Deborah Gould's volume is a beautifully written account of direct-action AIDS activism in the United States from its emergence in the mid-1980s through its decline in the early 1990s. The story of ACT UP, the central focus of the work, illuminates the complex history of both the AIDS epidemic and the political dynamics of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) communities at a key moment of transition. Founded during the conservative backlash of the Reagan era and active through the conservative turn in LGBT politics of the early Clinton years (with the prioritization of questions like military service), the group's confrontational tactics, radical discourse, and political successes prove something of an anomaly. Explaining this anomaly is Gould's central concern, and in doing so, she offers a compelling argument for the importance of addressing affect and emotion in the study of social movements, providing a carefully nuanced conceptual framework to do so.
Positing the need for an “affective ontology,” Gould introduces the notion of emotional habitus as a way to highlight the social dimensions of feeling. Focusing on dynamics both within ACT UP and in the larger society, she traces the affective and emotional undercurrents that permitted the emergence and subsequent decline of contentious AIDS activism. As she explains in the introduction, an emotional habitus operates through a kind of “emotional pedagogy,” beneath the level of consciousness, establishing a “template for what and how to feel,” naturalizing some feelings and inhibiting others (p. 34). Following Pierre Bourdieu, Gould is careful to recognize the stabilizing force of habitus, but the emotional habitus she describes is not static and closed but rife with tensions and in flux.
In Part I, for instance, the author analyzes the contradictory emotions that circulated in LGBT communities after the first reported cases of AIDS in the early 1980s, including pride, fear, grief, guilt, shame, a desire for acceptance, and an incipient anger, still too weak in its capacity to mobilize. Against this backdrop, the Supreme Court decision in Bowers v. Hardwick in 1986, which upheld states' authority to criminalize sodomy in starkly homophobic terms, came as a “moral shock” that fundamentally transformed the emotional habitus of LGBT communities, crystallizing anger at government inaction on AIDS and opening the emotional possibilities for a more contentious politics. Gould presents this constellation of feelings by weaving together interviews, movement documents, public speeches, and reports of the epidemic in both the LGBT and mainstream press. Indeed, her use of evidence is noteworthy not only for its breadth but also for the way she marshals it to reveal what is often difficult to register: repressed emotions, affective states, and foreclosed possibilities of action. She thus contrasts, for example, predominant community and activist responses to the few initial calls for civil disobedience in the early 1980s—discouraging such action, defending the government, and calling on people to reign in their anger—with those following Hardwick, which found a new resonance with the widespread outrage provoked by the case. In the year after Hardwick, activists founded ACT UP.
In Parts II and III of the book, Gould traces the “emotional work” performed by these activists, initially finding receptiveness to their demands and disruptive tactics; subsequently, less so. Another key turning point in this story is the election of Bill Clinton, which promised greater social acceptance for gays and lesbians, provided we behave. Indeed, while careful to avoid drawing a direct causal link between particular emotions and specific political tactics, the author elaborates a central tension throughout the book between a contentious, direct-action activism, fueled primarily by anger, and an activism that operates through established political institutions, reflecting (among other feelings) an ambivalent hope for social acceptance and a certain shame about gay/queer difference. Thus mapping a second transformation of the emotional habitus, she documents a growing chorus of political and LGBT community leaders who dismissed ACT UP's tactics as counterproductive, irrational, juvenile, or outdated.
In this inauspicious context, Gould also traces how, within the group, an omnipresent though generally unacknowledged grief over the rising death toll of family and friends and a growing despair about the chances of finding a cure undermined feelings of solidarity. Her distinction between affect and emotion is relevant here: the former, not free of social influences, but operating at the “nonconscious” level of bodily register, unspoken and unstructured; the latter, materialized as narrative and codified through social conventions. While the two are related—emotion, as Gould describes it, represents a sedimentation of affect—what is important about this distinction is the necessary slippage between the two. That is, while the narrative expression of emotion can capture something of affective states, this “capture” is necessarily partial and there is always excess. Attention to affect thus reveals the subtle influences of social forces escaping our consciousness. Against the affective backdrop of growing desperation and unspoken grief, she describes how sharpened divisions around race, gender, and HIV serostatus within the group fostered destructive dynamics of moralizing and shaming that contributed significantly to its demise.
