Remembering the AIDS Quilt (original) (raw)
Related papers
Review: Remembering the AIDS Quilt
Quarterly Journal of Speech, 2013
The AIDS Memorial Quilt is sui generis. A casual observer might sense this, but a reader of the fine anthology Remembering the AIDS Quilt, edited by Charles E. Morris III, will be overwhelmed by the unparalleled qualities and conundrums of the Quilt. One of the most potent conundrums is remembering a traveling, crowd-sourced, parse-able memorial (that was never ‘‘just’’ a memorial and grows still). Morris rightly puts the irony front and center with the volume’s title. I write as someone who has not experienced the Quilt but through overhead images. After reading 12 wide-ranging, often affecting, essays, I am struck by how much the Quilt is unlike other memorials. I am struck by the many personal, political, conceptual, and methodological issues staked by the short, freighted history of the Quilt. Like any anthology there are ups and downs, but this one is well worth reading, whether you are interested in the history of HIV/AIDS, gay activism, public memory, or critical methods.
Through a qualitative, extended case study of the National AIDS Memorial Grove (NAMG) in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, the only federally designated AIDS memorial in the United States, this paper investigates collective memory as an organizationally bounded process. After locating the case in the scholarship on collective memory conflicts, and on complex and reflexive memorials, I suggest that the NAMG highlights the interaction between impulses within collective memory work that stand in tension. In the political struggle over the what, why, who, and how of memorializing at the NAMG and elsewhere, we can see an encounter between the forces of resolution, fixity, and unitary voice and those of openness, reflexivity, and multivocality. In the case of the NAMG, the balance has interestingly tipped towards the latter, what I call flexible memory production: the NAMG operates with relatively broad, porous categories of " victims " and " survivors, " and deliberately pursues nonlinear, fluid, decentered storytelling. My discussion then points to the conditions that enable and encourage such flexibility—the characteristics of the trauma itself; organizational conditions; and the features of memory technologies—and those that push back against it, within and beyond the Grove case. I conclude with a consideration of whether and how unsettled, mutable, flexible memory projects can be sustained over time.
2003
Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt: A Rhetorical Study o f the Transformation of an Epidemic through Social Movement by Daniel Hinkley Dr. Richard Jensen, Examination Committee Chair Professor o f Communication University o f Nevada, Las Vegas This study looks at the Names Project: AIDS Memorial Quilt as a rhetorical artifact and centerpiece of the current AIDS movement. The methodology for this study is an ethnographic and auto-ethnographic design, utilizing interviews with four Quilt volunteers and staffers, including my observations as a person living with AIDS. This study looks at the Quilt using social movement, rhetorical, and dramatist theories to prove that the Quilt is the rhetorical centerpiece of the AIDS Movement. Social movement theories explain how the Quilt mobilized thousands o f people to fight AIDS Rhetorical theories explain how the Quilt transformed the belief that AIDS was just killing “gay perverts” to an honest understanding that AIDS does not discriminate. Dra...