ALSA 2025 meeting

This paper examines how the risk of institutional oppression influences expressions within legal mobilization in authoritarian environments, and how these affected expressions, in turn, contribute to or undermine the emergence, continuation, and development of such mobilization. Building upon collective action frame theory, this study investigates different forms of expressions in China's campus anti-sexual harassment legal mobilization. It finds that participants' expressions are a hybrid of three types: dispute-resolving oriented expressions (DROE), future-promoting oriented expressions (FPOE), and assertive expressions (AE). These three forms of expressions serve distinct functions and incur different risks. Individuals' perceptions of rights influence how much they express, while their perceptions of oppression risk affect what they express. When the perceived risk of oppression is high, participants suppress and reduce FPOE, and either refrain from expressing or even critically denounce allying AE. This leads to the deliberate avoidance of resonance within the collective action frame and the renouncing of frame bridging, ultimately causing the spontaneous dissolution of legal mobilization even in the absence of overt conflict. Because even the mere anticipation of the risk of oppression can cause individuals to alter their expressions, this dissolution is often invisible, representing the reproduction of an invisible form of social control within the group.