Character work in social movements

James M. Jasper, Michael Young & Elke

Zuern

Theory and Society

Renewal and Critique in Social Theory

ISSN 0304-2421
Volume 47
Number 1

Theor Soc (2018) 47:113-131

DOI 10.1007/s11186-018-9310-1

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 Author's personal copy
Theor Soc (2018) 47:113–131
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-018-9310-1

Character work in social movements

James M. Jasper 1 & Michael Young 2 & Elke Zuern 3

Published online: 16 February 2018

# Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature 2018

Abstract Social movements carry out extensive character work, trying to define not
only their own reputations but those of other major players in their strategic arenas.
Victims, villains, and heroes form the essential triad of character work, suggesting not
only likely plots but also the emotions that audiences are supposed to feel for various
players. Characters have been overlooked in cultural analysis, possibly because they
often take visual, non-narrative forms. By focusing on characters within movements,
we illuminate some cultural dilemmas that both organizers and their opponents face as
they try to influence players’ reputations.

Keywords Characters . Culture . Heroes . Social movements . Victims . Villains

In a case beloved by scholars and the public, Rosa Parks was selected to challenge
Montgomery’s bus segregation because she appeared passive and unthreatening as well
as morally impeccable. At five feet three inches tall with a slender build, she was the
right size and gender to appear a perfect victim. Beneath the surface, however, she was
tough and, as secretary of the local NAACP, determined: she was stronger and more
active than she appeared.
Parks was not such an unwitting victim as the civil rights movement pretended, but
victimhood was an effective character strategy directed at multiple audiences. For
whites who might be uncertain about civil rights, she offered a less threatening image
than a large, angry man might have. And for the movement’s religious supporters her

* James M. Jasper
JJasper@gc.cuny.edu

1
Department of Sociology, City University of New York Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Ave, New
York, NY 10016, USA
2
Department of Sociology, University of TX at Austin, One University Station, A1700, Austin,
TX 78712-0118, USA
3
Department of Politics, Sarah Lawrence College, 1 Mead Way, Bronxville, NY 10708, USA
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114 Theor Soc (2018) 47:113–131

image did not challenge their expectation that preachers—men—should be the public
heroes, no matter how heroically the women behaved (Robnett 1997).
Social movement scholars point to Parks in order to show that popular narratives
tend to highlight brave individuals acting spontaneously at the expense of the networks
and resources that support them, but these scholars tend to forget that these narratives
represent thoughtful character work by the movements themselves, a shrewd part of
their cultural strategies (Schudson 2012). Often, their character work consists of
portraying victims (weak and good) who need help and compassion, but also suggest-
ing how they can transform themselves into heroes (strong and good), as Parks did.
It is so satisfying to watch a victim become a hero that observers often want to take
part in the process. We wish to help, supporting the victims and heroes. We are more
open to recruitment. Character work—efforts to shape the reputations of strategic
players into familiar types of protagonists—is alive and well in contemporary politics.
All strategic players try to influence the standing of other players as well as of
themselves, tarnishing opponents and burnishing allies. Protest groups do character
work not only as a means for pursuing other action but as a satisfying end in itself. It
feels good to be a hero and bad to be a victim (Whittier 2001). Reputations are central
to politics (Fine 2001, 2011).
This is a vital but largely ignored part of the cultural work that social movements do.
The vast scholarship on frames, narratives, collective identities, and texts rarely
identifies the characters who are usually the central feature of interest in these works.
Characters fill several gaps in cultural approaches: they clarify the emotional resonance
of many cognitive components; they explain why individual examples are so important
in inspiring action; they also demonstrate that images are as important as words in the
transmission of meanings.
Although they have almost disappeared from serious fiction, traditional characters—
primarily heroes, villains, victims, and minions—continue to provide much of the
emotional resonance in political rhetoric. Table 1 defines these basic types by their
strength and their morality (for more extensive discussion, see Jasper et al.
forthcoming). Heroes are strong and good, villains strong and malevolent. Victims
are weak but morally worthy, due our sympathy and perhaps aid; by helping victims we
can become heroes. Villains, victims, and heroes form an Bessential triad^ of characters
in moral-political dramas, a kind of harmonic chord in the music of politics. Minions
are less essential, too weak to be threatening, unless they combine together in large
numbers, usually led by a true villain.
Character work is a form of epidictic rhetoric—or the effort to shape common moral
sense as opposed to efforts to win policy decisions or court cases (Kennedy 1999). In
ancient Greece, epidictic was tied to funeral orations, which praised the character of the
dead, often war heroes. In his history of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides recounts a
famous example in which Pericles, Athens’ leader, praised the bravery and sacrifice of
those who died, but more importantly employed these heroes to instruct the living.

Table 1 Characters are defined

Strong Weak
by strength and morality
Benevolent Heroes Victims
Malevolent Villains Minions
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Characters have an impact not only because we readily understand them but because
they suggest the emotions that we are supposed to feel as audiences. They help to
explain why some cultural meanings resonate and others do not. We admire heroes,
whether we like them or not. We fear villains and sometimes hate them. We pity
victims. We feel contempt for minions. Fear and pity are especially potent in motivating
action. So is anger, which we feel for both villains and minions and sometimes for
potential heroes who have not yet acted. Audiences feel greater empathy with individ-
ual characters than with abstract categories (Bloom 2016; Slovic 2007).
Characters also suggest several basic plots. Foremost, heroes protect victims from
villains. Villains can be converted into heroes. More treacherously, heroes can betray
the cause and become villains. And victims can sometimes become heroes, a process
central to the hopes of social movements. Frames and narratives without such charac-
ters tend to fall flat.
We aim in this article to generate theory about the cultural creations we call
characters, not to test it. After discussing character theory in the following section,
we describe the four basic characters in more detail. We then turn to how they are
related: how victims are transformed into heroes, why a certain kind of passivity
enhances images of morality, and how victims and heroes are gendered. Finally we
point out that protestors are not the only strategic players doing character work; all such
players do, such as state agencies, corporations, and the media. In this article, we hope
primarily to clarify what the characters look like and secondarily how they interact in
narratives, but not to generate hypotheses about how they are created in practice. For
reasons of space we do not analyze the visual components of characters, important as
they are (but see Jasper et al. forthcoming).

