Becoming Coalitional: The Perverse Encounter of Queer to the Left and the Jesus People USA

In this talk, Dr. Deborah Gould takes as her starting point the motion in emotion—including its etymological roots in civil unrest and public commotion but also the sense of being moved—to explore a low-cost housing coalition in Chicago that included a group of queer leftists and an evangelical Christian group. Strikingly, difference here was both pronounced and a non-event: the two groups never confronted each other about homosexuality. Interested in political appetite and the not-yet of politics, and with an eye to the felt dimensions of political life, she uses this case of affinities across chasms of perceived difference to explore what a coalition can do—what desires, capacities, and potentialities a coalition might generate and nourish. Through an analysis of this seemingly unimaginable alliance, the talk traverses a number of themes including: the matter of emotions; affect and world-making; convergence without unity; what “touching” across difference tastes like and makes possible; hopes generated through surprising encounters; a longing to live belonging differently, through politics and “doing together” rather than only through identity; the thrill of defying forces that divide and conquer; and desire for activism that holds out the possibility of being changed.

Dr. Gould will also give a seminar on her book Moving Politics the following day on April 15 from 1 to 3 p.m. in Room H-1220.

Speaker bio

Deborah Gould is an associate professor of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz (and affiliated faculty in Feminist Studies, History of Consciousness, and Politics). She received her PhD from the University of Chicago in Political Science in 2000 and was a post-doctoral Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at the University of Chicago, 2000 – 2004. Her first book, Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight Against AIDS (University of Chicago Press, 2009) won the Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Best Book Award from the American Sociological Association’s Political Sociology Section (2010), the Ruth Benedict Book Prize from the American Anthropological Association (2010), and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in LGBT Studies (2010).

She is currently working on a second book, also about political emotion, called Emotional Terrains of Activism: Appetites, Encounters, and the Not-Yet of Politics. She was involved in ACT UP/Chicago for many years, and later in Queer to the Left, and was a founding member of the research/art/activism collaborative group, Feel Tank Chicago, most famous for its International Parades of the Politically Depressed.