Institutional Allyship for LGBT Equality: Underlying Processes and Potentials for Change

Abstract

Discussions of outgroup activism in support of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) equality reflect two shortcomings. First, such discussions generally present uncritically positive views of ally activism; second, research on ally activism has overly focused on individual allies. The aim of this article is twofold: to suggest that action toward LGBT equality may often be influenced by sexual prejudice and may thus recapitulate longstanding power dynamics between majority and sexual minority groups, and to expand our understanding of ally behavior beyond individuals by presenting an ethnographic study exploring the development of institutional ally identity in a mainstream church that underwent a marked shift from an explicit anti‐LGBT to an expressly LGBT‐supportive stance. The study employed critical discourse analysis to examine interview, textual, and participant‐observation data. Dimensions of individual and institutional ally activism, and potential pitfalls in each, are explored. Suggestions for promoting more constructive collective action are offered.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 78 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.