In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Feeling Our Way Toward a History of ACT UP
  • Colin R. Johnson (bio)
Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight against AIDS. Deborah B. Gould. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. xii + 524 pages.

As the sociologist Deborah B. Gould notes in the introduction to Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight against AIDS, there is something bittersweet about feeling historical. For Gould, and surely for many of the people who will read her book, this is especially true when what occasions such mixed feelings is a reflection on the heady heyday of AIDS-related organizing and activism during the late 1980s and early 1990s, particularly the angry, ingenious, often gorgeously outlandish mass-protest movement known as the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power, or ACT UP.

On the one hand, it has been more than twenty years since ACT UP first started making trouble by shutting down Wall Street in protest over murderously slow Food and Drug Administration (FDA) drug approval processes and pharmaceutical industry profiteering. As such, some scholarly attention to ACT UP’s profoundly significant place in the history of modern lesbian and gay experience in the United States is probably long overdue. Yet, as Gould rightly points out, consigning ACT UP and everything it represents to the past — treating it as a movement whose time has simply come and gone — somehow feels alarmingly premature given the fact that, as recently as 2008, the Centers for Disease Control were still reporting somewhere in the neighborhood of fifteen thousand AIDS- related deaths and just under sixty thousand new HIV diagnoses per year in the United States alone.

For better or for worse, Moving Politics does nothing to quiet or resolve these conflicted feelings. What it does do, however, is meld an admirable if somewhat uneven survey of the history of ACT UP’s rise and fall with a provocative, often poignant analysis of the crucially important role that affect and emotion play in motivating social and political engagement generally. To be a bit more specific, Gould’s project in Moving Politics is to figure out what makes social and political engagement feel urgent. She does this by tracking what she refers to as lesbians’ [End Page 432] and gay men’s shifting “emotional habitus” during the 1980s and 1990s — an obvious and avowed renovation of Pierre Bourdieu’s famous concept, and one that most readers will undoubtedly find extremely serviceable following what many are already referring to as the “affective turn.” Just as notably, though, and of particular importance where the lamentably brief history of ACT UP is concerned, Gould also helps us understand what makes social and political engagement feel unimaginable, impossible, or simply more than we can bear.

Gould organizes her study into three sections corresponding to three distinct periods: 1981 to early 1987, the period following HIV’s emergence as a national health crisis in the United States but preceding ACT UP’s coalescence as a truly national phenomenon; 1987 to 1991, the short yet tumultuous period during which multiple ACT UP chapters were active throughout the United States and beyond; and 1992 to today, a fractious period during which Gould contends internal divisions and simple exhaustion led first to ACT UP’s demise and then to a more general decline in contentious politicking. In most cases, I would consider such precise periodization slightly suspicious and therefore something to pick at. For the purposes of Gould’s study, however, it actually makes a great deal of sense, given the fact that one of the questions she seeks to address in the book is why lesbians and gay men remained comparatively well-behaved (if profoundly grief-stricken) during the epidemic’s early years only to turn around in March 1987 and launch a direct-action protest movement that burned so incandescently with anger and righteous indignation that it arguably self-immolated within just a few short years.

Gould’s answer — that the U.S. Supreme Court’s Bowers v. Hardwick ruling functioned as a final straw that left many lesbians and gay men feeling as if they had nothing left to lose by pointing an accusatory finger (often the middle one) at a callous marketplace...

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