Sex, death, and the politics of anger: Emotions and reason in ACT UP's fight against AIDS

This dissertation evaluates and rethinks standard social movement theory through an exploration of the emergence and development of the militant AIDS activist movement in the United States, ACT UP (AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power). I ask why lesbians and gay men became politically active in the face of AIDS and why they took to the streets after more than a decade of participation in routine interest group politics. ACT UP brought a new militance to lesbian and gay activism; it played a crucial role in the birth of a new "queer" generation that was angry, sexually radical, and committed to confrontational activism, and that continues to have widespread effects on lesbian and gay politics. Yet the origins, meteoric rise, and legacies of this movement have never received systematic scrutiny.;My research suggests, contrary to the dominant "political opportunity" model in the social movement literature, that ACT UP emerged despite, and, in fact, partially because of, constricted political opportunities. To explain its rise, and in the hopes of expanding social movement theory, I have explored a factor largely ignored by social movement scholars---emotions. I argue that lesbians and gay men historically have demonstrated a persistent ambivalence about their homosexuality and about dominant society; I show that this ambivalence has had significant political effects. Lesbians and gay men engage in conscious and unconscious efforts to "resolve" their ambivalence through the expression of emotions like shame, pride, fear, and anger. Such emotional statements, particularly those that become normative within a community, can actually alter how people feel. Amidst the AIDS crisis, lesbians' and gay men's emotional utterances affected their ambivalence about self and society and thereby influenced their responses to AIDS. I explore shifts in lesbian and gay understandings of and feelings about AIDS, and I demonstrate why and how their emotional utterances sometimes encouraged moderate responses, and at other times animated militant political activism. I argue that incorporating emotions into studies of social movements more generally is necessary in order to understand how people make sense of themselves and their worlds and why and how they decide to engage in collective political action.