| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Dividends of Dissent: How Conflict and Culture Work in Lesbian and Gay Marches on Washington. By Amin Ghaziani. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. xxiv, 419 pp. Cloth, $80.00, ISBN 978-0-226-28995-3. Paper, $25.00, ISBN 978-0-226-28996-0.)

Amin Ghaziani's study of four lesbian and gay marches on Washington (in 1979, 1987, 1993, and 2000) has much to offer sociologists as well as historians of social movements, cultural history, and queer history. The sociological objectives of the study are two-fold: to reevaluate "infighting" or dissent in social movements as productive, not simply debilitating; and to conceptualize "culture" less as a "cloud" swirling around political actors but more concretely as "symbolic-expressive, meaning-making processes" that "influence what people think and how they act" (p. xiv). These two goals converge in the study of the four marches. Ghaziani breaks down the complex work involved in the staging of a political march and along the way brings into sharp focus the role infighting played in articulating changes in the political moment and in the ways gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered (GLBT) participants and organizers defined themselves. Ghaziani defines infighting as "a subtype of conflict that specifically carries concerns of strategy and identity" and, as such, is best understood as a useful if uncomfortable expression of "divergent meaning systems" or "centers of local contention between rival cliques in a challenge for power, limited resources, and public image" (p. 18). The dividends of dissent, he argues, lie in "activists' use of infighting to engage in another conversation, an abstract one that allows activists to converge on shared meanings of political organizing" (p. 20).

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