Moving Politics

"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.