Theoretical background

We find these basic characters in various genres, especially narratives (films, novels,
epics, and more) and images (paintings, cartoons, caricatures, graffiti). Traditional
narrative theory, rooted in French structuralism, subordinates characters to the functions
of plot (Greimas 1966), even though in our opinion people enjoy narratives because of
the characters they contain, characters who can be defined in ways that are not
reducible to plot. (The essentialism of characters can in fact work against the contin-
gencies of plot.)
Humanistic literary theorists have recently reasserted the importance of character
over narrative (Lynch 1998). As an earlier humanist observed, BNothing is simpler
than to create for oneself the idea of a human being, a figure and a character, from a
series of glimpses and anecdotes. Creation of this kind we practice every day; we are
continually piecing together our fragmentary evidence about the people around us
and molding their images in thought. It is the way in which we make our world^
(Lubbock 1957, p. 7).
We also do this work of character attribution in daily life. Cognitive psychology has
demonstrated how humans construct character (personality) out of small bits of infor-
mation through inferences about persons (Gilbert 1998). We expect to find familiar
bundles of traits, often in the form of group stereotypes (Banaji et al. 1993). Unraveling
and challenging the assumptions that lead to these inferences (the goal of many social
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movements) has played a critical role in combating discrimination and asserting the
rights of marginalized actors. We fight stigma by doing character work.
The insights from cognitive psychology do not seem to have been applied to our
characters, but the leap is not great: tallness, strength, confidence, calmness, compe-
tence, protectiveness, generosity, and self-sacrifice bundle together into heroes; tini-
ness, weakness, nervousness, meanness, selfishness, and so on combine into minions.
Susan Fiske’s (2011) basic dimensions of warmth and competence (judgments we
make within a split second of meeting someone, often based on group stereotypes) are
close to the defining components of characters, namely their morality and their
strength.
Affect control theories of emotions and action show how people form expectations
of actions from three basic traits that they attribute to subjects, to objects, and to actions:
whether they are good or bad; strong or weak; and active or passive (Heise 1979, 2007;
MacKinnon and Heise 2010; on the relationship of ACT to character theory see
Bergstrand and Jasper 2017). The third dimension is useful for distinguishing among
types of heroes and victims. (Less so for villains, who must be active, not passive, to be
threatening; they scheme even if they are not currently doing anything.) Heroes are
admired more if they are initially passive (sleeping giants), launching into action only
when victims are threatened. So character theory can deploy all three dimensions, not
just our original two.
Social movements use these cultural building blocks in their work, especially in
dramaturgical techniques to attract attention and sympathy from audiences.
Among these techniques is the creation of dramatis personae, or a Bcast of
characters^ (Benford and Hunt 1992, p. 39). They galvanize emotions by vilifying
opponents as Bbaby killers,^ Bwarmongers,^ Bscabs,^ and worse. They point to
innocent victims, such as Rosa Parks, and call on bystanders to join the fight in
various capacities.
Protest groups generate a continuous flow of cultural meanings in order to reach
audiences including their own members, the media, and other strategic players.
Speeches, images, press conferences, and publications contain frames, narratives, facts,
histories, identities, moral boundaries, and more. Characters can appear in any of these.
Charles Tilly (2008) inadvertently summed up character rhetoric in the ungainly
term BWUNC displays,^ deployed by social movements to demonstrate their moral
Worth, Unity, Numbers (size), and Commitment. This makes them good and powerful,
in other words, heroes. Other players and audiences are supposed to take them seriously
as strong players but also admire them as moral.
In Tilly’s view, protestors need some positive amount of each of the four, although a
large amount of one can sometimes compensate for a smaller amount of another. He
suggests a multiplicative relationship: if any value falls to zero, so does the total. If its
moral reputation turns negative, a player becomes a villain rather than a hero. It can be
feared but not admired. If its strength evaporates, it goes from hero to victim. It can be
pitied or ridiculed, but need not be dealt with.
If modern social movements are primarily a rhetorical exercise in persuasion,
WUNC displays are their principal means. Ever the structuralist, Tilly said little about
the formation of groups, implying that they already exist—like classes in themselves, to
borrow the Marxist phrase—and mostly need to use these displays for outsiders,
especially authorities. He did not see that they also need to convince themselves that
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they are a coherent strategic player, constructing collective identities to attract and
retain members.
If WUNC captures something key to protest strategies, we can push further into the
once-forbidden territory of meaning and emotion by linking it to the primary dimen-
sions of character work. Worthiness is, obviously, about morality: we are good, not bad.
Numbers are about strength: the more of us there are, the stronger we are. Unanimity
and coherence are related: unanimity is about doing the same thing at the same time,
whereas coherence is about acting predictably over time. They both yield strength,
especially by increasing activity levels. WUNC breaks down into the three dimensions
of character theory.
A group’s displays of its moral worth and its displays of its strength can be
at odds. Unity, numbers, and commitment together suggest to outsiders, BWe
will hurt you if you get in our way.^ This message about strength must usually
remain implicit so as not to undermine the morality dimension. The best
balancing act shows the group as good but dangerous if provoked—the sleeping
giant who will return to its lethargy after enacting righteous vengeance through
strikes, riots, or violence. Or the threat may be linked to a radical flank,
perhaps only as a scapegoat, while the morality adheres more tightly to the
moderate wing of the movement.
We see here the naughty-or-nice dilemma, played out in characters, in which
case it takes the form of the hero-victim dilemma (Jasper 2014c, p. 57). As a
protest group, you almost always want to demonstrate your moral worth, but it
is not clear how strong you should appear. If you look too strong, you do not
seem to need the help of others; if too weak, you become victims and cannot
do anything for yourselves. Both extremes have advantages as well as disad-
vantages: a sense of strength gives confidence and a feeling of inevitability, an
image of weakness elicits compassion and aid from others.
Having broken WUNC into its components, we can see that parallel claims can also
be made about other players: the rhetoric is not restricted to claims about the movement
itself. Tilly does not include these in the term Bdisplays,^ but most are explicit claims.
There are two kinds of character claims that protest groups make about opponents,
portraying them as either villains or minions. To portray them as villains requires only
the reversal of the first term: they are bad instead of morally worthy, yet disturbingly
unified, numerous, and committed, or BUNC. Or you can reverse all the terms (of
strength as well as morality), making them into minions who are bad, incoherent, torn,
and small: BITS?
Here, parallel to the hero-victim dilemma, is the villain-minion dilemma: do you
characterize your opponents as strong in order to stress how urgently threatening they
are, or do you ridicule them as weak, not to be taken seriously, in order to undermine
their confidence and the confidence of their allies, and so reduce their capacity as
players? BUNC or BITS?
These dilemmas reflect the existence of multiple audiences for character rhe-
toric. The message of a movement’s moral worth that will gain bystander sympa-
thy when conveyed (and distorted) through the media may differ from the threat-
ening message of strength that will elicit desired policies from legislatures. The
disruption that helps poor people to gain advantages succeeds through their
strength, not because of their claims to moral superiority (Piven and Cloward
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1977). While there may be victims and villains within the ranks of the movement
(or more often just outside it), most movement organizations seek to maintain both
their moral worth and their strength, though in different ways to different
audiences.
And, as one audience among others, character rhetoric is always partly aimed at
protestors themselves, reassuring them about their strength and good intentions. Inter-
nal and external impacts are, in the Janus dilemma, related in complex ways and are
sometimes at odds (Jasper 2014c, p. 3).
Scholars often misunderstand character work because they do not distinguish
between leaders as cultural symbols and leaders as decisionmakers. Just as
scholars misconstrue Rosa Parks, so Aldon Morris conflates Martin Luther King
Jr. as a symbol and as a decisionmaker. He acknowledges that BSCLC officials
believed that only one individual—Dr. King—should be the leader.^ He was the
heroic character, the international image of the movement, necessary for attracting
crowds, media attention, contributions, and politicians’ support. But Morris down-
plays this symbolic weight by switching to King as a decisionmaker, complaining
that we Bare likely to attribute superhuman qualities to King instead of analyzing
the organizational machinery, skilled staff and consultants, masses possessing
talents and resources, and creative collective ideas, all of which were the real
substance upon which King’s leadership was based^ (Morris 1984, p. 94). King
was not an all-powerful organizer and decisionmaker. But as a symbol, King was a
superhero. The movement recognized how crucial it was to create a superhuman
hero to inspire others. It developed the organizational machinery to create and
sustain the image of a heroic character, whether or not that hero made the
decisions or did the gruntwork. (Heroes do not go to the market or bake cookies.)

