Dramatic Protests, Creative Communities: VVAW and the Expressive Politics of the Sixties Counterculture

This article locates the Vietnam Veterans Against the War ( VVAW ) within the context of the sixties counterculture. More specifically, it explores how VVAW 's membership adopted an expansive definition of politics that relied on cultural forms such as guerrilla theater and community activism to convey their antiwar message. In the past, scholars have subdivided sixties protest into the categories of “expressive” and “instrumental” activism. This essay adds to the growing scholarship of the “long sixties” and challenges the division of protest into these two categories using VVAW to reveal the porous nature of cultural/expressive and political/instrumental activism. It illustrates how activists took advantage of this cross‐pollinating tendency to cultivate creative forms of protest that transcended the narrow boundaries separating hippies from politicos, and how VVAW 's cultural politics gave rise to a unique antiwar veterans' culture premised on dramatic street theater, experimental self‐healing, and a deep suspicion of centralized authority.