As I wrote in my review, Deborah Gould offers us a valuable conceptual tool kit in Moving Politics with which to explore the role of affect and emotion in social movements. In her review of my book, she invites me to address these dimensions in my own account of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) activism in Brazil and Mexico.
Affect and emotion can undoubtedly play a determinative role in the course of social movements. As Gould suggests, early debates about alliances with leftist parties, for instance, were bitterly divisive within LGBT movements in both Brazil and Mexico, in the former case ultimately dividing the first and most important gay and lesbian group in the country, Somos/São Paulo, and in the latter, leading to the organization of competing LGBT pride marches on more than one occasion. Underlying these divisions were constellations of feelings that included a hope for social and political acceptance, strongly felt commitments to particular visions of social change, dynamics of shaming and mutual recrimination, and intense disappointment and anger at the homophobia rampant within the Left. Constructions of the national and the foreign also played into these dynamics. These were evident not only in leftist militants' common dismissals of activists' concerns as irrelevant to national priorities but also—in Brazil in particular, where an American activist living in the country played a central role in pushing for alliances with the Left—among activists who rejected such a strategy as an importation from abroad.
Indeed, so much of activism involves affective and emotional labor, whether it be in fostering intensities of feeling about particular issues or (more recently) in NGOs' efforts to transform people's relationship to sexuality and risk, that this dimension of mobilization can easily be taken for granted. At several points in my book, I consider moments of conflict and tension among activists, although Gould is correct in noting that I do not address affect and emotion as such in my analysis. This speaks primarily to the broader theoretical concerns that informed my work. When I wrote the book, most of existing literature on LGBT activism in these countries focused on dynamics, particularly conflicts, internal to movements themselves. One of my central concerns was thus to recast this relatively narrow focus by situating the story of activism within broader histories of changing institutional, political, and cultural terrains unfolding nationally and transnationally. In doing so, I may well have underplayed the affective dimension of these social changes.
That said, my work does share with Gould's an underlying concern with challenging narrow rationalist approaches in the social sciences. Thus, without denying the importance of strategic calculation for both activists and party militants at various points in the analysis, as Gould notes in her review, I also sought to trouble such approaches both by historicizing rationalities that are often taken as a given and by underscoring that rational calculation is always imbricated with a much messier story of desire, as actors coalesce around particular goals.