Blaming villains

Villains are central to protest, as they focus indignation. BAn injustice frame,^
according to Gamson (1992, p. 32), Brequires that motivated human actors carry
some of the onus for bringing about harm and suffering. These actors may be
corporations, government agencies, or specifiable groups rather than individuals.
They may be presented as malicious, but selfishness, greed, and indifference
may be sufficient to produce indignation.^ Malice is not the only form that
immorality takes.
Gamson (1992, p. 33) also sees a limit to character work, in that protestors Bmay
exaggerate the role of human actors, failing to understand broader structural con-
straints, and misdirect their anger at easy and inappropriate targets.^ But this is a
normative intrusion into his argument: the construction of villains advances the
emotional work of mobilization, whether or not the villains are actually the source
of the problem. (As students of moral panics argue, the purported villains need not
exist at all, see Jenkins 1992).
Blame is a central part of the rhetoric used to mobilize protestors (Jasper
1997, pp. 118–121). It must be attached to humans, not to nature or to God.
Environmental hazards arouse protest only when they are traced to corporate or
government decisions, not when they are seen as an almost natural result of
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innumerable, unidentifiable individuals’ decisions and activities. Governments

can be blamed for not fixing problems, even if they are not thought to have
caused them. They become villains when their actions to redress problems are
disappointing, when they fail to act despite having both the information and the
capacity, as in the Flint, Michigan water crisis.
Demonized groups usually fight back with their own character work. Some
concentrate on presenting themselves as moral, others as strong (although in the
long run they hope to be both): Martin Luther King Jr. and the SCLC, or
rioters and the Black Panthers. This is the naughty-or-nice dilemma: threatening
others may get what you want, but at some cost to your reputation (Jasper
2006, p. 106). More often, authorities intervene and suppress aggressive groups.
Many groups win by having an aggressive wing and a more moderate one.
Depending on the stereotypes arrayed against them, some groups may need to
assert their strength (women had to learn to display their anger), while others
need to assert their morality (gays and lesbians in the early 1980s). Some
movements may emphasize one dimension to internal audiences and another
dimension to external audiences.
Jasper (1997, chap. 16) suggests that nations, as they are incorporated into the
capitalist world system, search for enemies in predictable parts of the social structure:
newcomers from other groups or nations; those at the bottom of the economic ladder
who have an insecure place in the emerging market economy; those involved in new
activities and social structures at the cutting edge of social change; young people who
have not yet been socialized into a society’s morality; and those who live in cities,
where many of these other groups are found. Sometimes those at the very top are also
demonized, especially when they can be linked to foreign political or economic
organizations.
In many conflicts today, multinational corporations make perfect villains.
They are controlled by foreigners and appear suddenly as part of a wave of
industrialization or resource extraction. They are rich and powerful, capable of
corrupting local elites. By attracting local employees they may disrupt tradi-
tional social structures. From Shell’s oil refineries in Nigeria (Bob 2005) to
Gabriel Resources’ Roșia Montană project in Romania (Bejan et al. 2015; Velicu
and Kaika 2017), extractive corporations can easily be portrayed as ransacking
the land that is the heart of the tribe or the nation.
The stakes of a conflict are high when villains and heroes are pitted against
one another: Will victims escape their torment? Will good or evil prevail? The
outrage against one possible outcome forms a Bmoral battery^ when pitted
against the relief of the other (Jasper 2011). Joseph Gusfield (1996, p. 311)
found this emotional drama in the very name of a group, Mothers Against
Drunk Driving. MADD Bpresents the symbols that carry an expressive imagery.
‘Mothers’ puts the issue in a framework of violence against children. ‘Against’
provides an emotional sense of battles and enemies. ‘Drunk drivers’ provides an
image of DUI asocially responsible and out of control. This is the ‘killer drunk’
who constitutes the villain of the story. MADD has brought to the public arena
the emotional and dramatic expression of the public as victim.^ In its name
MADD expresses both the essential triad of victim-villain-hero and the emo-
tions that audiences are supposed to feel.
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Minions

