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Fifteen plus years into the 'emotional turn' in the study of contentious politics, the question is no longer 'do emotions matter' but rather 'do emotions evernotmatter?' Or, stated positively, can we grasp the phenomena that we group together under the name of collective political action without paying attention to feelings, emotions, affect? As others have argued, the factors that social movement scholars deem important for mobilisation – e.g. political opportunities, organisations, frames – have force precisely because of the feelings that they elicit, stir up, amplify, or dampen. We turn towards emotion, then, in order to understand the workings of the key concepts in the field. In addition, we need to explore feelings because they often are a primary catalyst or hindrance to political mobilisation, attenuating the role of other factors. Then there are the many other aspects of collective political action, beyond the question of mobilisation per se, where emotions play important roles, from ideological struggles to alliance formation to activist rituals to collective identity formation to community building. So, again, are emotions ever unimportant, are they ever a simply trivial aspect of what happens in and around contentious politics? Historians of emotion might take the argument further. If, as Rosenwein argues, 'emotions are about things judged important to us',2if emotions are indications of what matters, of what is valued and devalued, how can scholars interested inanyaspect of social lifenotconsider emotions?

Focusing on the street AIDS activist movement ACT UP, this article explores the question of social movement sustainability. Emotions figure centrally in two ways. First, I argue that the emotion work of movements, largely ignored by scholars, is vital to their ability to develop and thrive over time. I investigate the ways AIDS activists nourished and extended an "emotional common sense" that was amenable to their brand of street activism, exploring, for example, the ways in which ACT UP marshaled grief and tethered it to anger; reoriented the object of gay pride away from community stoicism and toward gay sexual difference and militant activism; transformed the subject and object of shame from gay shame about homosexuality to government shame about its negligent response to AIDS; and gave birth to a new "queer" identity that joined the new emotional common sense, militant politics, and sexradicalism into a compelling package that helped to sustain the movement. Second, I investigate the emotions generated in the heat of the action that also helped the street AIDS activist movement flourish into the early 1990s.

Examines factors promoting gay & lesbian involvement in militant public activism against acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) in the late 1980s & compares this participation to their earlier, more conventional engagement in interest-group politics. It is argued that the AIDS issue aroused intense emotions that shook gays out of their previous ambivalence toward issues related to their sexuality & their roles in society. External political opportunity factors are linked to internal emotional factors to explain homosexual political mobilization surrounding AIDS & gays' willingness to actively & militantly take their battle into the streets; illustrative examples are offered from Chicago (IL), San Francisco (CA), & New York City. A case study is offered of the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power (ACT UP), the predominant organization of militant gays & lesbians against AIDS, detailing factors that led to its emergence & evolution. Implications for social movement theory in general, particularly regarding the salience of emotional factors, are discussed. K. Hyatt Stewart

Examines factors promoting gay & lesbian involvement in militant public activism against acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) in the late 1980s & compares this participation to their earlier, more conventional engagement in interest-group politics. It is argued that the AIDS issue aroused intense emotions that shook gays out of their previous ambivalence toward issues related to their sexuality & their roles in society. External political opportunity factors are linked to internal emotional factors to explain homosexual political mobilization surrounding AIDS & gays' willingness to actively & militantly take their battle into the streets; illustrative examples are offered from Chicago (IL), San Francisco (CA), & New York City. A case study is offered of the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power (ACT UP), the predominant organization of militant gays & lesbians against AIDS, detailing factors that led to its emergence & evolution. Implications for social movement theory in general, particularly regarding the salience of emotional factors, are discussed. K. Hyatt Stewart

