Deborah B. Gould > Quotes

“To engage in activism that envisions alternatives ways of organizing society and alternative ways of being is to risk membership in society, a sense of belonging, however partial it may be. Activism can make us vulnerable because it is so obviously about wanting something beyond what is, and to have a political desire often is construed as wanting too much.”
― Deborah B. Gould, Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP's Fight against AIDS

“At its [the book’s] heart is the question of political imaginaries and their conditions of possibility: how do people come to their understanding of the world and their sense of what else might be possible and how to get there? What are the factors that make political action conceivable at all, or that make some forms of activism thinkable while others are, or become, wholly unimaginable? How do attitudes within a social group or collectivity about what is politically possible, desirable and necessary—what I call political horizon—get established, consolidated, stabilized, and reproduced over time, and with what sorts of effects on political action? What are the processes through which a prevailing or hegemonic political horizon might be challenged and even transformed? And what role do affects, feeling, and emotions play in generating, and foreclosing, political horizons?”
― Deborah B. Gould, Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP's Fight against AIDS