A Gendered Organizational Analysis of the ... - Campus Activism

gay rights stance (and a Queer Caucus), its role in the struggle against heterosexism, both as a tool of sexism and
an evil of its own accord, is a critical organizational element. Focusing on gender narrows the scope of this
investigation, but also blunts its applicability by theorizing a false equality of all women. Unfortunately this may
be an unavoidable necessity, since, for instance, analyzing race in SEAC would be a major endeavor. Acker’s
focus on the ‘job’ and methods of job evaluation is not that useful for my analysis of SEAC, which has many
undefined or poorly defined positions.
Mats and Billing (1997) complicate Acker’s theory with their example of a Swedish advertising agency
which in some aspects follows untraditional feminine values and whose workers claim to work in a liberated
environment, but it also shows signs of being gendered male (sex segregation, objectification of women). Like
the advertising agency, SEAC shows a tension between being gendered male in some aspects and female in
others.
Background on SEAC
SEAC was formed in 1988 by a group of students from UNC Chapel-Hill who put an advertisement in
Greenpeace magazine about starting a national student environmental organization and received two hundred
replies. Students organized a series of very successful conferences (national and regional), the largest of which
drew 7600 students to University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1991. Since then SEAC has become the
largest grassroots progressive student organization in the United States, with approximately a thousand groups,
had as many as a dozen concurrent staff members, published a national magazine, organized campaigns, held
trainings, and held many conferences. In 1995 SEAC experienced an internal crisis, lost all of its funding, its
entire staff, and closed the national office. Since then SEAC has partially recovered – though the national office
is a shell of what it once was.
Methodology
I first became involved with SEAC in the fall of 1996 when I got an email about a regional
environmental conference in PA from some organization that I had never heard of (SEAC) and drove ten hours
from Indiana to attend. The conference was very impressive. I attended the following spring conference and
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