NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt Research Articles

Ghost-Stitching American Politics

Ghost-Stitching American Politics

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With Gay Greetings and Lesbian Solidarity: Transnational AIDS-activism and the Danish National Organization for Gays and Lesbians 1981-1994. AIDS-activism is an understudied area of Danish history, and the previous research made has only focused on the Danish government’s response to the epidemic. Using Signild Vallgårda’s theories of ‘problematization’ and ‘path dependency’, and Sidney Tarrow and Donatella della Porta’s theories of transnational activism, this article examines how The Danish National Organization for Gays and Lesbians developed AIDS-activism strategies at international conferences. By analyzing conference notes, meeting minutes, and campaign materials, this article finds that the AIDS-epidemic was mainly problematized as a discriminatory problem within the international organizations The Nordic Council for Homosexuals and the International Lesbian and Gay Association. This was caused by the organizations’ previous work with discrimination. A diffusion of AIDS-prevention strategies evolved within these international forums and while the diffusion of AIDS-prevention strategies mainly happened between European homosexual organizations, Danish AIDS-activists used American symbols to frame the AIDS-epidemic, such as the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt. The use of American symbols in the Danish AIDS-activism, might have made the American influence in the Danish AIDS-activism seem bigger.

Affordances, remediation, and digital mourning: A comparative case study of two AIDS memorials

The NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt is a collaborative project that memorializes individuals who have died of AIDS-related causes. Since its inception, it has become the world’s largest public folk art project. Scholars have noted the Quilt’s materiality, scope, and cultural importance to collective memory processes related to HIV/AIDS. More recently, discussions of collective memory in the digital public sphere have attracted attention from new media theorists and memory scholars alike. @theAIDSmemorial (TAM) is an Instagram account that serves as a digital repository for a new form of connective memory. By assessing two AIDS memorials as comparative cases, this research argues that TAM’s digital affordances of interactivity and reach are evident, although in assessing the digital remediation of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, the materiality, metaphoric origins, and scope of the Quilt cannot be rendered on digital platforms, representing a loss in affective engagement.

Accidental tourists: Visiting ephemeral war memorials

How a memorial impacts public memory depends not just on its symbolic appeals but also on how it gains the attention of visitors and how those appeals convert visitors into engaged participants. Although numerous studies have explored visitors’ performances at sites of memory, this scholarship has largely overlooked what we call “the accidental tourist,” the would-be visitor who had not planned to visit a site of memory but ended up doing so because of the site’s proximity to another existing attraction or daily route. Building on research into the performances of memory at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, we expand inquiry into the way memorials attract and engage visitors by studying two temporary memorials to the cost of the Iraq War. We demonstrate how these memorials gain attention and prompt the engagement of “accidental tourists” through temporal and spatial tactics as well as both overt and subtle cues for visitors to interact with the site, organizers, and other visitors.

When is a Performance?: Temporality in the social turn

The ‘social turn’ in performance, in which social and aesthetic ends are increasingly conceived in tandem, turns creative processes into fields of artistic potential. In these performances, the socio-aesthetic gestures of rehearsal and writing processes may be as important as the moment of encounter between performer and spectator, and the question ‘When is a performance?’ acquires a new complexity. Schechner has differentiated performances from the ‘proto-performances’ that precede them: training, workshop and rehearsal. This temporal map of performance processes, and the marked separateness of public performance, is increasingly challenged by the engaged collaborative processes of social performance. In crowdsourced performances such as the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, constructed from panels submitted by friends and families of AIDS victims, and the film Life in a Day, compiled by director Kevin Macdonald from YouTube videos submitted by thousands of users, the creative process is, in many ways, as performative as what might qualify as ‘public performance’ under Schechner's model. On the other hand, where participative performance is concerned, for example in the ‘autoteatro’ of Ant Hampton, or in the performative installations of London's Hayward Gallery exhibit ‘Move: Choreographing You’, the performance moment is entirely the point. The creative process of the artist may not be highlighted particularly, yet the public performance, which is largely executed by the spectator, becomes a sort of creative process itself; proto-performance and performance again become enmeshed, albeit differently. In the social turn, process becomes performance and performance becomes process. The social function of these performance processes can be exaggerated, but as process and public performance become more tightly interwoven, lengthier and potentially deeper affective engagements do become possible for both participants and publics.

From San Francisco to Atlanta and Back Again: Ideologies of Mobility in the AIDS Quilt's Search for a Homeland

In this essay, I examine two key controversies about the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt that span the years 2001–7. Specifically, these controversies are the relocation of the Quilt from San Francisco to Atlanta and the firing of NAMES Project founder and spokesperson Cleve Jones. These controversies bring to the forefront the importance of ideologies about place and movement. Embedded in these controversies is an assumption about the nature of the Quilt—that it does its work best when it engages in "promiscuous mobility." Yet this assumption stands alongside an equally strong assumption about the Quilt's need to rest in an appropriate homeland. Thus, these controversies nominate mobility as both a key topic for analysis and a conceptual resource. I employ mobility as a conceptual framework for exploring themes of movement, space, place, homeland, and ownership in these two controversies and for exploring the intersections of these themes with sexuality and race.

