Moving Politics

Description

In the late 1980s, after a decade spent engaged in more routine interest-group politics, thousands of lesbians and gay men responded to the AIDS crisis by defiantly and dramatically taking to the streets. But by the early 1990s, the organization they founded, ACT UP, was no more—even as the AIDS epidemic raged on. Weaving together interviews with activists, extensive research, and reflections on the author’s time as a member of the organization, Moving Politics is the first book to chronicle the rise and fall of ACT UP, highlighting a key factor in its trajectory: emotion. Surprisingly overlooked by many scholars of social movements, emotion, Gould argues, plays a fundamental role in political activism. From anger to hope, pride to shame, and solidarity to despair, feelings played a significant part in ACT UP’s provocative style of protest, which included raucous demonstrations, die-ins, and other kinds of street theater. Detailing the movement’s public triumphs and private setbacks, Moving Politics is the definitive account of ACT UP’s origin, development, and decline as well as a searching look at the role of emotion in contentious politics.

Description

"In this first book to analyze the emergence, development, and decline of the direct-action AIDS movement ACT UP, Deborah B. Gould explores a factor that only recently has entered the sights of social movement scholars and is still largely ignored in the social sciences in general: emotion. An inquiry into the affective stimuli and blockages to political activism, Moving Politics provides an in-depth analysis of the emotional dimensions of contentious politics. Weaving together interviews with activists, extensive research, and reflections on the author's time as a member of ACT UP, Moving Politics explores political imaginaries and their conditions of possibility; the psychic effects of oppression; ambivalence and activism; social movements as sites of collective world-making; the erotics, humor, and intensities of activism; solidarity and its fracturing; and political despair. Gould not only documents a disappearing history; she also plumbs that history with an eye toward opening imaginative possibilities for the present."--Back cover.

Subjects

Other Editions

• Moving Politics: Emotion and the Fight Against AIDSThe University of Chicago Press2009-01-01
• Moving PoliticsUniversity of Chicago Press2009-01-01
• Moving PoliticsUniversity of Chicago Press2010-01-01