Moving Politics. Emotion and ACT UP's Fight Against AIDS

In this first book to analyse 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, humour, and intensities of activism; solidarity and its fracturing; and political dispair. Gould not only documents and disappearing history; she also plumbs that history with an eye toward opening imaginative possibilities for the present.