Malevolent characters may nonetheless be too weak to be a threat. As a result of their

weakness, these minions may be cowardly. And because they are only mildly threat-
ening, they are laughable, ridiculous clowns.1 They are faceless and nameless. (Unlike
villains, they literally go unnamed in news photographs; see Corrigall-Brown and
Wilkes 2011). The humiliation of ridicule can reduce the perceptions of their pow-
er—in their own minds as well as those of other players.
Media and politicians often describe protestors as clownish minions, in an echo of
older crowd theories. Gitlin (1980, p.70) summarizes media portrayals of the New Left:
BWhen dissidents were ‘muttering,’ ‘rolled up in sleeping bags,’ ‘bearded,’ disheveled,
and at the same time planning massive illegality, they themselves became the issue.^
CBS correspondent Bruce Morton dismissed them as ineffectual: BAll in all there’ve
been so many demonstrations, it’s unlikely one more can have much effect^ (quoted in
Gitlin 1980, p. 120). The mainstream media often portray protestors as ineffectual:
naive bleeding hearts, colorful characters with little impact on the realistic world of
business and politics.
Triviality and menace, Gitlin observes, were compatible frames, but during the late
1960s the media moved from one to the other. The protestors became villains. They
were increasingly described as Ba conspiracy,^ in other words stronger and more
menacing than they seemed on the surface. The BITS were being led by a handful of
Bextremists,^ the true villains: well-organized, secretive, Boutside agitators^—BUNCS.
Lynn Owens (2009, p. 119) offers an example of the minionization process in his
discussion of the decline of the Amsterdam squatters’ movement. Among other ways
that the movement fragmented, many squatters accused the movement Bbosses^ of
authoritarian arrogance and contempt for democratic processes. Replied one of the
accused bosses, BI’ve had enough of the standoffish and anti-authoritarian grumblings
over the bosses…. The secret gossip and boasting makes me want to vomit.^ Another
complained of the Bchildish bickering and bar talk^ of those with Bfrustrations,
intrigues, and sectarian desires.^ The overall tone was contempt. Their opponents were
children, capable of grumbling and bickering but not real action. The word Bgossip^ is
often associated with women, in an implied contrast between the bosses’ macho power
and the ineffectual chatter of their critics.
In her research on far-right hate groups in the United States, Kathleen Blee
discovered that they sharply distinguish between gays and Jews. Gays, she says
(2002, p. 75), Bare viewed as disgusting rather than dangerous, the consequence
and not the cause of social degeneracy.^ They are Bnot the major threat to
Aryan survival,^ argues the leader of one hate group, who instead believes that
Bnonwhites and Jews control the world, engaged in unremitting struggles for
dominance that increasingly dispossess whites and Aryans.^ These groups do
not just hate Jews; they fear them as a powerful, worldwide conspiracy. They
are the villains, gays and other Bdegenerates^ are the minions.

1
Not all clowns are malevolent: some make people laugh by intentionally mocking other players or
institutions (including the entire system of cultural meanings that make up character). Sometimes we laugh
at clowns, but other times we laugh with them.
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Heroes can save us

