In our increasingly politically-conscious world, “Resist!” has become a motto for many who oppose systemic oppression. What does this motto enjoin us to do? Resistance is commonly associated with activism. Activists use blatantly political acts, like protests, boycotts, and door-to-door canvassing, to send loud and clear messages of resistance to oppressors and public audiences. They work to create large-scale social changes, often through planned collective action. Indeed, activism for a good cause is an excellent tool for promoting human welfare and honoring the rights of persons. But people can resist oppression without engaging in activism. You can advance in a male-dominated field to get your dream job against pressures to settle for a less ambitious career. You can teach your daughter to be independent because you want her life to go well against norms that tell you to reward her acquiescence. You can stop obsessing over your bodyweight to focus on more important things in spite of the figure-obsessed media. In each of these cases, you resist oppression. And you do so admirably, even morally so. But you do not work to advance any political or humanitarian causes, act collectively with others, or make any public expressions of resistance. You do not engage in any activism.
Normative theories of resistance should be sensitive to the diversity of ways people can resist oppression, as well as the diversity of ways resistance can be valuable. Different acts of resistance can be valuable for different reasons. Marching in protest, for instance, might be good as a means of producing positive changes in legislation that will promote the welfare of society as a whole. Resolving not to give in to sexist pressures to give up on your beloved career, on the other hand, might be good for its own sake, for reasons having to do with your own personal values and commitments. In this chapter, I present a taxonomy of features that differentiate acts of resistance and bear relevantly on their value. My aim is not to provide a comprehensive theory of resistance or the ways in which it can be valuable here. Instead, my aim is to supplement existing theories by highlighting some differentiating features that are easy to overlook when we assume that all resistance is like activism.
The chapter proceeds in three parts. Part 1 lays the ground for discussion by briefly introducing the concepts of oppression and resistance. Part 2 argues that acts of resistance can be differentiated by: (1) their subject: who is resisting,
1 Oppression and Resistance
1.1 Oppression
Let’s start by briefly introducing the concepts of oppression and resistance. As Marilyn Frye puts it, oppression is “an enclosing structure of forces and barriers which tends to the immobilization and reduction of a group or category of people.”1 In its historical usage, oppression referred to legally codified systems of injustice, especially tyrannical rule. Today, the term also refers to systems of injustice that are perpetuated independently of top-down rule, like sexism and racism. Sexism and racism are examples of what Jean Harvey terms “civilized oppressions.”2 Such oppressions persist because they are so deeply rooted in culture. Instead of resulting exclusively from the top-down decisions of corrupt political authorities, they are sustained by the ordinary customs, habits and informal practices of well-meaning people. Civilized oppressions employ mechanisms that cannot be codified by any law or official document. And, although they also inflict physical and economic harms, much of the harm
Oppression can be extremely difficult to recognize, even by its victims. This is because its effects tend to be perceived as natural or mundane. Those who participate in its mechanisms, victims and non-victims alike, usually do not think of themselves as participating in a system of oppression at all. To understand why certain practices are oppressive, we must zoom out and study them at the macro level, and draw connections between them and other practices within an oppressive structure.4
1.2 Resistance
What constitutes an act of resistance to oppression? Since not all resistance is like activism, it would be wrong to disqualify an act on the basis of its lacking activism’s characteristic features. It would be wrong to say that a given act is not one of resistance if it, for instance, does not aim to effectively reduce or eliminate the aggregate harms of oppression, or it does not make a public expression of resistance, or it does not involve collective action towards a political or humanitarian cause. Otherwise, we would have to deny that examples like the ones discussed earlier (e.g., refusing to give up your dream job against sexist pressures) are acts of resistance.
Leading theories of resistance call a few important considerations to our attention when determining whether an act constitutes one of resistance to oppression: (1) Is the agent aware of the oppressive force and do they take some action against it? (2) Does the agent at some level see the limitation as wrong or unacceptable? And (3) is the act likely to reduce or symbolically oppose the oppressive force?
