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Interaction Patterns
Patterns of Domination and Patterns of Resistance
From: The Power Manual
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Interaction Patterns, highlights the thinking of Audre Lorde, Roland Barthes, and Franz Fanon. Lorde identified difference as the key factor that triggers power dynamics, or unequal interactions. Barthes brilliantly revealed that underneath all the various ways that one can assert dominant power (such as racism, sexism, classism), there are actually seven basic dominant interaction patterns, and they are so much a part of rational thinking that they may at first seem benign. They are tolerance, objectification, assimilation, authority, objectivity, accumulation, and certainty. Luckily, Fanon showed that there are also patterns of resistance — sign reading (the ability to see signs of domination), deconstruction (the ability to understand the relationships between signs of domination and the narratives they create that drive interactions), and reconstruction (the ability to rearrange the signs to tell a new, more mutual story).
Contributors
Cyndi Suarez
Cyndi Suarez works with leaders in nonprofit organizations, philanthropy, and social movements, including most recently the Movement for Black Lives. She helps social change leaders move from struggle to flow by helping them build elegant ideas and structures. She has a MS in Nonprofit Management from Southern New Hampshire University, and studied Feminist Theory at the New School for Social Research. Suarez is Senior Editor at Nonprofit Quarterly, the leading nonprofit journal. She lives in Boston, MA.