Protest movements carry out several kinds of heroic character work. They draw on
moral exemplars from the past, especially martyrs (think of Che’s ubiquitous image).
They also create their own inspiring leaders (heroes are usually drawn from a move-
ment’s charismatic leaders). Part of their goodness leads heroes to be brave, to sacrifice
for the greater community. Grassroots participants can also be offered the role of heroes
through their own activity. As we discuss below, the processes by which characters
move from weak and passive to strong and active are the heart of mobilization. (The
power and activity dimensions are closely entwined in this case). Recruiters must
persuade enough people that, with sufficient resolve and numbers, they can become
heroes or at least help the heroes; they can have an impact.
Community organizing also has its heroes. In the most famous model of
organizing, Saul Alinsky’s, the organizer rides into town, helps to develop local
leaders, then rides off to the next community in need of his assistance. The
outsider and the local are both heroes, of different types. The local leader, in
this model, is a hero in formation who needs the support of a more experienced
activist to realize and expand her own implicit strengths. The outsider, who is
presumably older (and probably more privileged), arrives with a range of
resources (powers) not available to those in the local community.
Subcommandante Marcos famously characterized himself, not as the leader of the
Zapatistas, but as an outsider who came to work with and learn from local communi-
ties, in the process energizing local heroes. He is contradictory in that he both draws on
and subverts more traditional notions of heroism. On the one hand, he is commonly
depicted on horseback, an ancient accessory for heroes, enhancing their perceived
power as well as making them appear larger than others. But Marcos, contrary to the
Alinsky model, stayed on in those local communities, refusing to return to his
privileged life. He embodies what might be considered a post-modern form of heroism
where not just commanding and leading but also listening and following are presented
as heroic. Even Bhorizontalist^ movements benefit from hero images.
Puffing your leaders into full heroes has its risks. This is the dilemma of any
powerful partner: your ally may use that power for their own purposes rather than for
yours. Todd Gitlin (1980, chap. 5) describes the process by which the media trans-
formed a handful of New Left leaders into celebrities: they received far more media
attention, but ended up using that attention to get more attention, to promote their own
careers, and not to advance the goals of the movement. Other sources of leaders’
power—social network connections, material resources, caste status, expertise—pose
the same powerful-allies dilemma (Jasper 2014c, p. 128).
Dead heroes avoid the problems that Gitlin recounts, as they no longer pursue their
own interests. They are symbols, not decisionmakers. Here the battle is over their
symbolic meaning: how they are used and who benefits. Numerous actors will compete
to present themselves as the true heir to the original martyrs. Images are central to this
contest. Who has the right, for example, to include Che’s image on their tee-shirts, their
flyers, their website? Competitors include everyone from activists to corporations, each
seeking to benefit in its own way. By employing these images and the names of
martyrs, they are also opening themselves up to the critique that they are tarnishing
the hero’s image with their exploitation.
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Guobin Yang (2005, pp. 91–92) discovers explicit discussions of long-dead Chinese
heroes as motivational exemplars for students at Tiananmen Square. A recognized trope
in Chinese culture, especially poetry, the hero is supposed to have Boutstanding
sensibility, character, and talent; courage and wisdom; self-awareness of personal
worth; generosity and magnanimity; spontaneity and freedom from restraint; and
personal integrity.^ Clearly a combination of morality and strength, with a distinctly
Chinese accent. Yang finds in posters and conversations references to famous heroes in
Chinese culture that prepared students for the possibility of self-sacrifice.
Protestors exhibit heroism in their moral vision as well as in their ability to bring
about change. BActivists are the heroes of modern society,^ says Kathleen Blee (2012,
p. x), Bturning a critical lens on what is and imagining what can be.^ Criticizing,
imagining, and being an example are forms of strength that fuse the moral and power
dimensions into heroism.
In modern revolutions Eric Selbin (2010, p. 30) sees a widespread Bdesire for heroes,
quasi-mythic or otherwise endowed with some special or arcane knowledge even as
they are fully and recognizably human. They are asked to rise above the present, often
dreary circumstances and imagine a new future, to set out a new vision to which they
can aspire and yet which somehow is made to seem within reach, even if there are at
time substantial demands for self-abnegation and sacrifice.^ Revolutionaries are usually
heroes of action, helping to bring about a new world, but they can also be visionary
heroes of imagination, dying young and leaving behind a beautiful martyr story.
There are situations in which it is more important for players to establish their
strength than their goodness, and coercive interactions crowd out persuasion. But even
here, armed insurgents need to persuade potential supporters that peaceful action is no
longer possible and goodness alone could not prevail. Nelson Mandela’s most quoted
speech, delivered in his own defense during his treason trial, does just this. In
Mandela’s (1964) words, the state denied Ball lawful modes of expressing opposition^
and Bresorted to a show of force to crush opposition to its policies, only then did we
decide to answer violence with violence.^ This speech, although delivered in court
during a treason trial, was not geared to changing the verdict of the court (Mandela
admitted to organizing violence) but at building public support for the movement by
explaining its tactical decisions as moral desperation.
Armed insurgents also need to convince bystanders that they are strong enough to
protect them from vengeful government troops, or that they at least have the strength to
prevail in the end and honor their dead. The glorification of martyrdom is key in
encouraging people to fight by demonstrating strength in death. The LTTE in Sri Lanka
focused especially on memorializing its martyrs in its fight against the state. After the
Sri Lankan state defeated the LTTE militarily, it quickly destroyed these memorials
(McDowell 2012). Regimes work to portray dissidents and challengers as hopelessly
weak.

Rescuing victims

Victims have long been a staple of framing research in the study of protest
rhetoric. Gamson (1992) insists that a sense of injustice is the core motivation
behind protest, and it follows that there must be someone who has been treated
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Theor Soc (2018) 47:113–131 123

unjustly. Victims testify, their stories are elaborated in detail, photos of their
wounds (figurative or literal) are published, all in an effort to arouse moral
emotions of indignation. BWithout victims there would be no social movement
dramas^ (Benford and Hunt 1992, p. 42). We have more sympathy for those
who are weak, innocent, small, young, and suffering.
In the modern world children have proven the most sympathetic victims, especially
as their innocence has been highlighted culturally. It is relatively easy to mobilize
protest against any perceived threats to children, from drunk drivers to domestic
abusers to rock and roll. Children are not only priceless, but innocent and powerless:
strong Bwarrants^ for protective action (Best 1987; Davis 2005). Animals are also
sympathetic victims in modern cultures: guileless, loyal, passive recipients of whatever
treatment humans choose to give them. Because children and animals are
Bdefenseless,^ they need heroes to protect them.
Dilemmas arise when the victims are human adults. Nancy Whittier (2001, 2009)
examines the hero-victim dilemma of those in the movement to combat child sexual
abuse, torn between presenting themselves as heroes or as victims. They gain the most
news coverage as victims, reaching broader audiences. The media typically present
them as children again, even to the point of giving them teddy bears to hold on talk
shows, where victims are encouraged to cry and tell their stories in the halting, simple
vocabulary of a child. Therapists (adult, professional, and expert) are invited to present
the Bfacts^ in a cooler fashion; they can be strong. But their strength highlights and
perpetuates the victims’ weakness.

