Performing marginality: Identity and efficacy in the plowshares nuclear disarmament movement

The dissertation is a study of a small group of American Catholic activists who, since 1980, have periodically drawn their own blood, trespassed onto sites where nuclear equipment is manufactured or stored, and poured the blood over the equipment as a way to effect "symbolic disarmament." Believing themselves to be enacting a Biblical role, the Plowshares claim the status of outsiders, considering society's margins to be the only place where prophetic witness can occur. Through analysis of the Plowshares' rhetoric, accounts of their civil disobedience actions, and trial transcripts, the dissertation examines how the Plowshares rhetorically and performatively undertake the boundary work necessary to protect their theologically imperative claim to marginality. In the context of how the centers and margins of the American religious landscape have shifted over the movement's three decades, the dissertation asks how the Plowshares shore up symbolic and social boundaries around their margin in order to retain it as an orienting value; how their ways of doing so reflect a particular moment in American Catholicism and, in turn, the generational character of the movement; and what their boundary work suggests about the changing contours, and the future, of the movement. The dissertation argues that groups like the Plowshares, for whom boundary work is not merely attendant to but at the very heart of what it means to be religious, problematize dominant narratives of American religious history as well as theories of religious group strength that are based on factors that an emphasis on authentic commitment to certain values may counter.