Theories put different amounts of weight on each of these considerations, even making some of them necessary conditions. Harm-based theories like Ann Cudd’s, for instance, insist that for an act to count as resistance, it must constitute an attempt to reduce or protest the aggregate harms of oppression and it must be likely to succeed in doing so.5 Volitional accounts of resistance
If an act is to qualify as genuine resistance to oppression, a few minimal conditions should be met. First, for an act to be considered one of resistance to oppression, there must be not just any kind of social force prohibiting doing the act, but a social force of a certain kind: one that is oppressive. Oppressive forces include cultural, legal, and institutional injustices that inhibit the rights and wellbeing of entire social groups to the advantage of others.8
For a person to be resisting oppression, they must also have a basic perception of the oppressive force as bad or unacceptable. The perception must inform her motivation for acting. An agent cannot be said to be resisting if she has no idea that society discourages or forbids her behavior. A woman who resolves never to put on make-up, for example, but who is completely unaware of the social forces pressuring women to wear it and punishing women who don’t, could hardly be said to be resisting oppression by resolving not to put it on. When a person resists oppression, she pushes back against an oppressive force that she at some level perceives as bad and that she knows would be risky to defy. She needn’t take the wrongness of the oppressive force as the reason for challenging it. She might act against it because she wants to pursue a personal project or relationship. In a culture that considers same-sex love a sin, for example, having a same-sex relationship defies oppressive norms. The fact that those norms are oppressive provides one kind of reason to defy them, and to defy them through particular kinds of acts, perhaps though protest. But someone might defy those norms by pursuing a same-sex relationship, not out of protest of those norms, but simply because they are in love with someone. Such a person is resisting oppression if they know that same-sex relationships are forbidden in their culture and that choosing to have one anyway is risky. But with an attitude that says “to heck with that! I’m going to do this anyway!,”
Resistance to oppression involves, at the very least, pushing back against oppressive forces in the face of known risk. Resistors needn’t have any sophisticated theoretical knowledge of oppression, like good activists typically do. But, they do need to know that there are social forces banning or discouraging their behavior. Choosing to violate those social forces is risky and this is a reason for them not to do it, but resistors are motivated to discount or dismiss that reason and act instead on other reasons that favor doing what oppression bans or discourages. These are the minimal requirements for an act of resistance. Not, as some have argued, that the agent acts with the intention of reducing or protesting oppression or that their action is likely to be effective in producing good consequences.9
2 Eight Dimensions of Resistance
In this section, I differentiate acts of resistance along four axes: the resisting subject: who is resisting? The resisted target: what kind of effect of oppression is being resisted? Its scope of interests: who’s interests does the resistance aim to protect, affirm, or advance against oppression? And the communicative tone of the resistance: does the act aim to communicate resistance to others?
2.1 The Subjects of Resistance: Individuals and Collectives
While oppression is a large-scale system of injustice that harms entire social groups, persons experience its effects as individuals. People can resist either alone or with others through collective action. The first distinction I want to highlight is made according to the subject of resistance: is the resistor a collective or an individual? A woman who insists on keeping her name when she gets married or who decides to stop obsessively removing her body hair is engaged in a kind of individual resistance. While she could have the support of her friends, her resistance is individual in the sense that she acts on her own and not as a member of a collective of resistors. A man who joins the Black Panthers and patrols the streets in black neighborhoods to protect residents from police brutality is engaged in a kind of collective resistance. He doesn’t do
2.2 The Targets of Resistance: Public and Private
The next pair of categories I wish to introduce is distinguished according to the target of the act of resistance. Activists like mlk and Malcom x not only acted collectively with others to oppose racism and segregation in America (i.e., they resisted collectively), but they also sought to change specific laws in the country’s administration. As such, they and others like them were engaged in publicly targeted acts of resistance. By “public” I mean to single out a particular kind of target that these acts of resistance aim to push back against. The target of public resistance is to change or oppose oppressive aspects of public administration. Public resistance focuses on issues that can be addressed by changing the law and its enforcement.
