Womens Center draining and exhausting, and
told me she left the organization because she found it politically and
emotionally stifling.
In my conversations with Silke and Anja, two of the original staff members at the Womens Center, neither of whom was still working at the
Center when I first met them in 2003, the effects of dependence on the
state were evident across many domains. On the one hand, being institutionalized as a municipal entity provided critical validation. Staff and
volunteers felt that the city was taking their concerns as women seriously.
At the same time, as city employees, staff at the center felt depoliticized
and emotionally repressed. As Anja comments:
I was also aware that a city-run womens center is different from an autonomous organization. Naturally, we werent funded to be politically active.
Many of us were uncertaineven our directors were uncertain: On the one
hand, they wanted us to be political, but, on the other hand, they didnt
know how to activate us politically as public employees . . . An attachment
to a structure like that [of the state] hobbled us in many ways.
Downloaded from gas.sagepub.com at COLEGIO DE MEXICO BIBL on November 10, 2015

352GENDER & SOCIETY / June 2009

In Anjas mindand her former colleagues echoed the sentimentbeing

dependent on the state functioned to deradicalize the Womens Center as
an organization and had the same effect on often the individual women
who worked there. Instead of embracing emotions as a legitimate form of
expression or tool for mobilization, the Womens Center draws on a discourse of professionalism in which detached indifference is considered
appropriate. Emotions run counter to professionalization and therefore to
the public reputation and state support of the Womens Center. A staff
member summed up the situation: As a state-funded institution, we
couldnt look like a group of hysterical women.
Largely motivated by concern over maintaining a positive relationship
with the city government, which indirectly paid employee salaries, as well
as the cost of overhead and equipment, staff members at the Womens
Center adopted an unemotional presentation of self and organization.
While none of the staff I spoke with could recall an instance of a state
agent explicitly advising them of emotion rules, respondents consistently
reported feeling constrained in their emotional expression because of their
status as a dependent organization. The staff at the Womens Center perceive an emotional opportunity structure in which violating the norms of
their benefactor, namely the state, would place them at risk for soft repression through stigmatization, ridicule as hysterical women, and loss of
funding (Ferree 2004). The Womens Center has relied on its ability to
elicit support from local state leaders and agencies, which involves maintaining broad appeal to justify public financial support. As staff consistently noted, the emphasis on public appeal translates into a nonthreatening,
nonemotional organizational culture where clients pass through rather
than become committed constituents.
State officials, too, recognized that dependence on the state influenced
the capacity of the Womens Center to utilize emotions for political purposes. One city official told me that she was simultaneously proud of her
involvement with the Womens Center, but also disappointed that it
couldnt be more political and more passionate because of its reliance on
the city. Like staff members at the Womens Center, she conflates politics
with passion, asserting that because the city deactivated the political
impulses of the women who founded the Womens Center by co-opting
the organization, it also drained them of passion.
In contrast, at Brennessel, emotional displays are welcome, and emotion rules require expression. Feelings are viewed as authentic, real,
legitimate, and important. Rejecting fears about women being represented
or understood as irrational and overly emotional, activists at Brennessel

