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Talkin’ ‘Bout Meta-Generation: ACT UP History and Queer Futurity

Sun, November 9, 2:00 to 3:45pm, Westin Bonaventure, Floor: Level 1, San Gabriel B (L1)

Abstract

At an archive exhibition celebrating ACT UP Philadelphia’s 20th anniversary in 2008, Asia Russell, an international AIDS activist and veteran ACT UP member, recounted the time when she and fellow member, Kiyoshi Kuromiya, were arrested during a demonstration in Washington, DC, in 1998. Thousands of AIDS activists from around the US converged on the nation’s capital to demand international access to affordable, generic HIV drugs. The scale of the crowd drew federal as well as local law enforcement. Russell explained how she and other activists could identify the federal agents by the signature black, knee-high leather boots they wore. As Kuromiya and Russell lay on their stomachs, hands cuffed behind their backs, Kuromiya silently began to lick the boots of his arresting officer. Without comment, the agent bent over and slowly tightened the cuffs around Kuromiya’s wrists. Russell, witnessing this spectacular encounter unfold, pointedly asked her friend, ‘‘What are you doing?!’’ to which Kuromiya hissed under his breath, ‘‘Shh, I’m having a scene.’’

How do we relate to Kuromiya’s “scene” with his arresting officer as told by Russell within a scene of exchange between AIDS activists of different generations at the exhibition? I have developed the hermeneutic of ‘‘meta-generationality’’ to describe the particular crosshatching of intergenerational and multigenerational dynamics in ACT UP Philadelphia’s organizing culture, historically and presently. Despite its exclusion from most historical accounts of the ACT UP movement, the Philadelphia chapter continues today because of its meta-generational work, which has enabled the group to build critical bridges between the fight against AIDS and the struggle against prisons in the U.S. Meta-generationality offers an optic through which to challenge the discourse of “generational divides,” a discourse which emerged in the popular press to domesticate anti-imperialist movements that were effervescing in the 1960s. As the specter of “generational divides” haunts the (new) New Left, it continues to hamstring the critical imagining of a queer future – a future without AIDS or prisons.

I draw on José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of “queer futurity” to shift from a question of “generational divides” to a question of how the temporality we assign to social movements and their histories makes certain futures imaginable. Muñoz theorizes queer futurity as “a temporal arrangement in which the past is a field of possibility in which subjects can act in the present in the service of a new futurity” (Muñoz, 2009). Beyond their value as political parables in a time of hyper incarceration, policing, and surveillance, stories like Kuromiya’s can serve as fields of possibility for new arrangements of meta-generational political work.

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