Activism and Emotion: the Rise of ACT UP

Cultivating the emotions needed to build and sustain a militant movement

• shifting the paradigm from shame to anger
• emergence of a new "queer identity"
• branding militant street activism
• replaced care giving, service access a lobbying (for treatments, etc.)
• 1980s and early 1990s

How was ACT UP radical?

• confronted mainstream "emotion culture"--disparages angry people, seeing it as chaotic, impulsive, irrational --should be transcended and is inappropriate in public discourse
• confronted the idea that democracy takes place in the voting boots and legislatures, NOT on the streets
• existed when other militant groups had disappeared or were on the decline (had to legitimize it for gays)
• had to overcome internal stigma of being gay (ambivalence)
• often encourages a "politics of respectability"
• 1970s marked by conservative gay movements and a rejection of activism

AIDS magnified the stigma of homosexuality, intensifying shame about sexual practices and anxieties about social rejection...emotions which helped to shape the response to AIDS.

ACT UP and the New Emotional Common Sense

• Anger: "Turn outrage into action"
• government policies of neglect
• irresponsible inaction of President Reagan 
• Indifference of elected officials
• at criminal hoarding of funds in govt agencis
• Part of the work of social movements is "emotion work"
• often less than fully consious 
• often the EFFECT of activities, but not the INTENTION of them
• Grief: corner stone of the experience of AIDS in the 80s
• AIDS Quilt-Names Project
• ACT UP highlighted the emotion of anger in the complicated emotion of grief surrounding AIDS
• start meetings with a moment of silence
• reframe the "meaning" of a death
• "turn your grief into anger and activism"
• government action labeled "genocidal" (angry at political context)
• Rhetoric of "Death"
• shift from death by "virus" to death by "government"
• protest governmental and drug agencies (blame)
• shift away from deviant sexual behavior which stigmatized them
• shift toward expressions of PRIDE

deviant behavior (shame)

deadly virus (fear)

government neglect (anger)

• AIDS changed perceptions about the gay community
• kind
• caring 
• nurturing
• strong
• proud

Re-Birth of Queer

• Queer-anger, oppositional politics, sex-radicalism (consolidating in movement)
• re-eroticized sex
• sex infused AIDS activism
• lesbians and gays united (temporarily) by their sex activism
• sexual and gender outlaws
• Emotions of Queer
• Jasper: "a collective identity is not simply the drawing of a cognitive boundary; most of all it is an emotion, a positive affect toward other group members on the grounds of that common membership. Defining oneself through a collective label entails an affective as well as cognitive mapping of the social world (1998:415)".
• reclaimed the term QUEER