Downloaded from gas.sagepub.com at COLEGIO DE MEXICO BIBL on November 10, 2015

Guenther / The Impact Of Emotional Opportunities353

encourage the expression of emotions as a path to self-discovery and

feminist empowerment and, ultimately, to challenging existing power relations. In this emotion culture, expression is a key part of consciousness
raising, through which women become aware of the inequalities they face,
their unity with other women, and their efficacy as political actors. Events
at Brennessel, like a regular cabaret and an extensive menu of self-help
and discussion groups, focus on the expression of a range of emotions
including anger, grief, shame, despair, happiness, love, and lust. The only
emotion ever framed as one to be overcome at Brennessel is fear, which
self-defense classes, as well as support groups work to obliterate.
To promote and maintain an expressive emotion culture, Brennessels
calendar includes workshops that focus on topics like getting in touch
with feelings and emotional self-expression. Brennessel is also unique
among feminist organizations in that it has offered a special certificate in
feminist counseling. Most staff members there have completed this program in addition to any training they may have from mainstream educational institutions. In this feminist curriculum, counselors are urged to
encourage emotional expression among clients, and to recognize anger
and grief especially as empowering feelings. The curriculum stresses
emotional expression as a route to self actualization and feminist consciousness for both clients and counselors. In working with survivors of
gender-based traumas such as rape, incest, and domestic violence,
Brennessel promotes emotional displays and the maintenance of emotion
states among clients as stages of healing and feminist awakening. A range
of emotions, but especially anger and sadness, are welcomed and understood among staff members as part of the process of healing from
trauma, and of becoming a feminist. One staff member described Brennessels
approach to emotions in counseling by noting, Healing requires feeling
feelings. Reflecting this philosophy, staff members work to elicit emotional responses from clients. Sometimes a client really needs to be pushed
in order to get in touch with her feelings, one staff member mused.
Our role is to provide that push to make sure they really feel what they
need to feel.
Emotions are also important for building solidarity between women at
Brennessel. An ethic of care through which staff and clients express their
feelings and acknowledge, encourage, and discuss one anothers emotion
states is central. What American feminists commonly term processing
is fundamental to Brennessels emotion culture. Individuals share and
discuss their emotional states frequently. Conversations about emotional
responses to events within and outside the organization are a normal part

Downloaded from gas.sagepub.com at COLEGIO DE MEXICO BIBL on November 10, 2015

354GENDER & SOCIETY / June 2009

of interactions. For example, a staff member might express anger at an

experience with sexism on the way to work, or anger at a colleague for
failing in some task. Those who witness these emotional displays are then
expected to manage their own emotional responses by offering support
and validation, even in the face of conflict. Through such processing, as
well as in other interactions with colleagues and clients, staff and volunteers are expected to engage in the emotional labor of amplifying their
emotion states and/or validating one anothers emotions.
Reflecting this expressive emotion culture, activists at Brennessel routinely made reference to emotion states. They described specific events or
points in time as exciting, exhilarating, tumultuous, or frustrating.
They also framed their own responses to events and encounters in emotional terms, and recognized that their motivation as activists was
grounded in specific feelings and emotion states. One staff member who
became active in womens issues in 1989 recalled her development as an
activist in largely emotional terms. After unification, she explained, she took
a job in a government office addressing womens issues. From what she
learned there, however, coupled with her experiences with underemployment as a consequence of unification, she became angryeven enraged. It
wasnt a choice anymore to do this work. I had to do it. Otherwise, I would
be complicit in the patriarchy.
Emotions are also obvious in the public face of the organization.
Brennessels printed matter utilizes the language of emotions, especially
anger, grief, and courage. For example, their monthly newsletter is rife
with politicized emotions, regularly calling women into action by inciting
anger and outrage and directing those emotions at specific targets.
Headlines routinely urge women to stand up, take charge, and fight
back, often with the added emphasis of an exclamation point. While
many newsletter items are purely informational, most request some type
of action on the part of the reader, and the authorsthe staff and volunteers at Brennesselpoliticize emotions by provoking and invoking
emotions to encourage action, such as participation in protests that
require the transformation of negative or inhibitive feelings into empowering, confrontational emotion states. Brennessels emotion culture centers on the emotional labor of frequent expression of intense emotions for
individual and collective empowerment.
The cost is that Brennessels emotion culture scares away some potential participants, and the likelihood that a woman will seek services there
in the first place is lower than at the Womens Center, which has a much
larger clientele. Several women in the broader sample, for example, said
they do not feel comfortable at Brennessel because, in their words, they
Downloaded from gas.sagepub.com at COLEGIO DE MEXICO BIBL on November 10, 2015

