Repeated Remembrance: Commemorating the AIDS Quilt and Resuscitating the Mourned Subject

This essay examines the twentieth anniversary of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt as a moment of doubled memorialization through which the nation's relationship to AIDS and homosexuality is renegotiated. Considering both the processes of national identity formation and the constitution of subjectivity and subject positions, I contend that a "mourned subject" position is produced by the discourses of the Quilt and is necessary to a specific national identity forged in relation to AIDS. That is, as we remember the origins of the Quilt project, the "mourned subject"—a position through which gay men were granted social recognition and therefore a certain kind of agency during the early years of the AIDS crisis, but from which legitimate mourning and militant activism were prohibited—is reconstituted. Ultimately, by considering the possibilities for developing activism through mourning and/or militancy, I suggest that the commemoration of the Quilt conserves a limiting form of social recognition that severely constrains its potential as a site for activating social change.