From victim to hero

Activists understandably resist this victim portrayal, preferring to feel like heroes.
Whittier’s subjects Bbelieve that the display of feelings of strength, pride, or anger is
strategically stronger than the display of grief, pain, or fear. The emotions of trauma,
they argue, suggest that people are permanently damaged by child sexual abuse and,
ironically, ultimately contribute to perceptions of survivors as unreliable witnesses who
are incapable of shaping policy on the issue. In contrast, they see the emotions of
resistance as suggesting that people can recover from child sexual abuse and as
encouraging survivors to mobilize in order to prevent others from being abused^
(Whittier 2001, p. 244). Victims must transform themselves into heroes, in the form
of survivors.
In presenting yourself as a victim in need of saving, you deny your own capacities
for successful action: in exchange for aid, you give up some recognition as a full
strategic player, maybe even a full human being. The women’s movement had to fight
hard to move women from the victim to the hero cell, capable of fighting their own
battles; this was also one aim of black nationalism as a rallying cry for the US civil
rights movement. Pacifists confront similar stereotypes of themselves as weak and have
worked to characterize themselves as Bpeaceful warriors,^ calling for peace armies and
teaching that non-violence in the face of hate requires great courage and strength
(Moorehead 1987).
The construction of sympathetic victims generates indignation, but making the
victims into active martyrs may better inspire collective action. Martyrs lend a
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124 Theor Soc (2018) 47:113–131

heroic sheen to the movement or the cause. Collins (2001, p. 33) gets at this in
discussing how Binnocent victims^ arouse public support for movements with
which they are associated. BWhat mobilizes a conscience constituency in such
cases,^ he says, Bis not merely moral outrage, the feeling that it is manifestly
unfair, morally disgraceful, to attack the weak. The victims must not only be
innocent, but they must be emblems of the movement’s dedication, or be quickly
converted into such emblematic associations.^ He continues, BIt is their deliberate
willingness to sacrifice themselves, or at least to expose themselves to the danger
of such atrocities, that broadcasts the sense of a moral commitment operating. This
is inseparable from the feeling of moral and emotional (and ultimately social)
strength. The victims become martyrs because they are taken to represent the
moral power of the movement; they symbolize the feeling that the movement will
ultimately win out.^ Collins observes that the creation of these characters involves
focusing emotions as much as creating cognitive images.
Strategic players are never entirely innocent. To become martyrs, victims
must be refigured as strong rather than weak. They must be seen as having
intentionally sacrificed themselves for the cause, because their action can then
be seen as an act of strength, for the movement at least but also usually for the
individual. The child killed by an inebriated driver may inspire her parents to
join or found a protest group, but she remains an innocent victim not a martyr.
Mohamed Bouazizi, who by setting himself on fire helped to spark the Arab
uprisings of 2011, could be recast as a martyr, even though his personal
motives probably differed somewhat from those of the movement he inspired.
Tunisian revolutionaries benefited from portraying him as an intentional martyr
(and from re-describing his motives to match their own).
Scholars have documented the need for stigmatized groups to transform
shame into pride in order to mobilize their own members (Gould 2009;
Taylor 1996). Re-characterizing themselves as moral instead of immoral is only
the first step, as this makes them victims, too weak and passive to fight for
justice. Their shame is merely transformed into fear. They must also refigure
themselves as strong, in order to create the confidence they need to enter and
act effectively in political arenas. Their shame and fear must become anger and
pride (Britt and Heise 2000).
Good political organizers can take an audience who feel like victims—and who are
victims of some injustice—and turn them into survivors, heroes, or supporters. This is a
key mechanism for creating and sustaining a movement for social change. The simple
endurance of the martyr is one way that victims become heroes, a passive form of
resistance often associated with women. Instead of active combat, they find other ways
to resist.
Martin Luther King Jr. was a master of this transformational rhetoric. He
could begin with standard Christian themes of suffering, but make it clear that
he was talking about Black Americans in the 1950s and 1960s. Theirs was a
shared sacrifice of a group demanding justice: BThe solidarity King touted was
not the emotional unity of victims who shared the tragic history of the race, but
the political cohesion of fighters who had been aroused to reverse that history,^
says Jonathan Rieder (2008, p. 175). In King’s words, BWe’ve got to stay
together and maintain unity^ if Bwe are determined to be people,^ because Bwe
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Theor Soc (2018) 47:113–131 125

are God’s children.^ They are worthy and united. The sleeping giant must wake
up.

Who started it?

In asserting their strength, victims must be careful to retain their morality: to

become heroes rather than villains (as their opponents will portray them). Not
all victims become martyrs, and they lose some of their innocence when they
do. If you initiate a strategic interaction it is difficult to claim the status of
passive, weak victim. It is easier for your opponents to portray you as preda-
tory villains, aggressors. This is an aspect of the engagement dilemma: all
interactions involve risks, so that the decision to engage should never be taken
lightly (Jasper 2006, p. 26). Because they cannot guarantee moral outcomes, it
is difficult for initiators to ensure their moral reputations.
What matters most, of course, is not who initiates an engagement, but who
is perceived as the initiator. Clifford Bob shows how the Zapatistas pulled off
victim status. BAlthough the Zapatistas had initiated the fighting, they came to
be perceived as victims (albeit highly proactive victims) not only of long-term
societal oppression but, more importantly, of excessive government reprisals.^
This quick character work justified humanitarian support.
The characterization stuck. When, the following year, Mexico’s new Zedillo
government launched an offensive to take back rebel territory, the Zapatistas
simply fled into the forest. But their sympathizers, in Mexico and around the
world, mounted massive demonstrations that led the government to retreat. The
government’s own character work failed Bto impugn the rebels as ‘foreigners’
and ‘professionals of violence’ who had ‘manipulated’ the region’s Indians.^ In
a standard narrative dynamic, going one step back in the history of the
interaction turned the aggressors into victims (Bob 2005, pp. 146, 154).
In Argentina the famous Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and the Junta
pursued two characterization battles based on who initiated the engagement:
who were the Mothers, but also who were their children? To their mothers, the
disappeared children were innocent victims of the regime, while the regime
painted them as criminal and subversive. In one case the regime acted first, and
arbitrarily; in the second the state was simply responding to aggression. In
describing the systematic brutality of the regime, the Mothers made it the initial
actor as well as an immoral one. The characterization of their children deter-
mined the characterization of their mothers: avenging heroes on the one hand,
misguided minions on the other.
Successful revolutionary movements usually pull off this same reversal of
perceived agency. A nasty regime views a small, peaceful protest as a provo-
cation and brutally represses it. For those who judge the regime’s violence as
disproportionate and immoral, it now becomes the villainous perpetrator, and
future demonstrations can be constructed as justifiable responses. Although
Brockett (2005, p. 3) refers to this as the Brepression-protest paradox,^ in
which repression increases protest instead of decreasing it, it is no longer a
paradox when the emotional mechanisms of blame and character work are
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126 Theor Soc (2018) 47:113–131

