Morris Bernstein
Biographic Data
| ID | 182138 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Morris Bernstein |
| GIVEN NAMES | Morris |
| FAMILY NAME | Bernstein |
| SIGNATURE | BERNSTEIN M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Connecticut |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2750-2209 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 771 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 37 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1927 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Scorecards, not sit-ins
Classic accounts of contentious repertoires explain change through disruption. This article introduces the concept, repertoires of alignment, to be understood as a distinct, complementary toolkit that wins by converting movement claims into targets’ imperatives. Using semi-structured interviews with 53 LGBT insider activists and their allies across 36 large U.S. employers, triangulated with Corporate Equality Index reports and policy documents, w…
The 2024 SSSP Presidential Address 'Every Damn Day in America
This presidential address disrupts common misperceptions about what gun violence in the United States looks like, who is most affected, and how we should think about reducing the scourge of gun violence. I draw on seven years of ethnographic and interview-based research on gun violence prevention activism in Connecticut and nationally. Focusing on community gun violence and mass shootings, I demonstrate that structural racism and racist discourse…
Beyond Gun Control
Most research portrays the gun violence prevention (GVP) movement as predominantly white, dominated by national Washington DC-based policy organizations and recently by white middle-class women seeking stronger gun regulations, overlooking organizing by people in racially oppressed communities. In contrast, we extend the multi-institutional politics approach to social movements to understand how interlocking political, institutional, and cultural…
Protecting Black Lives
This article examines how community gun violence (CGV) activists reenvision policing in order to reduce both CGV and police violence. Theoretically, understanding this prefigurative work necessitates reconceptualizing the overpolicing/underpolicing paradox because, like overpolicing, what I call the failure to serve is another mechanism of racial control. Drawing from over 360 hours of ethnographic observation and 39 interviews, I analyze how CGV…
Community-level factors and incidence of gun violence in the United States, 2014-2017
Once in Parkland, a Year in Hartford, a Weekend in Chicago
Generally ignoring firearm‐deaths by suicide, “common sense” divides gun violence into two distinct types of phenomena: urban gun violence and mass shootings. At a cursory level, these phenomena seem distinct because of the difference in the number of victims killed during a particular shooting, rather than subtypes co‐creating a master category defined by gun violence. As a result, gunshot deaths of black and brown bodies in urban settings, whic…
Denial, Deflection, and Distraction
This article integrates theory on contentious movements and racism to develop what we call the “stigma neutralization model,” which explains how activists challenge stigmatizing identities in order to build a positive collective identity. Using original ethnographic research, we examine the response of a local Tea Party group to charges of racism. If a social movement is seen as racist, their political efficacy may be damaged. By analyzing backst…
Same-Sex Marriage and the Assimilationist Dilemma
This special issue of the Journal of Homosexuality, examines the impact of the marriage equality movement and the resulting landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision, Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) that legalized same-sex marriage in the U.S., on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) activism, politics, communities, and identities. The articles in this issue examine the complicated ways in which the discourse used in same-sex marriage co…
Identity Politics
“Identity politics” is a concept used to describe politics based on ethnic, racial, nationalist, or any other status identity such as gender or sexual orientation. The term is predominantly used to critique the politics of various social movements, rather than being used as an analytic concept to explain a particular social phenomenon. This entry examines three main theoretical approaches to identity politics.
