Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP's Fight Against AIDS (review)

In Moving Politics, Gould conducts a multi-sited historical examination of the rise and fall of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power by integrating the work of emotions scholars with problems and questions from social movement studies. In doing so, this book expands on the emotional turn in sociology, offering a refreshing corrective to the overly rationalistic explanations that have dominated movement studies for the past several decades. By examining the relationship between politics and emotions in the case of ACT UP, Gould makes it clear that it is impossible to understand movements without considering the social role of emotions in political activism.

In particular, she examines the relation between socio-political contexts and emotional habitus — the embodied, partly un/conscious emotional disposition of a group — to empirically explain the emergence, maintenance and dissipation of ACT UP. Although the language of "mechanism" is not invoked, certainly emotional habitus are useful mechanisms for explaining how factors previously identified by movement scholars actually drive mobilization. This allows Gould to address how ACT UP emerges despite, and possibly because of, constrained political opportunities. In addition, she is able to demonstrate how the structure of the gays' and lesbians' emotional habitus contributes to the success or failure of various frames at different points in time. More proximally, emotional habitus is used to explain how political horizons, or group attitudes about political possibilities and necessities, are excluded or established and maintained over time.

Gould analyzes the emergence, rise and fall of ACT UP by observing changes in the emotional habitus of queer communities over time. The first section complicates conventional narratives about early AIDS activism by asking why gays and lesbians did not take part in action-based demonstrations earlier, particularly given the obvious apathy of the state towards AIDS, and angry calls to action from some community members. Pre-AIDS communities were already structured by an emotional habitus of ambivalence, balancing gay liberation-based pride in the community's distinction from the mainstream, and shame-based desire to be accepted and supported by hetero-normative society. Gould construes the service and care work performed by the community as a performance of the politics of respectability — this work signaled to the mainstream that gays and lesbians were "good" citizens capable of caring for their own. The affective state of ambivalence — pride and shame-based desire — was amplified by this care work.

It was not until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Georgia's anti-sodomy statutes against homosexual sex (but not heterosexual sex) in Bowers v. Hardwick (1986) that the emotional habitus of queer communities began to shift. Gay and lesbian ambivalence was destabilized by the moral shock and indignation provoked by the ruling. Section two elaborates on the role of emotions and affect in sustaining ACT UP from 1987 to 1990. The humor, outlet for venting intense anger and grief, and even the erotic potential of ACT UP meetings and activities are described as key reasons that many people in the gay and lesbian community stayed with ACT UP over the years. The final section describes the decline of ACT UP as a movement. Although conflicts over tactics, strategies and key issues were present for the duration of ACT UP, they did not threaten movement sustainability until the gay and lesbian emotional habitus shifted once again. There were concerns that the movement was being misdirected toward other social justice issues and that activists who had gained privileged access to the scientific community were not doing enough for women and people of color with AIDS. This internal clash of interests led to moralizing and shaming between actors within the movement. In the context of accumulated despair that activists felt in the face of mounting AIDS deaths and greater tolerance of gays and lesbians by hetero-normative society, the movement crumbled.

Moving Politics is a substantial empirical and theoretical work that is sure to be thought provoking for seasoned scholars and...