Resistance can also target oppressive forces that exist independently of law and public administration. When a woman seeks to reduce the pressures on her children to be attracted to certain gendered forms of play, for instance, she is engaged in a privately targeted act of resistance. By privately targeted, I do not mean that the resistance is secret or concealed from view, although it can be. The mother resists privately in the sense that she aims to reduce a specific effect of oppression on her children’s private lives. In this case, she aims to reduce the social pressures on them to play house and dress up as opposed to sports or videogames. She may not even care about reducing similar effects on other children. What makes her resistance private is that she targets a specific informal effect of oppression on her and her daughters’ private lives.
2.3 The Scope of Resistance: Global and Local Interests
A third distinction can be made according to the scope of interests that the act of resistance aims to advance or validate. Individuals can resist the effects of oppression on particular individuals (e.g., themselves or their children) or on an entire social group, which they may or may not belong to (e.g., all women or blacks or people with disabilities). For instance, Martin Luther King Jr. sought to resist racial oppression for the benefit of all blacks in America, and not just for himself. But he could have chosen not to lead a life of public advocacy, instead resisting only the racist limitations that affected him and his close associates. Since he aimed to benefit all blacks in America, mlk was engaged in
Alternatively, the mother from our earlier example seeks to reduce the effects of oppression on her daughters in particular. She might do so by buying them gender-neutral toys or encouraging them when they take an interest in traditionally male-dominated activities. When she does this, the scope of her resistance is much more restricted than that of activists like mlk. She does not aspire to advance the global interests of the entire social group of female children. Her resistance has local interests; it is focused on bolstering the confidence of and reducing the effects of stereotypes on a couple select individuals, her children.11
2.4 The Tone of Resistance: Quiet and Loud
There is one more distinction to be made. It seems to me that in addition to whether resistance is undertaken individually or collectively and whether it opposes public or private aspects of oppression, there are also distinct “tones” in which people resist oppression. Resistance that is undertaken individually or collectively, against public or private affairs can all be performed in a “loud” or “quiet” manner. Quiet and loud here should not be taken literally, as there are forms of loud resistance that are literally silent to the ears and there are forms of quiet resistance that are not. Activism is typically “loud” because it depends on making expressions of resistance to oppressor groups or other public audiences. Loud resistance always constitutes an attempt to communicate something to others. It might aim to surprise, offend, confuse, persuade, or send another powerful message.
In contrast to resisting in a “loud” manner, people can also resist quietly. By “quiet” I don’t mean resistance that literally cannot be heard by anyone. Rather, I mean to mark a different contrast between certain forms of resistance and activism. Activism is intended to send loud and clear messages of resistance to the oppressor group or another public audience. In contrast, quiet resistance needn’t involve any communication or expression to any audience. Indeed, some quiet resistors may not care about politics. They might not care if anyone else gets the message that they are resisting. What matters to them is that they
Quiet resistors might even intentionally keep their resistance under wraps, so as to escape the oppressive situation or avoid serious backlash for resisting. This is what African slaves did when they broke their tools and played dumb in order to conspire against the slave masters. Surely, they would have been killed if their masters knew what they were up to. They kept their resistance under wraps in order to achieve personal goals that they were forbidden from pursuing. Other quiet resistors might want some people to get the message that they are rebelling—for instance, African slaves sometimes used songs to communicate with one another in code—but their resistance is still quiet in the sense that it was communicated to particular people in their vicinity without attempting to draw the attention of a public audience. So, resistance is quiet insofar as it does not constitute an attempt to make a blatant public expression of resistance or to engage the attention of public audiences. This differentiates quiet forms of resistance from activism, and especially paradigms of public protest, which involve sending blatant messages of resistance to entire groups of people.
The following table illustrates the differentiating features, or “dimensions,” of acts of resistance:
Let’s consider some connections between the dimensions of resistance. The categories should not be taken as rigid divisions permitting of no overlap or grey area. First consider the division between public and private. It is widely accepted among social theorists that the line between the private and public spheres is flexible. Recall the feminist slogan “the personal is political!” Reducing oppression in the public sphere will often mean alleviating some of its effects in private life, and sometimes changes in private life are necessary for making changes in the public sphere. Protesting discriminatory laws, HB2 for example, can also be a way in which people attempt to push back against the private effects of oppression on their private lives. When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white man, she was both asserting her own self-respect as well as attempting to trigger large-scale political change. Amina Tyler’s resistance, too, seems neither merely publicly targeted, nor merely privately targeted, but a bit of both. Amina Tyler was a Tunisian woman who posted a nude photograph of herself online with the phrase “my body is mine and not the source of anybody’s honor” painted across her skin in Arabic, provoking outrage in her Muslim community. She may not have been aiming to change any particular laws. But, she opposed a system of honor that is codified in the laws of many Muslim majority countries, in addition to having pervasive unlegislated effects on women’s private lives, including her own. Her resistance targeted both public and private aspects of oppression at once.