Marriage, the Final Frontier? Same‐Sex Marriage and the Future of the Lesbian and Gay Movement
Given hostility within segments of LGBT communities toward same‐sex marriage, how do Australian activists justify their efforts toward achieving marriage equality? In this article, we expand the social movement literature by examining how activists construct identity, meaning, and goals in contradistinction to others within the same movement. We draw on interviews with Australian lesbian and gay activists to examine what enables them to pursue th…
United States
This chapter seeks question, to what extent is the lesbian and gay movement in the US influenced by the state compared to other possibly relevant factors. Most recent work on the lesbian and gay movement in the US focuses on the impact of one factor to the exclusion of others. However, these efforts were not sufficient to gain entry into the polity and, as argues, ironically, it would be the emergence of the Religious Right that would further pro…
The Meaning of Marriage to Same-Sex Families
Lesbian and gay male couples formalize romantic partnerships at different rates. These rates differ differently depending on national context, with female partnerships exceeding male partnerships in U.S. contexts, while gay male partnerships exceed lesbian partnerships in some European contexts, and rough parity is reached in Canada. Through a cross-national analysis of welfare regimes, partnership forms, and patterns of formal same-sex partnersh…
Altared States
In this article, we use comparative historical analysis to explain agenda-setting and the timing of policy outcomes on same-sex marriage in the United States, Canada, and Australia. Unlike the United States and Canada, Australia does not have a bill of rights, making litigation to obtain rights not enumerated in existing legislation unavailable to activists. Extending the literatures on the development of public policy and on political and histor…
Same-Sex Marriage and the Future of the LGBT Movement
In this article, I respond to queer critiques of the pursuit of same-sex marriage. I first examine the issue of (homo)normalization through a consideration of the everyday lives of same-sex couples with children, a subject about which queer critics are strangely silent. Children force same-sex couples to be out in multiple areas of their lives and recent court cases explicitly challenge the idea that same-sex couples do not make fit parents. Seco…
Community Policing, Workplace Structure and Attitudes Toward Lesbians and Gay Men and their Civil Liberties
While criminal justice workplaces, such as the police and prisons, are noted for reproducing both gender inequality and inequality based on sexuality or sexual orientation, this paper examines whether reorganizing the workplace can alter those interactions and reduce inequality. We draw on survey data from a police department to theorize the likely impact of the move toward community policing and rehabilitative models of justice on the attitudes …
How the Right Usurped the Queer Agenda
This article draws on a case study of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender ( LGBT ) and queer politics in Vermont to explain the conditions under which radical discourse gains and loses a public voice. In contrast to claims that the marginalization of queer discourse is due to silencing by LGBT rights activists or to litigation strategies, we argue that variation in queer discourse over time is the result of the co‐optation of queer discourse …
Power, politics and social movements
How important is the state as a locus of social change for Islamic movements whose goal is to promote Islam (Gurbuz and Bernstein 2012)? Why do multi-racial movements create collective responses to
The Sociology of Sexualities
Gay Officers In Their Midst
While fear among gay men and lesbians about being out in a masculinist environment is not surprising, this article examines what heterosexuals expect will happen when gay men and lesbians come out. We draw on a unique dataset from a police department in the southwest United States to examine the consequences anticipated by heterosexual police department employees if a gay or lesbian officer's sexual orientation became known in the workplace. We t…
Sexual Citizenship and the Pursuit of Relationship-Recognition Policies in Australia and the United States
Sexual Citizenship and the Pursuit of Relationship-Recognition Policies in Australia and the United States Mary Bernstein (bio) and Nancy A. Naples (bio) Achieving the right to marry has arguably been the one of the most important agenda items for the U.S. lesbian and gay movement for more than a decade (Bernstein 2002; Eskridge 1996). In contrast, achieving same-sex marriage has not been central to the political agenda of lesbian and gay activis…
Identity Deployment and Social Change
In this article, we discuss the theoretical implications of empirical elaborations of model of identity deployment. New research encompasses a diverse array of venues and targets and elaborates on the mechanisms through which identities may be deployed strategically. Application of the identity deployment model spans a variety of so‐called ‘identity movements’ as well as ethnic, nationalist and indigenous movements, and community mobilization. Id…
