Deborah Gould’s piece, “The Emotion Work of Movements”, looks at the ways in which the AIDS activism of ACT UP challenged notions of how displays of emotion should and can be used to accomplish the goals of a movement. Gould draws attention to how ACT UP redirected feelings of shame about homosexuality to government shame over its handling of the AIDS crisis. Or, as Gould writes, how “…ACT UP harnessed grief to anger and both feelings to confrontational action.” (223).
Divisions within AIDS activism and competing ways of utilizing emotion within the movement to ensure impact and sustainability are detailed by Gould as it relates to organizing and taking a more militant stance. One example of this that stood out to me is when Gould mentions the mixed emotions of AIDS activists towards the memorial quilt, a display of activism which is compared to the holding of political funerals for those who died of AIDS. While many activists note that being able to grieve is necessary, the quilt represents a sort of sanitized version of the reality of those who were affected during the crisis.The quilt thus can be said to represent a form of “acceptable” grieving, as the reality of death is stripped away and there is no disruption in the form of protests and political funeral processions. Gould then references the call for spreading the ashes of those who had died on the lawn of the White House — an act which directly contrasts the example of the quilt in terms of its unwillingness to ignore the reality of the situation and to separate anger from grief.
Moreover, Gould explores how ACT UP essentially “authorized” fury suppressed by shame in a way that “…harnessed and subordinated grief to anger…” so that “grief could hardly be felt as something other than anger.” (235).