Although public and private targets may overlap, the distinction is still illuminating. The target of the resistance—whether it is a public or private affair—will bear relevantly on its value. Moreover, there are cases where the two targets come cleanly apart. That is, where the resistor is really only aiming to liberate themselves or a select few individuals (recall the mother who encourages gender-neutral forms of play but has no interest in taking political action or helping other children), and cases where the resistor aims only to change the law (corrupt immigration laws might never harm you personally, but you might still resist them by lobbying or writing a letter to your governor about it). Indeed, there are effects of oppression that we have to resist by focusing on changing private affairs—internalized body shaming, for instance, can’t be eliminated if we don’t work to change our attitudes. And there are aspects of oppression that we have to resist by focusing on public affairs—corrupt legislation, for instance, can’t be changed if we only ever focus on changing our attitudes.
Privately targeted resistance can be taken up individually (by oneself) or collectively (with others). The same goes for publicly targeted resistance. One can
Collective resistance need not always be aimed at a public administration. For instance, in the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman sought to liberate willing slaves by giving them an escape route. She worked collaboratively with a network of antislavery activists and safe houses to reduce the effects of oppression on others. Although her resistance was performed in collaboration with allies, it was not a direct attempt to change the law. Rather, it aimed to enhance the private lives of those African Americans who were willing to try to escape slavery. Moreover, it was crucial that she keep the project “underground” and out of sight of officials so it could not be sabotaged.
Now consider the relationships between the “loud” and “quiet” features of resistance and its other dimensions. Loud resistance is frequently publicly targeted and collectively undertaken. But resistance that is individually undertaken and aimed at private effects of oppression can also be loud. Political protests are a kind of loud and collective resistance. If they aim to change the law or political administration (“Repeal HB2!,” “Dump Trump!”) they are publicly aimed. If they aim to empower and promote solidarity, like Pride marches do, they are loud, collective, and targeted at unlegislated effects of oppression in the private sphere. Going into a fit of anger and screaming at one’s family over having always to do all the housework is a kind of loud resistance that is both individually undertaken and privately targeted. Wearing clothing with provocative political statements (“Pussy Grabs Back!” or “Bad Hombre”) can be a way of loudly resisting a public effect of oppression, but it can also be a way of loudly resisting the private effects of injustices in public administration, for instance, by loudly expressing one’s self-respect. Exhibiting one’s provocative artwork can be a way of loudly and individually resisting oppression’s effects on one’s private life. It can even be a way of protesting oppressive laws and administration, depending on the content of the artwork. Amina Tyler’s
Quiet resistance is often privately targeted and individually undertaken, but it need not always be. Women in Saudi Arabia resist quietly and individually by wearing bright colored nail polish to the mall in spite of the risk that the morality police will reprimand them for it. A person can quietly resist public administration by breaking the law in a manner that doesn’t aim to draw attention. The women on Obama’s staff quietly resisted workplace sexism through collective action by using the “amplification” strategy of repeating each other’s ideas and crediting the women who came up with them during staff meetings.14
Resistance that aims to advance or uphold the global interests of an entire social group need not always be aimed at a public target. A martial arts instructor who uploads instructional videos on YouTube designed to teach women to evade sexual assault is engaged in resistance of a global scope—she aims to advance the interests of all women. But her resistance does not aim to change public laws and administration; her goal is instead to arm women with self-defense techniques.
Quiet, individually undertaken, privately targeted resistance that aims to uphold local interests is the most difficult to identify in the real world. On the other hand, many cases of resistance that we have clear intuitions about are examples of loud, collective, publicly targeted resistance that aim to advance global interests. These features are characteristic of activism.