The Blackwell Companion To Social Movements
What are You
This article uses the Hapa movement as a case study in order to provide a framework for understanding identity as a goal of social movements and to expand on a theoretical understanding of multiracial social movements. In contrast to current understandings of identity-based movements, this article argues that the Hapa movement seeks simultaneously to deconstruct traditional notions of (mono)racial identities and to secure recognition for a multir…
Culture, Power, and Institutions
We argue that critiques of political process theory are beginning to coalesce into a new approach to social movements-a 'multi-institutional politics' approach. While the political process model assumes that domination is organized by and around one source of power, the alternative perspective views domination as organized around multiple sources of power, each of which is simultaneously material and symbolic. We examine the conceptions of social…
Paths to homophobia
Culture, Power, and Institutions
We argue that critiques of political process theory are beginning to coalesce into a new approach to social movements-a 'multi-institutional politics' approach. While the political process model assumes that domination is organized by and around one source of power, the alternative perspective views domination as organized around multiple sources of power, each of which is simultaneously material and symbolic. We examine the conceptions of social…
Celebration and Suppression
Critics of identity politics decry the celebration of difference within identity movements, yet many activists underscore their similarities to, rather than differences from, the majority. This article develops the idea of "identity deployment" as a form of strategic collective action. Thus one can ask under what political conditions are identities that celebrate or suppress differences deployed strategically. A comparison of strategies used in f…
Stolen Thunder? Huey Long's "Share Our Wealth," Political Mediation, and the Second New Deal
In 1934 Huey Long created Our a national challenger that sought economic redistribution. Our study explores the outcomes of this insurgency and the reasons for its successes and failures. We first review perspectives on success for social protest movements and provide a new definition of success, based on securing collective goods for a beneficiary group through movement organization efforts. Next we elaborate a theory of movement success. This t…
Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained? Conceptualizing Social Movement 'Success' in the Lesbian and Gay Movement
This article employs and expands a multidimensional framework for understanding movement effects that includes political, mobilization, and cultural outcomes. It compares lesbian and gay efforts to decriminalize sodomy between 1961 and 1977 and between 1986 and 1991 and examines the conditions under which activists strive for different sorts of goals. Because movement strategies are inextricably tied to what motivates activists-that is, their und…
How the Right Usurped the Queer Agenda
This article draws on a case study of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender ( LGBT ) and queer politics in Vermont to explain the conditions under which radical discourse gains and loses a public voice. In contrast to claims that the marginalization of queer discourse is due to silencing by LGBT rights activists or to litigation strategies, we argue that variation in queer discourse over time is the result of the co‐optation of queer discourse …
Same-Sex Marriage and the Future of the LGBT Movement
In this article, I respond to queer critiques of the pursuit of same-sex marriage. I first examine the issue of (homo)normalization through a consideration of the everyday lives of same-sex couples with children, a subject about which queer critics are strangely silent. Children force same-sex couples to be out in multiple areas of their lives and recent court cases explicitly challenge the idea that same-sex couples do not make fit parents. Seco…
Community-level factors and incidence of gun violence in the United States, 2014-2017
Gay Officers In Their Midst
While fear among gay men and lesbians about being out in a masculinist environment is not surprising, this article examines what heterosexuals expect will happen when gay men and lesbians come out. We draw on a unique dataset from a police department in the southwest United States to examine the consequences anticipated by heterosexual police department employees if a gay or lesbian officer's sexual orientation became known in the workplace. We t…
What are You
This article uses the Hapa movement as a case study in order to provide a framework for understanding identity as a goal of social movements and to expand on a theoretical understanding of multiracial social movements. In contrast to current understandings of identity-based movements, this article argues that the Hapa movement seeks simultaneously to deconstruct traditional notions of (mono)racial identities and to secure recognition for a multir…
Identity Deployment and Social Change