Guenther / The Impact Of Emotional Opportunities355

perceive the women there as alternately too angry or too confrontational. One feminist-identified policy maker admitted she had successfully urged the city leadership to deny a request for funds from Brennessel
because she thought their approach to feminism appealed only to a limited
group of women whereas the organizational culture at the Womens
Center was more accessible and less threatening to women in the community. Her positionwhich was widely known to staff at both organizationsreinforces fear of being cut off from state funding at the Womens
Center and anger toward the state at Brennessel.
Ultimately, although its initial appeal is lower, Brennessel does
more than the Womens Center to awaken and maintain mobilizing
emotion states among clients, staff, and volunteers. This is critical
precisely because Brennessel is an autonomous organization and suffers the very real material consequences of this status. Brennessels
organizational survival depends on the commitment of its members as
many activists ping pong between paid and unpaid positions according
to the organizations finances and their own eligibility for governmentsubsidized salaries. Validation of un- and underemployment is particularly important in the eastern German context where there is no history
of or appreciation for volunteerism and where women consider it an
affront not to be paid for their labor. Brennessels expressive, intense
emotion culture has narrower appeal than the more neutral, unexpressive emotion culture of the Womens Center, but produces greater
commitment and a stronger sense of solidarity among those who
become members.

CONCLUSION: EMOTIONAL OPPORTUNITIES

AND FEMINIST EMOTION CULTURES
Emotions are central to the mobilization and maintenance of social
movements and social movement organizations. Emotions galvanize support for protest and build commitment and collective identity. Rights-based
movements like feminism typically translate deviant or socially undesirable emotions to empower movement actors. Extant perspectives on feminist organizations have posited that they can be identified in part based on
similarities in their emotion cultures (Martin 1990; Taylor 1995), yet
feminist organizations develop diverse emotion cultures in response to
opportunities and constraints. Comparing the emotion cultures of the
Womens Center and Brennessel reveals only one common element of their
emotion cultures, namely an ethic of care.
Downloaded from gas.sagepub.com at COLEGIO DE MEXICO BIBL on November 10, 2015

356GENDER & SOCIETY / June 2009

The differences in the emotion cultures of the Womens Center and

Brennessel emerged in spite of similar internal dynamics including goals,
ideologies, and levels of professionalization. Differences in the external
context offer a better explanation of the observed variation in emotion
cultures than internal dynamics. Emotion cultures develop out of emotional opportunity structures constituted by the specific social, economic,
and political environments in which organizations operate. Conceptualizing
emotion cultures as the outcomes of emotional opportunity structures
analogous to political and discursive opportunity structures draws attention
to how emotion cultures are constructed in response to structured constraints and opportunities, including existing emotional repertoires and
expectations of emotion emanating from funders. The social and economic
realities organizations face are key in shaping their emotion cultures.
Returning to Summers-Efflers (2002) framework of strategies for coping
with the emotional energy lost as a consequence of a subordinate social
status, the Womens Center promotes emotion management that centers
on the suppression of anger and resentment. This depoliticizes emotions
and inhibits the development of a critical consciousness, which in turn
reduces the probability that clients, staff, or volunteers will organize to
demand political change. Such an emotion culture also reinforces masculine ideals of professional, appropriate behavior and leaves gendered
expectations of emotions undisturbed. In contrast, Brennessel adopts an
alternate strategy for coping with gender inequality, namely politicizing
emotions by using and amplifying a range of emotions to foster solidarity,
commitment, and a desire to protest gender inequality.
Both organizations are constrained in how they cultivate their emotion
cultures because of their specific relationships with the state. The Womens
Center responded to implicit demands made by the local state to be unemotional. Because its own survival is dependent on state support and not on
the emotional resources and commitment of its staff and clients, the
Womens Center has not needed to use emotions to cultivate critical consciousness or collective identity. However, the absence of an emotion culture that can sustain a sense of outrage and commitment among potential
supporters will become increasingly problematic for the Womens Center
as the city government continues to cut back its financial commitments to
the Center and to all social services. Without the lure of stable employment
and other resources, and without an emotion culture that effectively mobilizes participants and ensures their commitment, the Womens Center
could lose much of its appeal for staff, volunteers, and clients.
At Brennessel, the absence of state support necessitated the creation of
a highly emotive emotion culture that galvanizes staff and volunteers and
Downloaded from gas.sagepub.com at COLEGIO DE MEXICO BIBL on November 10, 2015