introduced to explain when repression leads to more protest and when it leads
to less. As in Pericles’ funeral oratory, martyrs are employed to call upon
bystanders to become heroes.

Gender, strength, activity

There is another way that victims face a treacherous path in asserting their strength.
Gender plays a role in most character work, as most gender stereotypes are constructed
out of images of strength/weakness and activity/passivity. Women and gay men face
special challenges in developing and displaying their strength, part of which involves
displays of anger (Gould 2009). This is a special case of victims’ turning themselves
into heroes.
A central strategy of the early women’s movement was to challenge the norms of
emotional displays that discouraged women from expressing anger. Feminists agreed
with Aristotle that the ability to display anger is essential to asserting one’s rights and
status in society (Hochschild 1975). Indignation, a moral form of anger, is in many
ways the essential emotion of protest movements (Jasper 2014a).
Women’s perceived weakness can make them appear more moral. According to
Jocelyn Viterna (2013), the FMLN guerrillas in El Salvador were able to present
themselves in a more moral light because they had women in their ranks (approxi-
mately one third of the guerrillas). Because men tend to be seen as violent by nature, an
all-male force could have been dismissed as just a bunch of thugs. Under the cultural
expectation that women are peaceful and passive, the women fighters were assumed to
be driven by solid moral imperatives such as the protection of their children, their own
honor, or sheer survival. Women’s unaccustomed strength had to be tempered (or
explained) by high levels of morality. (Alison [2009, p. 116] similarly suggests that
the use of women in the Israeli army sends the message that the nation’s situation is
urgent and moral.)
The FMLN also recruited women by suggesting they would be victims—in partic-
ular of rape—if captured by the government’s troops, a claim with considerable truth
behind it. The FMLN would arm women so that they could gain strength, changing
from victims to heroes. After the civil war, Viterna says, these same women had
difficulty returning to gender-stereotyped roles, in the face of an electoral majority
who anxiously embraced traditional life after the trauma of war. Those who have, even
once, assumed strong and active roles, may have trouble claiming later that they are
inherently weak and passive.
The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo also struggled to gain strength without
losing morality. They were the perfect image of motherhood: previously apo-
litical, wearing white headscarves, driven to action by their desperation over
losing their children without ever learning what had happened to them. But by
showing up weekly in the center of Buenos Aires they traded their passivity for
activity. They retained some air of weakness, or else the regime would have felt
its manhood threatened and retaliated more completely. But for some Argen-
tines, passivity is an essential part of femininity, putting the Mothers’ moral
standing at risk. Observes Marguerite Guzman Bouvard (2004, p. 8), BBecause
the Mothers defy not only the Argentine political culture but also a society that
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Theor Soc (2018) 47:113–131 127

still upholds the image of woman as homebound and submissive, disapproval is

not unusual.^
Through their own actions—and their outrage–the others came to feel their own
strength, although this was often hard to admit because it rested on their being mothers
(the basis of their goodness). They also asserted their own human dignity, itself a source
of strength. The regime tried hard to portray them as clownish minions. BAs a tactic to
isolate and weaken them the government deliberately ridiculed the women as an
example to any group who might wish to oppose the regime. The carefully designed
campaign labeled the Mothers as las locas (crazy women), effectively discouraging
people from associating with them^ (Guzman Bouvard 2004, p. 79). Not only were
they isolated, but the mothers themselves were affected by such images, torn as they
already were between activism and motherhood (they were still responsible for hus-
bands and other children). Many lived two lives: strong and active in one and weak and
passive in the other.