In this article, we discuss the theoretical implications of empirical elaborations of model of identity deployment. New research encompasses a diverse array of venues and targets and elaborates on the mechanisms through which identities may be deployed strategically. Application of the identity deployment model spans a variety of so‐called ‘identity movements’ as well as ethnic, nationalist and indigenous movements, and community mobilization. Id…
Identities and Politics
Social Science History - Volume 26, Number 3, Fall 2002
Same-Sex Marriage and the Assimilationist Dilemma
This special issue of the Journal of Homosexuality, examines the impact of the marriage equality movement and the resulting landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision, Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) that legalized same-sex marriage in the U.S., on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) activism, politics, communities, and identities. The articles in this issue examine the complicated ways in which the discourse used in same-sex marriage co…
Paths to homophobia
Marriage, the Final Frontier? Same‐Sex Marriage and the Future of the Lesbian and Gay Movement
Given hostility within segments of LGBT communities toward same‐sex marriage, how do Australian activists justify their efforts toward achieving marriage equality? In this article, we expand the social movement literature by examining how activists construct identity, meaning, and goals in contradistinction to others within the same movement. We draw on interviews with Australian lesbian and gay activists to examine what enables them to pursue th…
Identities and Politics
Critics of identity politics often wax polemically as they charge contemporary social movements with narrowly and naively engaging in essentialist politics based on perceived differences from the majority. Such essentialism, critics charge, inhibits coalition building (e.g., Phelan 1993; Kimmel 1993), cannot produce meaningful social change, and reinforces hegemonic and restrictive social categories (Seidman 1997). It is even responsible for the …
Beyond Gun Control
Most research portrays the gun violence prevention (GVP) movement as predominantly white, dominated by national Washington DC-based policy organizations and recently by white middle-class women seeking stronger gun regulations, overlooking organizing by people in racially oppressed communities. In contrast, we extend the multi-institutional politics approach to social movements to understand how interlocking political, institutional, and cultural…
Altared States
In this article, we use comparative historical analysis to explain agenda-setting and the timing of policy outcomes on same-sex marriage in the United States, Canada, and Australia. Unlike the United States and Canada, Australia does not have a bill of rights, making litigation to obtain rights not enumerated in existing legislation unavailable to activists. Extending the literatures on the development of public policy and on political and histor…
Racial and sexual differences in hair weight
Once in Parkland, a Year in Hartford, a Weekend in Chicago
Generally ignoring firearm‐deaths by suicide, “common sense” divides gun violence into two distinct types of phenomena: urban gun violence and mass shootings. At a cursory level, these phenomena seem distinct because of the difference in the number of victims killed during a particular shooting, rather than subtypes co‐creating a master category defined by gun violence. As a result, gunshot deaths of black and brown bodies in urban settings, whic…
The Meaning of Marriage to Same-Sex Families
Lesbian and gay male couples formalize romantic partnerships at different rates. These rates differ differently depending on national context, with female partnerships exceeding male partnerships in U.S. contexts, while gay male partnerships exceed lesbian partnerships in some European contexts, and rough parity is reached in Canada. Through a cross-national analysis of welfare regimes, partnership forms, and patterns of formal same-sex partnersh…
Sexual Citizenship and the Pursuit of Relationship-Recognition Policies in Australia and the United States
Sexual Citizenship and the Pursuit of Relationship-Recognition Policies in Australia and the United States Mary Bernstein (bio) and Nancy A. Naples (bio) Achieving the right to marry has arguably been the one of the most important agenda items for the U.S. lesbian and gay movement for more than a decade (Bernstein 2002; Eskridge 1996). In contrast, achieving same-sex marriage has not been central to the political agenda of lesbian and gay activis…
Interests and credibility
Accompanying the increase in technical controversies in the last 20 years has been an explosion of whistleblowing by those involved in the design, implementation, and operation of complex technologies. Whistleblowers provide a window onto the trade-off, in the construction of social problems, between one's credibility and the pursuit of one's interests. Whistleblowers gain credibility for speaking out contrary to their own interests and those of …
Protecting Black Lives