It is a pleasure to respond to such a thoughtful and insightful review of Moving Politics. Let me begin with Rafael de la Dehesa's suggestion that I may have overstated my challenge to the political opportunity model of social movement emergence. In arguing for the importance of bringing emotion into our analyses, I state that the task is not to consider feelings in isolation but rather as they articulate with more frequently studied factors that shape activism and movements, including political opportunities. Because feelings always play out in contexts, attention to them necessitates attention to the larger contexts in and through which they emerge and operate. In my view, one of the crucial insights that scholars in the political opportunity tradition make is that the larger political environment is a critical factor in movement emergence; we disagree, I believe, in our understandings of how that external context matters. The model's emphasis on the necessity of opening political opportunities for movement emergence, conveyed in its proponents' programmatic statements and suggested by the model's very name, precludes instances when movements arise in the face of tightly constricting opportunities, as occurred in the case of the AIDS movement. Even if, as de la Dehesa suggests, we were to understand ACT UP's emergence as an example of an existing movement shifting to more confrontational tactics in the face of institutional intransigence, the political opportunity model still comes up short: when the AIDS movement emerged in the early 1980s, AIDS and lesbian and gay activists faced tightly constricted opportunities. In light of the model's limitations, and after sorting through mountains of empirical material that revealed a dramatic shift in the prevailing emotional habitus in lesbian and gay communities during the period of ACT UP's emergence, it seemed like a focus on emotion would help illuminate how the external political environment affects movement processes.

Focusing on the street AIDS activist movement ACT UP, this article explores the question of social movement sustainability. Emotions figure centrally in two ways. First, I argue that the emotion work of movements, largely ignored by scholars, is vital to their ability to develop & thrive over time. I investigate the ways AIDS activists nourished & extended an "emotional common sense" that was amenable to their brand of street activism, exploring, eg, the ways in which ACT UP marshaled grief & tethered it to anger; reoriented the object of gay pride away from community stoicism & toward gay sexual difference & militant activism; transformed the subject & object of shame from gay shame about homosexuality to government shame about its negligent response to AIDS; & gave birth to a new "queer" identity that joined the new emotional common sense, militant politics, & sex-radicalism into a compelling package that helped to sustain the movement. Second, I investigate the emotions generated in the heat of the action that also helped the street AIDS activist movement flourish into the early 1990s. 63 References. Adapted from the source document.

Queer-feminist engagements aim at transforming sexualized, gendered, classed, and racialized regimes. Given the current turn in the humanities and social sciences towards affect and emotions, how crucial is (reworking) affect for this endeavor and how does affect work in these contexts? Are affects and emotions spontaneous and unruly or are they molded by historically and socially specific dynamics and codes of intelligibility? In what ways are the social, the economic, and the political created, enforced or transformed, for example, by anger, despair, shame, or pleasure? This event interrogated queering affect as work, as something that works, and as something that we can work with.Marie-Luise Angerer is professor for media and cultural studies at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. Her research and publications focus on affect and media technologies as well as on the entanglement of representation and materiality. Deborah Gould is associate professor of sociology at UC Santa Cruz, currently working on a project that looks at political affinities and reciprocities across chasms of difference. She was involved in ACT UP/Chicago for many years and is a founding member of the research/art/activism collaborative group, Feel Tank Chicago. Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodriguez is professor of sociology at the University Gießen. In her research and publications she engages with questions of the local face of global inequalities, queer-feminist decolonial epistemology, and critical intersectional approaches to migration and diaspora studies. ; Reworking Affect Queer-Feminist Engagements , workshop, ICI Berlin, 27 June 2013

Rafael de la Dehesa has written an empirically rich and analytically nuanced book that explores the rise and development of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) activist engagements with the state in Brazil and Mexico. The two cases are ideal for comparative analysis: Movements in both countries emerged under semiauthoritarian regimes and operated as their countries transitioned to democracy, but the paths they took show striking differences, allowing de la Dehesa to argue forcefully for the importance of the local and the contingent as activists navigate the national and transnational fields in which they are embedded. As the concept of embeddedness warrants, even while pointing toward the importance of the particular and the agentic, de la Dehesa carefully shows as well how constrained, and enabled, activists were by the multiple fields in which they operated. Queering the Public Sphere in Mexico and Brazil, then, successfully charts an analytical course that recognizes the powerful but nontotalizing nature of institutions, economic forces, and discourses.