Guenther / The Impact Of Emotional Opportunities357

legitimizes their un- and underemployment. Brennessels emotion culture

benefits the organization by allowing it to survive in spite of its autonomous status. This emotion culture enhances the development of critical
consciousness among members and the development of a constituency,
while simultaneously inhibiting widespread public appeal.
To date, concerns about the effects of state dependence and co-optation
have focused on issues of agenda setting, ideology, and political efficacy
(Landriscina 2006). Yet emotion cultures are important mechanisms through
which state dependence can lead to political neutralization. Given the importance of emotions for mobilization, scholarship on feminist and other social
movements must attend to the pragmatic foundations of emotion cultures
and to how dependencies may operate through emotion cultures to effect
other types of organizational and movement change, like depoliticization.
Overall, these findings support what the logic of feminist perspectives
on social movements would predict: Dependence on the state and the
neutralization of emotions as mobilizing agents go hand-in-hand.
Simultaneously, the complexity unearthed through this analysis of feminist emotion cultures offers no easy answers to feminist debates about
autonomy and dependence, and instead challenges advocates of both
dependent and autonomous models of feminist organizing. Both dependence and autonomy create opportunities and limitations and emotion
cultures that are at once functional and problematic. Dependence results
in a depoliticized emotion culture in which service provisioning focuses on
individual coping rather than consciousness raising, but which presents an
open and unthreatening introduction to feminist organizing to the uninitiated. Echoing accounts of the importance of emotions during periods of
movement abeyance (Taylor and Whittier 1992; Whittier 1995), autonomy
creates a need for mobilizing emotions to maintain commitment in the
face of adversity, thereby contributing to an expressive, politicized emotion culture that appeals to fewer adherents but which produces more loyal
and committed constituents.
The trend toward welfare state retrenchment and reduced state expenditures for social services, which may be accelerated by the economic
downslide of the early 2000s, seems likely to endanger dependent organizations like the Womens Center. To ensure their survival, such organizations may need to cultivate emotion cultures that foster solidarity and
commitment. Alternately or additionally, feminist activists should engage
in more open discussion about dependence and autonomy and, if desired,
pursue a strategy of organizing for greater state support. This appears
especially urgent in many postsocialist European contexts where much of
feminist civil society relies at least partially on the state for support.
Downloaded from gas.sagepub.com at COLEGIO DE MEXICO BIBL on November 10, 2015