This article examines how community gun violence (CGV) activists reenvision policing in order to reduce both CGV and police violence. Theoretically, understanding this prefigurative work necessitates reconceptualizing the overpolicing/underpolicing paradox because, like overpolicing, what I call the failure to serve is another mechanism of racial control. Drawing from over 360 hours of ethnographic observation and 39 interviews, I analyze how CGV…
Mate Choice and Domestic Life in the Nineteenth-Century Marriage Manual
Michael Gordon, M. Charles Bernstein, Mate Choice and Domestic Life in the Nineteenth-Century Marriage Manual, Journal of Marriage and Family, Vol. 32, No. 4, Decade Review. Part 1 (Nov., 1970), pp. 665-674
Denial, Deflection, and Distraction
This article integrates theory on contentious movements and racism to develop what we call the “stigma neutralization model,” which explains how activists challenge stigmatizing identities in order to build a positive collective identity. Using original ethnographic research, we examine the response of a local Tea Party group to charges of racism. If a social movement is seen as racist, their political efficacy may be damaged. By analyzing backst…
Racial and sexual differences in hair weight
Mate Choice and Domestic Life in the Nineteenth-Century Marriage Manual
Michael Gordon, M. Charles Bernstein, Mate Choice and Domestic Life in the Nineteenth-Century Marriage Manual, Journal of Marriage and Family, Vol. 32, No. 4, Decade Review. Part 1 (Nov., 1970), pp. 665-674
Stolen Thunder? Huey Long's "Share Our Wealth," Political Mediation, and the Second New Deal
In 1934 Huey Long created Our a national challenger that sought economic redistribution. Our study explores the outcomes of this insurgency and the reasons for its successes and failures. We first review perspectives on success for social protest movements and provide a new definition of success, based on securing collective goods for a beneficiary group through movement organization efforts. Next we elaborate a theory of movement success. This t…
Interests and credibility
Accompanying the increase in technical controversies in the last 20 years has been an explosion of whistleblowing by those involved in the design, implementation, and operation of complex technologies. Whistleblowers provide a window onto the trade-off, in the construction of social problems, between one's credibility and the pursuit of one's interests. Whistleblowers gain credibility for speaking out contrary to their own interests and those of …
Celebration and Suppression
Critics of identity politics decry the celebration of difference within identity movements, yet many activists underscore their similarities to, rather than differences from, the majority. This article develops the idea of "identity deployment" as a form of strategic collective action. Thus one can ask under what political conditions are identities that celebrate or suppress differences deployed strategically. A comparison of strategies used in f…
Les tireurs d'alarme dans les conflits sur les risques technologiques. Entre intérêts particuliers et crédibilité
Interests and Credibility : Whistleblowers in Technological Conflicts. Mary Bernstein, James M. Jasper [109-134]. Accompanying the increase in technical controversies in the last twenty years has been in the United States an explosion of whistleblowing by those involved in the design, implementation, and operation of complex technologies. Whistleblowers provide a window onto the trade-off, in the construction of social problems, between one's cre…
Lavender and Blue
Most victims of antigay/lesbian hate crimes never report these crimes to police for fear of hostility and abuse. Similarly, lesbian/gay officers fear a negative response if they come out at work. Research assumes but has not shown that dislike of lesbians and gay men translates into negative behavior. This article employs original survey data to examine the relationship between attitudes and behavior toward lesbians and gays among subsets of swor…
Identities and Politics
Social Science History - Volume 26, Number 3, Fall 2002
Identities and Politics
Critics of identity politics often wax polemically as they charge contemporary social movements with narrowly and naively engaging in essentialist politics based on perceived differences from the majority. Such essentialism, critics charge, inhibits coalition building (e.g., Phelan 1993; Kimmel 1993), cannot produce meaningful social change, and reinforces hegemonic and restrictive social categories (Seidman 1997). It is even responsible for the …
Queer Families, Queer Politics
1. Queer Families and the Politics of Visibility, by Mary Bernstein and Renate ReimannPart 1. Relationships 2. A Member of the Funeral, by Nancy Anne Naples3. Weddings Without Marriage: Making Sense of Lesbian and Gay Commitment Rituals, by Ellen Lewin4. We Can See Them, But We Can't Hear Them: LGBT Members of African American Families, by Michael Bennett and Juan Battle5. Talking Freaks: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Families on Daytim…
Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained? Conceptualizing Social Movement 'Success' in the Lesbian and Gay Movement
This article employs and expands a multidimensional framework for understanding movement effects that includes political, mobilization, and cultural outcomes. It compares lesbian and gay efforts to decriminalize sodomy between 1961 and 1977 and between 1986 and 1991 and examines the conditions under which activists strive for different sorts of goals. Because movement strategies are inextricably tied to what motivates activists-that is, their und…
