Disposable Media, Expendable Populations – ACT UP New York: Activism, Art, and the AIDS Crisis, 1987–1993

Weiner, Andrew

doi:10.1177/1470412911430584

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…However, scholars from these disciplines have started to catch up on this delay and contributed to a recent wave of publications. Adding to some articles (Doerr , Doerr and Teune , Hajek , Howell , Lim , Lotfalian , Morrison and Isaac , Philipps , Teune , Tripp , Weiner ) and books (Khatib , Streeby ), three special issues have been published in the past few years that address the role visuals play in social movements. In 2009, Kevin DeLuca and Joe Wilferth compiled an issue for the online journal Enculturation on image events and visual activism.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Visions of Protest. A Media‐Historic Perspective on Images in Social Movements

Mattoni

Teune

2014

Sociology Compass

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Social movements and the messages they wish to spread are essentially visual phenomena. Although this is both an obvious and momentous assertion, social movement research has been hesitant to integrate visual data. Until lately, most insights into the use of images in social movements originated from historical and media studies. This contribution presents the recent surge in literature devoted to the visual analysis of social movements. It focuses on activists' practices of image production and distribution under certain media‐historic constellations. In this perspective, the current opportunities to create and spread images of dissent are contrasted with previous appropriations of technical possibilities from early print to electronic media. In times of mobile devices combined with social network sites, scholars of movement images are confronted with profound changes in the ways images contribute to the emergence and dynamics of social movements. Thus, we argue for a media‐sensitive analysis of images in social movements.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Visions of Protest. A Media‐Historic Perspective on Images in Social Movements

Mattoni

Teune

2014

Sociology Compass

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“…. the prevalent view that HIV-infected populations were expendable” (Weiner, 2012, p. 108). However, the bloody handprints symbolized more than the disappeared victims of the AIDS crisis, because they were emphatically linked to the presence of activists.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Among activists interviewed in the ACT UP Oral History Project, there is a commonly described breakdown of collective momentum in the mid-1990s. Whereas AIDS and queer activism in the late 1980s and early 1990s are often described in terms of a “transformative experience that freely mixed politics with art, eros, and underground sociability in a New York that feels poignantly distant” (Weiner, 2012, p. 104), the mid- to late-1990s are described as a time in which frequent direct actions gave way to exhaustion and despair. Gran Fury members describe this emotional climate, and the difficulty of translating increasingly complicated AIDS discourses into pithy sloganeering, as a prime reason for the group’s unofficial disbanding around 1992 (McCarty, 2004, p. 37).…”

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confidence: 99%

Radical Distribution

Burk

2015

Space and Culture

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Toward its goal of ending the AIDS crisis, ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) used ephemeral media to stage demonstrations. Slogans such as "SILENCE = DEATH" and "ALL PEOPLE WITH AIDS ARE INNOCENT" galvanized collective action and took control of the unjust representation of gay men and other minorities with AIDS. Updating protest tactics for the headline-driven televisuality of late 20th-century American society, ACT UP relied on ephemera as a mode of distribution for activist slogans and images. Ephemeral materials provided activists with a powerful mode of representation that was inexpensive to reproduce. This essay examines the means by which ACT UP and its associated collectives deployed visual ephemera to create a ubiquitous presence in New York City, when AIDS cases there were among the highest in the United States. Against histories of ACT UP that acknowledge the importance of agitprop but neglect to fully account for its status as ephemera, I argue that the ephemeral properties of activist materials are central to the meaning of these cultural artifacts, and meaningful because they enabled the discursive and spatial representations of collectivity that defined and sustained the most active period of ACT UP, from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s.

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AI, Big Data, and surveillance zines as forms of community healthcare

Ketchum

Morena

2022

Feminist Media Studies

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Disposable Media, Expendable Populations – ACT UP New York: Activism, Art, and the AIDS Crisis, 1987–1993

Cited by 4 publications

References 3 publications

Visions of Protest. A Media‐Historic Perspective on Images in Social Movements

Visions of Protest. A Media‐Historic Perspective on Images in Social Movements

Radical Distribution

AI, Big Data, and surveillance zines as forms of community healthcare

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