Sites of contestation: How framing tensions shape feminist organizing

Social justice movements are often portrayed as unified, yet they are frequently shaped by internal tensions over meaning, priorities, and strategies for action. While Frame Theory recognizes that collective action frames are contested, existing research has tended to model framing as a relatively stable and linear process. This article examines how framing tensions operate as generative dynamics within feminist organizing rather than as obstacles to collective action. Drawing on transcripts of five multistakeholder roundtable discussions involving 35 actors in Lebanon’s women’s empowerment movement, we analyze how feminist actors navigate difference across organizational, political, and transnational contexts. We conceptualize frames as framings: recursive, relational, and epistemic processes through which collective meaning is produced in and through struggle. Building on this perspective, we introduce two analytic tools, sites of contestation and diagnosis-based prognosis, to capture how framing tensions are articulated and transformed through interaction. Our analysis shows that these tensions unfold differently across spaces and sites of contestation and along three epistemic axes: temporality; transnationality and localness; and reflexivity. Together, these dynamics shape how collective action strategies emerge, stabilize, and shift. We contribute to Critical Management Studies by conceptualizing organizing as a dynamic process in which intra-movement tensions are constitutive of political struggle and transformation. For social movement scholarship, the study advances a microprocessual understanding of framing by foregrounding the spatial, relational, and scalar conditions through which collective action becomes possible.