Paths to homophobia
Product Review
Culture, Power, and Institutions
We argue that critiques of political process theory are beginning to coalesce into a new approach to social movements-a 'multi-institutional politics' approach. While the political process model assumes that domination is organized by and around one source of power, the alternative perspective views domination as organized around multiple sources of power, each of which is simultaneously material and symbolic. We examine the conceptions of social…
Identity Deployment and Social Change
In this article, we discuss the theoretical implications of empirical elaborations of model of identity deployment. New research encompasses a diverse array of venues and targets and elaborates on the mechanisms through which identities may be deployed strategically. Application of the identity deployment model spans a variety of so‐called ‘identity movements’ as well as ethnic, nationalist and indigenous movements, and community mobilization. Id…
The Blackwell Companion To Social Movements
What are You
This article uses the Hapa movement as a case study in order to provide a framework for understanding identity as a goal of social movements and to expand on a theoretical understanding of multiracial social movements. In contrast to current understandings of identity-based movements, this article argues that the Hapa movement seeks simultaneously to deconstruct traditional notions of (mono)racial identities and to secure recognition for a multir…
Sexual Citizenship and the Pursuit of Relationship-Recognition Policies in Australia and the United States
Sexual Citizenship and the Pursuit of Relationship-Recognition Policies in Australia and the United States Mary Bernstein (bio) and Nancy A. Naples (bio) Achieving the right to marry has arguably been the one of the most important agenda items for the U.S. lesbian and gay movement for more than a decade (Bernstein 2002; Eskridge 1996). In contrast, achieving same-sex marriage has not been central to the political agenda of lesbian and gay activis…
Gay Officers In Their Midst
While fear among gay men and lesbians about being out in a masculinist environment is not surprising, this article examines what heterosexuals expect will happen when gay men and lesbians come out. We draw on a unique dataset from a police department in the southwest United States to examine the consequences anticipated by heterosexual police department employees if a gay or lesbian officer's sexual orientation became known in the workplace. We t…
Power, politics and social movements
How important is the state as a locus of social change for Islamic movements whose goal is to promote Islam (Gurbuz and Bernstein 2012)? Why do multi-racial movements create collective responses to
The Sociology of Sexualities
Community Policing, Workplace Structure and Attitudes Toward Lesbians and Gay Men and their Civil Liberties
While criminal justice workplaces, such as the police and prisons, are noted for reproducing both gender inequality and inequality based on sexuality or sexual orientation, this paper examines whether reorganizing the workplace can alter those interactions and reduce inequality. We draw on survey data from a police department to theorize the likely impact of the move toward community policing and rehabilitative models of justice on the attitudes …
How the Right Usurped the Queer Agenda
This article draws on a case study of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender ( LGBT ) and queer politics in Vermont to explain the conditions under which radical discourse gains and loses a public voice. In contrast to claims that the marginalization of queer discourse is due to silencing by LGBT rights activists or to litigation strategies, we argue that variation in queer discourse over time is the result of the co‐optation of queer discourse …
The Meaning of Marriage to Same-Sex Families
Lesbian and gay male couples formalize romantic partnerships at different rates. These rates differ differently depending on national context, with female partnerships exceeding male partnerships in U.S. contexts, while gay male partnerships exceed lesbian partnerships in some European contexts, and rough parity is reached in Canada. Through a cross-national analysis of welfare regimes, partnership forms, and patterns of formal same-sex partnersh…
Altared States
In this article, we use comparative historical analysis to explain agenda-setting and the timing of policy outcomes on same-sex marriage in the United States, Canada, and Australia. Unlike the United States and Canada, Australia does not have a bill of rights, making litigation to obtain rights not enumerated in existing legislation unavailable to activists. Extending the literatures on the development of public policy and on political and histor…
Sociology (33 works) · Political science (28 works) · Law (27 works) · Politics (22 works) · Gender Studies (18 works) · Law (16 works) · Psychology (14 works) · Social movement (14 works) · Gender Studies (12 works) · Lesbian (10 works)