Embodied Politics: A Movement Genealogy of Transformative Organizing

Abstract: Transformative organizing is an emergent intersectional social movement framework. It links individual, interpersonal, and cultural development to power-building, structural change work. Transformative organizing draws on transformative practice, a repertoire of psychological, spiritual, and body-based modalities from a wide range of traditions; healing justice and politicized somatics are two of its most influential lineages. This article explores the genealogical conditions and tributaries that enabled and informed the twenty-first century dialectics of the personal and the political. I move through three kinds of genealogical registers: late-stage capitalism, especially the shift to the non-profit sector as the structural home of most social movement activity; the late twentieth-century cultural turn that made new categories of self-understanding such as the therapeutic and embodiment both attractive and inescapable; and the rich cross-pollination of the last two generations of radical thought and social movement innovation, especially as informed by Black, feminist, and/or queer politics.