4 Conclusion
An adequate theory of resistance to oppression should account for not only the clear and explicit cases of resistance to oppression, like political activism, but also for resistance in its less obvious yet everyday forms. Here I have described a series of neglected features that can be used to differentiate acts of resistance to oppression. This work can serve as a starting point for developing inclusive philosophical theories of resistance to oppression that are grounded in examples from ordinary life.
Boxill Bernard. “Self-Respect and Protest.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 6 no.1 (1976): 58–69.
Boxill Bernard. “The Responsibility of the Oppressed to Resist their Own Oppression.” Journal of Social Philosophy 41, no. 1 (2010): 1–12.
Cudd Ann. Analyzing Oppression.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Cudd Ann. “Strikes, Housework, and the Moral Obligation to Resist.” Journal of Social Philosophy 29, no. 1 (1998): 20–36.
Friedan Betty. The Feminine Mystique.New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc, 1974.
Frye Marilyn. “Oppression.” In The Politics of Reality, 1–16. New York: Crossing Press, 1983.
Gottlieb Roger. “The Concept of Resistance: Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust.” Social Theory and Practice 9, no. 1 (1983): 31–49.
Harvey Jean. “Victims, Resistance, and Civilized Oppression.” Journal of Social Philosophy 41, no. 1 (2010): 13–27.
Hatch Jenavieve. “How the Women on Obama’s Staff Made Sure their Voices Were Heard.” Huffington Post, September 15, 2016. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/how-the-women-on-obamas-staff-made-sure-their-voices-were-heard_us_57d94d9fe4b0aa4b722d79fe.
Hill Thomas E. “Symbolic Protest and Calculated Silence.” In Autonomy and Self-Respect, 52–66. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
McGary Howard and Bill E. Lawson. Between Slavery and Freedom.Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1992.
Shelby Tommie. Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent, and Reform.Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016.
Young Iris Marion. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.
As a consequence, Iris Marion Young adds, “of often unconscious assumptions and reactions of well-meaning people in ordinary interactions, media and cultural stereotypes, and structural features of bureaucratic hierarchies and market mechanisms—in short the normal processes of everyday life.” Marilyn Frye, “Oppression,” in The Politics of Reality (New York: Crossing Press, 1983), 10–11; Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 41.
Jean Harvey, “Victims, Resistance, and Civilized Oppression,” Journal of Social Philosophy 41, no. 1 (2010): 13.
Ibid., 14.
Marilyn Frye, “Oppression,” 4–5.
Ann Cudd, “Strikes, Housework, and the Moral Obligation to Resist,” Journal of Social Philosophy 29, no. 1 (1998): 28. “A person or group resists only when they act in a way that could result in lessening oppression or sending a message of revolt or outrage to someone… [this] does not count as cases of resistance cases where the only ones witnessing the action are incapable of receiving a message of revolt and there is no lessening of oppression.”
Roger Gottlieb, “The Concept of Resistance: Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust,” Social Theory and Practice 9, no. 1 (1983): 31–49.
Both approaches face problems, which I discuss elsewhere. I am just flagging these views without endorsing them here.
I disagree with Gottlieb that the concept of resistance implies a context of oppression such that resistance is always resistance to oppression, because I think we can resist practices that are not oppressive.
These views are too narrowly focused on paradigms of activism, and as such, tend to overlook or leave out other kinds of resistance. I have argued for this in more detail elsewhere. See my unpublished paper, “Quiet Resistance.”
Ann Cudd calls this kind of resistance “distributive.” Cudd, “Strikes, Housework, and the Moral Obligation to Resist,” 27.
Ann Cudd calls what I am calling local resistance “personal” resistance. Ibid., 27.
I have written in more detail about the nature and value of quiet resistance elsewhere. See my unpublished paper, “Quiet Resistance.”
I’m assuming that one does this without strategizing or acting collectively with others.
Jenavieve Hatch, “How the Women on Obama’s Staff Made Sure their Voices Were Heard,” Huffington Post, September 15, 2016, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/how-the-women-on-obamas-staff-made-sure-their-voices-were-heard_us_57d94d9fe4b0aa4b722d79fe.