Other players’ character work

Protestors are not the only ones who do character work; all strategic players
perform it. Like protest groups, they try to influence their own reputations and
those of other players. Notably, the media, the police, and the opponents of
protest groups all do what they can to shape the images of social movement
participants. We lack the space to describe these activities in detail, but will
make some suggestions.
The targets of protest have the most direct interest in how each side is characterized.
Corporations conduct a certain amount of PR work regardless (Marchand 1998), but
when attacked by protest movements they react in a variety of ways to demonstrate
their own good intentions and contributions to society (McDonnell and King 2013). In
some cases they attack protestors as misinformed or immoral (hunters, scientific
researchers, and the meat industry have promoted US legislation defining animal
protectionists as terrorists, for instance, see Ahmed 2014). In other cases, they accept
some of the critique and take measures to blunt it (such as polluting corporations that
put on a green face). Organizations universally deal with whistleblowers, seen as
traitors and often revealing concrete infractions, by demonizing them as unstable,
selfish, or driven by personal motives: villains or minions instead of heroes (Alford
2001).
We are not accustomed to analyzing protest groups and corporate targets with the
same models, but they conduct the same kind of character work. They usually hope to
be seen as good, not bad. And both kinds of player face the same dilemmas over
whether to be seen as strong or weak.
Among protestors’ targets, there is often an opposed social movement. The anti-
abortion movement must contend with the pro-choice movement; the gun control
movement with gun fanatics; LGBTQ movements with homophobic religious groups.
Bob (2012:24) documents the extensive character work that dueling movements do
against each other in international arenas. They engage in Btarring^ to demonize or
ridicule their opponents. BActivists smear an entire network with the outlandish views,
fringe tactics, or moral failings of individual members….These mudslingers sift the
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enemy’s every move, parse its every word, and flaunt its every faux pas – sex and
money scandals, of course, but also unguarded words, unvetted allies, and unconsid-
ered positions.^
Politicians and officials are often targets of protest and so have an interest in replying
to criticism by painting their critics as minions (criminals, delinquents). In an extreme
example, the Turkish government painted protestors against hydroelectric dams (as it
would later portray the Gezi protestors) as criminals and terrorists (currently the favorite
term for demonizing any dissident), standing in the way of national development for
their own selfish reasons (Özen 2014).
The police in particular have an interest in constructing villains who must be
stopped, so that the police will need freedom and resources to stop them. They
thereby also gain status. Police are a central actor in many moral panics, and
they benefited heavily from the panic after 9/11. Police officials justify surveil-
lance on the grounds that environmental, anti-fracking, animal-protectionist and
related activists are radical extremists, outside agitators, dangerous mobs, con-
spiratorial, and yet also silly and naïve (e.g. Ahmed 2014). Part villain, part
minion: dangerous enough to justify police funding, but too silly to have their
ideas taken seriously, like dangerous animals.
In the face of armed insurgencies, various state players try to establish their
strength in order to prove that they will eventually win. The two sides engage
in symmetrical character work. BEach side tries to demonstrate that it is a tower
of strength and that the other side is a paper tiger. Each side subverts the other
side’s displays of power^ (Lichbach 1995:79). More generally, the state fights a
war of words and deeds, Bmaking public displays of its power, via pomp and
ceremony, making prominent and conspicuous use of its repressive apparatus,
and labeling dissidents as ‘deviants,’ and as a small minority of ‘outside
agitators’^ (Lichbach 1995:23).
The news media inevitably place a variety of political players in a number of
character roles. Muckraking journalists look for villains, primarily in corpora-
tions and government. News stories often consist of sympathetic reportage on
individual and group victims, especially of natural disasters and wars. Journal-
ists frequently grant elected and appointed officials a certain power and cred-
ibility due to the organizations and populations that they represent. Protestors
rarely get this respect, unless they are speaking on behalf of large and vener-
able groups such as the ASPCA, Amnesty International, or the NAACP
(Amenta et al. 2015; Andrews and Caren 2010). They can sometimes gain an
image of strength by presenting themselves as experts, but in the process they
also give up some of their moral goodness.
Often, the media characterize protestors as deviants, especially in less plu-
ralistic communities with lower tolerance for social conflict (McCluskey et al.
2009). Protestors are more likely to be demonized in articles on the front page
of newspapers compared to inside pages, perhaps because they are deemed
more threatening (McCluskey et al. 2009). Villains are more newsworthy than
minions. As one uniquely candid reporter told Nina Eliasoph (1998:225), BMost
reporters are liberal; they scorn bigotry, they’re for equality of the sexes, and
they recycle. But they’re not politically active, and are suspicious of people
who are.^
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Theor Soc (2018) 47:113–131 129

Conclusions

Character work demonstrates some of the emotional dynamics that lie beneath cultural
meanings, as the mechanisms by which those meanings have resonance and motivate
action (Jasper 2014b). Cultural sociologists have been slow to acknowledge the
importance of the emotions that are so closely entwined with the cognitive construc-
tions and processes they prefer to study. We know little about which frames, narratives,
and images resonate with audiences and which do not (McDonnell et al. 2017), but the
characters embedded in them certainly play a part.
Once we have established the role of characters in other cultural meanings, the next
step will be to ask why some characterizations are more effective than others. Is it the
characters who fit traditional expectations and stereotypes, or those that deviate from
them, in other words the familiar or the innovative tropes? Is it the strength of the
emotions they arouse, or is it some combination of emotions that is required? Is it a
moral battery that combines positive and negative emotions, such as we feel for heroes
and victims on the one hand and villains and minions on the other? In other words can a
character function by herself, or only in interaction with other characters? This paper
has concentrated on describing the main characters, not in elaborating on their produc-
tion or how audiences interpret them. That must await future research.
A group’s sense of its own character matters because different characters have
different emotions. It is useful to feel like a hero because heroes feel proud, confident,
and angry when they see injustice, emotions that encourage action. Victims feel grief,
doubt, fear, and often shame – demobilizing emotions.
Characters matter in all the central questions that scholars ask about social move-
ments: about how they recruit and motivate members; how they interact with their
opponents, authorities, and other players; how they are treated in the media; whether
they have an impact on policies and opinion. Character work is part of the creation of
all strategic players, a core component of their constructed identities. Their reputations
are advantages and disadvantages that shape and constrain what they can do, and with
whom. Once you look for it, character work is everywhere.

Acknowledgments Thanks to Anna Zhelnina for assistance, and to the Theory and Society reviewers and
editors for comments.

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James M. Jasper writes about culture and politics. His latest book is The Emotions of Protest (University of
Chicago Press, 2018). He has taught at NYU, Princeton, and currently, the Graduate Center of the City
University of New York.

Michael Young is associate professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. He is currently
working on a book about how DREAMers radicalized the U.S. immigrant rights movement.

Elke Zuern is the author of The Politics of Necessity: Community Organizing and Democracy in South Africa
(U of Wisconsin Press and UKZN Press in Southern Africa 2011). Her research addresses popular under-
standings of democracy, violence and protest, memorials as sites of contention, and the militarization of US
foreign policy in Africa. She is a Professor of Politics at Sarah Lawrence College.