In the last three decades, theories of social movements have descended from the lofty ether of political opportunities and post-industrial society to observable actions on the ground. From the grand comparative angle of a scholar hovering slightly above the earth, research now reflects the lived experience, the points of view and the feelings, the desires and projects of political participants themselves. Rather than attributing objective interests to them, we look at the goals that protestors themselves articulate. This convergence has reached the point that many scholars believe they can do academic research and engaged activism at the same time.

The final landing spot for this descent to earth might be the human body, with the phenomenological recognition that all action entails bodies, not only as subjects and as objects but also as something that is not quite either one. Bodies provide reasons for action, the means of action, as well as being the site where action occurs. This attention to the embodied practices of protest began with feminism, even though feminists’ concerns to show the universality of patriarchy often led them to gloss over differences among bodies beyond that of male-female.

In the 1990s queer theory and related endeavours vastly extended this work, with a proliferation of research into physical desires, tattoos and other body modifications, understandings of illness and disability, and the staging, choreography, and performance of protest. Many of the protests that have been studied are about control over sexuality, from slut walks to Egypt's notoriously abused ‘girl in the blue bra’. Others, including foremost the worldwide gay pride events, are about de-stigmatising collective identities. Some use the vulnerability of the human body to demand human rights and respect, as in the naked protests that have proliferated around the world. Activists have always invented creative ways to use the human body as a political platform.

The sweaty, messy details of individual and collective protest have never been so well documented as they are today. This completes a long arc since the 19th century (although stretching back much further): the bodily passions of crowds back then were used to dismiss protestors as bestial and irrational, incapable of the sophisticated discourse necessary to participate in democratic politics. Middle-class commentators were both dismissive and afraid of urban, working-class crowds.