In 2011, Libya witnessed an explosion of political mobilization against the Gaddafi regime that was both peaceful and militarized. It combined armed struggle within Libya with the journalistic and humanitarian efforts of Libyans residing in diaspora communities. Nevertheless, the country presents a puzzling challenge to understanding the emergence of political participation. Unlike other ‘Arab Spring’ countries, it lacked a civil society, formal opposition, political parties and other evident hallmarks of a ‘democratization’ process (Brynen et.al, 1995; 1998). This points to the need to expand our understanding of how and why people participate politically under authoritarian settings, and of political agency more broadly speaking (Maiguashca and Marchetti, 2013). In this paper, I combine the analytical methods and theories of constructivist social movement research (Snow and Benford, 1988; 2000) with the semiotic view of culture and agency put forth by Gamson (1992) and Wedeen (1999), in order to understand the case of Libya. Drawing on over 30 interviews with Libyan activists, fighters and aid workers who participated in 2011 uprising, as well as extensive documentary analysis and archival research, this paper investigates the motives and rationales underpinning opposition to the Gaddafi regime. In line with social movement framing theories, I analyze the way in which diverse groups and individuals aligned and extended their understandings of the revolutionary event, thus constructing collective action frames that enabled a unified stance against the Gaddafi regime. However, this paper develops these insights further by emphasizing processes of meaning-making in the Libyan uprising, as challenges to power structures in and of themselves. I argue that what has been termed the ‘publically political’ self (Wedeen, 1999), emerged not only in strategic political action, but through the production of symbols and metaphors of resistance, in which the Gaddafi regime’s dominant understandings of the political sphere were subverted. In this respect, discursive framing in the uprising was as much a performance of political subjectivities, as it was a manifestation of strategic pragmatism. It was rooted in historical negotiations of power practices under the Gaddafi regime, at the same time as it drew on changing opportunities and constraints. This paper has important implications for locating the Arab Spring movements within the social movements literature, whose theories have significant scope for expansion and development. Equally, and by drawing attention to political agency, it helps to bridge the much-replicated and insufficient dichotomy between strategic and ideational motivations for political action.