Gould's focus on affect and emotion poses an important challenge to the rationalist biases of social movement theory, and her dialogue with rationalist approaches is one of the central theoretical contributions of the book. True, recent scholarship has moved beyond early studies' dismissals of social movements as a deviant expression of irrational masses. Yet the dominant models in contemporary social movement theory, with activists strategically mobilizing resources and deploying discursive frames in response to perceived political opportunities, tend to reduce the complexity of human experience to a matter of rational calculation and instrumental action.
What, then, can be gained by attention to affect and emotion in the study of social movements? I would suggest two important contributions of such an approach, both artfully illustrated in this work, before raising certain questions about Gould's dialogue with rationalist approaches and the possible limits of an affective ontology. First, attention to affect and emotion illuminates dimensions of politics obscured by rationalist assumptions. Preferences, for instance, so central to rationalist models, paradoxically represent a black box to them, taken as a given. An affective ontology sheds light on the social processes that produce our preferences, as in Gould's account of the “emotional work” done by activists. Similarly, while the literature on collective-action framing has underscored the variable resonance of different frames, the affective and emotional backdrop rendering some frames resonant and others not has been largely ignored. In both cases, an affective ontology avoids the trap of naturalizing our emotional attachments to our social world, rather examining their social construction. Second, beyond denaturalizing certain rationalist assumptions, the author's discussion of affect in particular reveals generally unrecognized social forces influencing our politics. Her account of the way that unacknowledged grief undermined the emotional work of solidarity building within ACT UP, for instance, points to the independent force of affect in shaping the course of activism.
I am generally sympathetic to Gould's challenge to rationalist assumptions and believe that Moving Politics offers a truly groundbreaking model of how to incorporate emotion and affect into the study of social movements. That said, there are moments when I believe she overstates her challenge to these approaches, in part reflecting a somewhat problematic boundary around the category of “social movement” itself. In discussing the Hardwick decision's impact on the rise of direct-action AIDS activism, for example, she argues that “[her] findings are exactly opposite those of political-opportunity theorists in that, in this instance, the further constriction in political opportunities actually encouraged political action and the formation of a movement” (p. 167). I would question whether the author is actually talking about the emergence of a new movement here or about an existing movement's embrace of new tactics. The foil to ACT UP's civil disobedience throughout the book is comprised of various forms of political agency that do not challenge prevailing political norms: AIDS services organizations, peaceful candlelight vigils, activists working with rather than challenging the scientific establishment, and so on. In fact, the literature on political opportunity structures has focused considerably on social movements' changing strategies as they approach the state, often highlighting processes of institutionalization, “NGOization,” and co-optation. While Gould's work, in a sense, inverts this story, pointing to the activists' initial break with prevailing institutional norms (before their subsequent return to them), her findings are arguably very much in keeping with a political-opportunity structure model that would predict a more contentious activism when institutional alternatives are closed.
The point is worth noting because it also suggests possible limits of an affective ontology. A central contention of the book is that emotion is always an important dimension of activism and that activism is always in flux. Recalling Max Weber's discussion of the routinization of charisma, one might question the long-term sustainability of the emotional work required for direct-action activism, particularly given the prejudices against disruptive tactics in US society noted by Gould. Moreover, taking the case of more institutionalized modes of activism or the routinization of activism reflected, say, in going to work every day at a nongovernmental organization, one could certainly ask whether affect and emotion operate in the same way or even carry the same weight. Again, I do not mean to dismiss the importance of affect and emotion or deny the significant contributions of this impressive work but, rather, perhaps to push the analysis a bit further by asking more broadly when, why, and how these factors might come into play.
