Remembering+the+AIDS+quilt


 * The mourning after. (xxxvii-xix) - Charles E. Morris III**

Morris historicizes the AIDS quilt by situating it within three different time passages. In the first period, which he labels "yesterday", he situates the Quilt with the mourning taking place for AIDS victims in the '80s. He also briefly outlines the criticisms of the Quilt and the ways in which the project has responded to these criticisms. In his section about "Today," Morris explains how little the battle against the AIDS epidemic has progressed in the past decades. He also gives insight into the tensions around thinking about the Quilt as a site of ritual mourning and activism as well as the controversies surrounding the NAMES Project. Finally, Morris asks what role remembrance will play in both the future of the Quilt and the fight against AIDS.


 * From San Francisco to Atlanta and back again: ideologies of mobility in the AIDS Quilt's search for a homeland. (161-186). D.C. Brouwer.**

promiscuous mobility -circulating vigorously and endlessly in order to achieve political and pedagogical goals (p. 165)

San Francisco as queer homeland rather than capital (p. 167)

Brouwer examines the roles that homeland, place, and mobility played in the movement of the Quilt from San Francisco to Atlanta, as well as the firing of Cleve Jones.


 * How to have history in an epidemic. (261-296). K. Pearson.**

"How do activists appropriate a past that is not commonly shared?" (p. 263)

Pearson urges the reader to consider the AIDS Quilt as a symbol of progression rather than progress. Thinking of it as a progression is similar to Heather Love's notion of "backward feeling." For Love "'backwardness' ... [is] both a queer historical structure of feeling and a model of historiography" (p. 287). Temporality is at the crux of Pearson's argument about the history of the AIDS Quilt, and history //and// the Quilt. According to Pearson "temporality ...[is] a key rhetorical feature in AIDS activism" (p. 286). Although the chapter focuses on the ways in which the Quilt disrupts or resists straight or normative temporal understanding of AIDS, Pearson waits until the last few pages to bring up Heather Love's argument. Pearson emphasizes that history is unstable and ever-changing. The Quilt, as both memorial and activism sits within many competing histories about the AIDS crisis and AIDS activism.

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