358GENDER & SOCIETY / June 2009

To build improved models for theorizing organizational relationships

with the state, emotion cultures, and political energies, future research
should further examine cases like that of the Womens Center where one
organization has different linkages with the state over time. Such research
could help clarify the exact mechanisms through which varying levels of
state dependence influence or interact with the emotion cultures of feminist organizations. Another path for complicatingand improving
knowledge about the relationship between the state and feminist emotion
cultures would be to consider interactions between feminist organizations
and different state agencies. In this article, I have taken a narrow view of
the state, which is itself comprised of multiple branches and levels, not all
of which will necessarily expect, implicitly or explicitly, the same type of
emotion cultures among dependent and/or state-centered feminist organizations. Comparative research on the interactions between movements
and various branches of the state should further illuminate these dynamics. Feminist organizations are also often dependent on institutions other
than the state (see Incite! Women of Color against Violence [2009] for
critiques of dependence on foundations). Future studies should examine
whether dependence broadly or dependence on the state in particular
explains variations across feminist and other movement organizations,
including in their emotion cultures.
NOTES
1. Interactions between feminist movements and states are embedded in particular historical and cultural contexts. My findings cannot be uncritically extrapolated to other contexts, but the discussion here should provide a building block
for further investigation in other settings.
2. Although others use the terms emotional labor, emotional management, and
emotion work interchangeably, Hochschild limits emotional labor to emotional
efforts that are sold for a wage, or which, in Marxist terms, have an exchange
value. Many of the respondents in this study do not specifically exchange their
emotion work for wages because they are volunteers, but they do exchange it for
other things, like external funding and grants and higher status within an organization.
3. I did not exclude men from my sample; however, no men ultimately met the
criteria for participation in the research, namely involvement in a feminist organization at some point since 1989. At the organizational level, the study includes
all feminist organizations that have existed in the city since 1989.
4. Two research assistants assisted with transcription.

Downloaded from gas.sagepub.com at COLEGIO DE MEXICO BIBL on November 10, 2015

Guenther / The Impact Of Emotional Opportunities359

5. I interviewed three women who helped found and/or who worked at

the Womens Center before it was reorganized as a private organization, two
women who worked there after it was no longer a municipal institution, and two
women who were actively involved with the organization during both stages.
6. For purposes of dealing with state funding agencies and legal issues, Brennessel
also has an executive director, but decisions are in fact made through consensus.

REFERENCES
Banaszak, Lee Ann, Karen Beckwith, and Dieter Rucht, eds. 2003. Womens
movements facing the reconfigured state. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Borchorst, Anette. 2000. Feminist thinking about the welfare state. In Revisioning
gender, edited by Myra Marx Ferree, Judith Lorber, and Beth B. Hess. Walnut
Creek, CA: Alta Mira.
Brown, Annalies, Gerda Jasper, and Ursula Schrter, eds. 1995. Rolling back the
gender status of East German women. London: Pluto Press.
Brown, Wendy. 1992. Finding the man in the state. Feminist Studies 18 (1): 7-34.
. 1995. States of injury: Power and freedom in late modernity. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
Chappell, Louise. 2000. Interacting with the state: Feminist strategies and political opportunities. International Feminist Journal of Politics 2 (2): 244-75.
. 2002. The femocrat strategy: Expanding the repertoire of feminist
activists. Parliamentary Affairs 55:85-98.
Chaves, Mark, Laura Stephens, and Joseph Galaskiewicz. 2004. Does government funding suppress nonprofits political activity? American Sociological
Review 69 (2): 292-316.
Collins, Randall 1990. Stratification, emotional energy, and the transient emotions.
In Research agendas in the sociology of emotions, edited by Theodore D.
Kemper. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Dlling, Irene. 1991. Between hope and helplessness: Women in the GDR after
the turning point. Feminist Review 39 (Autumn): 3-15.
Einhorn, Barbara, and Charlotte Sever. 2003. Gender and civil society in central
and eastern Europe. International Feminist Journal of Politics 5 (2): 163-90.
Eisenstein, Hester. 1995. The Australian femocratic experiment: A feminist case
for bureaucracy. In Feminist organizations: Harvest of the new womens movement, edited by Myra Marx Ferree and Patricia Yancey Martin. Philadelphia:
Temple University Press.
Ferguson, Kathy E. 1984. The feminist case against bureaucracy. Philadelphia:
Temple University Press.
Ferree, Myra Marx. 1995. Making equality: The womens affairs offices in the
Federal Republic of Germany. In Comparative state feminism, edited by
Dorothy McBride Stetson and Amy G. Mazur. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Downloaded from gas.sagepub.com at COLEGIO DE MEXICO BIBL on November 10, 2015

