Thinking the Transversality of Contentious Politics The Field of Women’s Advocacy Laure Bereni (Laure.Bereni@ens.fr ) CNRS Research Fellow at the Centre Maurice Halbwachs (CNRS, Paris) Paper presented at the Politics and Protest Workshop, CUNY Graduate Center Thursday, March 31, 2011 This is a draft Introduction In the past fifteen years, definitional debates over the category of social movement have been brought at the center of social movement theory (Fillieule 2009). Traditional definitions have been increasingly criticized for being too narrow and rigid, and unable to account for the path of social movement’s institutionalization observed in the past decades. The view of social movements as marginal actors deprived of institutional resources and networks, using non-conventional means of action and adopting a clear confrontational stance toward the State no longer prevails. Boundaries between institutional and non-institutional politics, civil society and the State, insiders and outsiders, have become increasingly fuzzy (Giugni, McAdam, & Tilly 1998; Giugni & Passy 1998; Meyer & Tarrow 1998b; McAdam, Tarrow, & Tilly 2001; Goldstone 2003). Although not at the center of theoretical debates, several studies of women’s movements have provided precious insights with respect to the definition of social movements. Since their emergence as organized forces in the second half of the 19 th century, women’s movements have adopted a wide range of organizational forms, discourses, and means of action. In the last decades, these movements have been particularly affected by institutionalization dynamics, not only through a routinization and professionalization of their forms of action, but also through the incorporation of feminist discourses and actors inside mainstream institutions, and most notably inside the State (Sawer 1990; Mc Bride Stetson & Mazur 1995; Banaszak, Beckwith, & Rucht 2003; McBride, Mazur, & Lovenduski 2010). Placing the emphasis on the proliferation of “unobtrusive”, “under the radar” feminist protest inside dominant institutions, some women’s movements scholars have pointed to the theoretical limits of the persisting conflation between location, means, and goals of protest in the dominant definitions of social movements (Katzenstein 1998a; Banaszak 2010). One of the main theoretical challenges faced by these critiques of the traditional visions of social movements is to find a definition that could be broad and flexible enough to encompass a variety of forms of social protest, without diluting the conceptual specificity of this social phenomenon, as opposed to other forms of political action