Beyond participation, toward disparticipation

Social movements require participatory dissent. Facing tensions between ideological purity and mass popularity, movements that desire to be politically effective and act in the interest of their participants need dissent that leads to revision instead of conflict that devolves to dissolution. Using three examples from the 2017 and 2019 Women’s Marches, this essay theorizes “disparticipation.” Building from José Esteban Muñoz’s Disidentifications, I define disparticipation as participatory, disidentifying dissent. While disparticipants may be seen as not participating, or even counter-protesting, I reframe their participation as a “diss” of a protest for a lack of nuanced politics. Disparticipants dissent from binary oppositions of popular/pure and reformist/radical and disidentify to promote coalition-building. Women’s March disparticipants dissed white feminist racism, cissexism, and antisemitism. Disparticipation generates discourse that can expand the topoi of protest rhetoric by revealing and responding to broader structural injustices.