360GENDER & SOCIETY / June 2009

. 2004. Soft repression: Ridicule, stigma, and silencing in genderbased movements. Research in Social Movements, Conflict, and Change
25:85-101.
Flam, Helena, and Debra King, eds. 2005. Emotions and social movements.
New York: Routledge.
Frink, Helen. 2001. Women after communism: The East German experience.
Lanham, MD: University Press of America.
Goodwin, Jeff, James M. Jasper, and Francesca Polletta, eds. 2001. Passionate politics: Emotions and social movements. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gould, Deborah. 2002. Life during wartime: Emotions and the development of
ACT UP. Mobilization: An International Journal 7 (2): 177-200.
. 2004. Passionate politics: Bringing emotions back into the study of
social movements. In Rethinking social movements: Structure, meaning, and
emotion, edited by Jeff Goodwin and James M. Jasper. Lanham, MD: Rowman
& Littlefield.
Guenther, Katja M. 2006. A bastion of sanity in a crazy world: A local feminist
movement and the reconstitution of scale, space, and place in an eastern
German city. Social Politics 13 (4): 551-75.
. 2008. Understanding policy diffusion across feminist social movements:
The case of gender mainstreaming in eastern Germany. Politics & Gender 4
(4): 587-614.
. Forthcoming. The politics of names: Rethinking the methodological and
ethical significance of naming people, organizations, and places Qualitative
Research.
Hercus, Cheryl. 1999. Identity, emotion, and feminist collective action. Gender
& Society 13 (1): 34-55.
Hernes, Helga. 1987. Welfare state and woman power: Essays on state feminism.
Oslo: Norwegian University Press.
Hochschild, Arlie. 1979. Emotion work, feeling rules, and social structure.
American Journal of Sociology 85:551-75.
. 1983. The managed heart. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Incite! Women of Color against Violence. 2009. The revolution will not be
funded: Beyond the nonprofit industrial complex. Boston: South End Press.
Jaquette, Jane S. 2003. Feminism and the challenges of the postCold War
world. International Feminist Journal of Politics 5 (3): 331-54.
Jasper, James M. 1997. The art of moral protest: Culture, biography, and creativity in social movements. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
. 1998. The emotions of protest: Affective and reactive emotions in and
around social movements. Sociological Forum 13:397-424.
Kantola, Johanna. 2006. Feminists theorize the state. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Katzenstein, Mary Fainshod. 1998. Faithful and fearless: Moving feminist protest
inside the church and the military. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Kemper, Theodore. 1978. A social interactional theory of emotions. New York:
Wiley.

Downloaded from gas.sagepub.com at COLEGIO DE MEXICO BIBL on November 10, 2015

Guenther / The Impact Of Emotional Opportunities361

Kim, Hyojoung. 2002. Shame, anger, and love in collective action: Emotional
consequences of suicide protest in South Korea, 1991. Mobilization 7 (2):
159-76.
Landriscina, Mirella. 2006. A calmly disruptive order: The case of an institutionalized advocacy organization at work. Qualitative Sociology 29 447-66.
Lang, Sabine. 2000. The NGOization of feminism: Institutionalization and institution building within the German womens movements. In Global feminisms
since 1945, edited by Bonnie G. Smith. London: Routledge.
Lehr, Valerie C. 1995. Redefining and building community: The importance of
anger. Women & Politics 15 (1): 35-63.
Lyman, Peter. 2004. The domestication of anger: The use and abuse of anger in
politics. European Journal of Social Theory 7 (2): 133-47.
Martin, Patricia Yancey. 1990. Rethinking feminist organizations. Gender &
Society 4 (2): 182-206.
Matthews, Nancy. 1995. Feminist clashes with the state: Tactical choices by statefunded rape crisis centers. In Feminist organizations: Harvest of the new
womens movement, edited by Myra Marx Ferree and Patricia Yancey Martin.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Mazur, Amy G. 2002. Theorizing feminist policy. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Meanwell, Emily, Jospeh D. Wolfe, and Tim Hallett. 2008. Old paths and new
directions: Studying emotions in the workplace. Sociology Compass 2 (2):
537-59.
Michels, Robert. 1962. Political parties: A sociological study of the olilgarchical
tendencies of modern democracy. New York: Free Press.
Morgen, Sandra. 1995. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times:
Emotional discourse in the work cultures of feminist health clinics. In Feminist
organizations: Harvest of the new womens movement, edited by Myra Marx
Ferree and Patricia Yancey Martin. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Perry, Elizabeth J. 2002. Moving the masses: Emotion work in the Chinese revolution. Mobilization 7 (2): 111-28.
Piven, Frances Fox, and Richard Cloward. 1977. Poor peoples movements.
New York: Vintage Books.
Reger, Jo. 2004. Organizational emotion work through consciousness-raising:
An analysis of a feminist organization. Qualitative Sociology 27 (2): 205-22.
Rosenfeld, Rachel A., Heike Trappe, and Janet C. Gornick. 2004. Gender and
work in Germany: Before and after unification. Annual Review of Sociology
30:103-24.
Rudd, Elizabeth. 2000. Reconceptualizing gender in postsocialist transformation.
Gender & Society 14 (4): 517-39.
Shaible, Stefan, Michael Schweiger, and Ashok Kaul. 2005. Unternehmen
Familie: Studie von Roland Berger Strategy Associates im Auftrag der Robert
Bosch Stiftung. Available at http://www.bosch-stiftung.de/content/language1/
downloads/0604_berger_studie.pdf (accessed February 12, 2009).

Downloaded from gas.sagepub.com at COLEGIO DE MEXICO BIBL on November 10, 2015

362GENDER & SOCIETY / June 2009

Skjere, Hege, and Birte Siim. 2000. Scandinavian feminist debates on citizenship.
International Political Science Review 21 (4): 345-60.
Stearns, Peter N., and Carol Z. Stearns. 1985. Emotionology: Clarifying the history of emotions and emotional standards. The American Historical Review 90
(4): 813-36.
Stetson, Dorothy McBride, and Amy G. Mazur, eds. 1995. Comparative state
feminism. London: Sage.
Summers-Effler, Erika. 2002. The micro potential for social change: Emotion, consciousness, and social movement formation. Sociological Theory 20 (1): 41-60.
Tarrow, Sidney. 1994. Power in movement: Social movements, collective action,
and politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Taylor, Verta. 1995. Watching for vibes: Bringing emotions into the study of
feminist organizations. In Feminist organizations: Harvest of the new womens
movement, edited by Myra Marx Ferree and Patricia Yancey Martin.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
. 2000. Emotions and identity in womens self-help movements. In Self,
identity and social movements, edited by Sheldon Stryker, Timothy J. Owens,
and Robert W. White. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Taylor, Verta, and Leila J. Rupp. 2002. Loving internationalism: The emotion
culture of transnational womens organizations, 1888-1945. Mobilization: An
International Journal 7 (2): 141-58.
Taylor, Verta, and Nancy Whittier. 1992. Collective identity in social movements:
Lesbian feminist identity. In Frontiers in social movement theory, edited by
Aldon D. Morris and Carol McClug Mueller. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press.
Thoits, Peggy A. 1989. The sociology of emotions. Annual Review of Sociology
15:317-42.
Trappe, Heike. 1995. Emanzipation oder Zwang? Frauen in der DDR zwischen
Beruf, Familie und Sozialpolitik. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.
Whittier, Nancy. 1995. Feminist generations: The persistence of the radical
womens movement. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Katja M. Guenther is an assistant professor of sociology at the University
of CaliforniaRiverside, where she conducts research on gender, social
movements, and the state in comparative perspective. Her primary research
project focuses on the development of local feminist movements in eastern
Germany since the collapse of state socialism in 1989.

Downloaded from gas.sagepub.com at COLEGIO DE MEXICO BIBL on November 10, 2015