The AIDS Memorial Quilt and the Contemporary Culture of Public Commemoration

This essay situates the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt within the vigorous culture of national commemorative building in the late twentieth-century United States, a culture that found its first articulation in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. We begin with an assessment of ways in which the AIDS Memorial Quilt appropriated and extended the rhetoric of the VVM in terms of the two memorials' modes of democratic representation, their troubling of the boundaries between contexts of invention and reception, and their differential coding of the public and private. We take up later memorial projects, specifically the Oklahoma City National Memorial and the September 11, 2001, commemorative projects, to suggest how the rhetoric of the AIDS Quilt can be marked as a harbinger of practices to come and how its progressive rhetoric has been turned in some later commemorative works to very different ends.

Repeated Remembrance: Commemorating the AIDS Quilt and Resuscitating the Mourned Subject

This essay examines the twentieth anniversary of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt as a moment of doubled memorialization through which the nation's relationship to AIDS and homosexuality is renegotiated. Considering both the processes of national identity formation and the constitution of subjectivity and subject positions, I contend that a "mourned subject" position is produced by the discourses of the Quilt and is necessary to a specific national identity forged in relation to AIDS. That is, as we remember the origins of the Quilt project, the "mourned subject"—a position through which gay men were granted social recognition and therefore a certain kind of agency during the early years of the AIDS crisis, but from which legitimate mourning and militant activism were prohibited—is reconstituted. Ultimately, by considering the possibilities for developing activism through mourning and/or militancy, I suggest that the commemoration of the Quilt conserves a limiting form of social recognition that severely constrains its potential as a site for activating social change.

Introduction: The Mourning After

Introduction:The Mourning After Charles E. Morris III (bio) Anniversaries, by convention, invite and invent time passages: rhetorical embodiments of retrospective experiences; mappings of routes from those pasts through contemporaneous frames into prospective futures; interpellations of us as chronological or epochal or historically contingent and contiguous beings. By way of introducing this very special issue marking the 20th anniversary of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, I begin with three time passages that for me exemplify the spirit of commemoration and critique that animates these engaging essays on this epidemic text.1 In his posthumously published volume of essays on AIDS, Queer and Loathing (1994), author and activist David B. Feinberg opened his tribute to "David P." by lamenting how the epidemic had left him bereft not only of the lost, but of the rhetorical resources to convey their fulsome histories: "In these horrible times we have been forced to abbreviate the mourning process. How many people can you grieve for properly when everyone is dying? I wrote a novel for Jim Bronson, whom I barely knew. I wrote stories about my friends Saul Meissler, Glenn Peter Pumilia, and Glenn Person. Now I am reduced to brief essays in memoriam. Eventually all will be reduced to nothing but a litany of names chanted at the Quilt, panels of cloth the size of a coffin."2 The impetus for this issue came in a start on a Sunday morning in February 2006 while drinking coffee and rereading Christopher Capozzola's essay on the AIDS Quilt for my course on public memory. That I was seized by an awareness [End Page 557] of the imminent anniversary is ironic given that Capozzola insightfully places the AIDS Quilt in history, within the very specific context of gay liberation and AIDS activism in the Reagan era.3 But I think it was, in fact, such historical precision that precipitated my recognition of the momentous present, what that present might mean, and the ways in which the past might envelop you at the expense of the here and now. When a week later I wrote to ask Cleve Jones for permission to reprint material from his memoir Stitching a Revolution, he responded, "I must admit that I was taken aback by the realization that next year marks the 20th anniversary of the first display." What did Jones mean by this? I imagine that, in no small part, and perhaps with lamentation, he had in a start measured the distance between then and now. On the 2004 DVD edition of Jeffrey Friedman and Rob Epstein's documentary Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (1989), we twice find the late, beloved activist Vito Russo waxing prophetic about a time after AIDS, about legacies and the archive. In the peroration of his 1988 speech "Why We Fight," which he memorably delivered at two ACT UP actions that year, Russo observed, "Don't ever forget . . . remember, that some day, the AIDS crisis is going to be over. And when that day comes, when that day has come and gone, there are going to be people alive on this earth, gay people and straight people, and black people and white people, men and women, who are going to hear the story, that once, a long time ago there was a terrible disease and that a brave group of people stood up and fought and in some cases died so that others might live and be free." Russo's visionary eloquence also provides in voiceover the peroration of the documentary itself, as we glance one last time at the Quilt displayed at sunset in the sightline of, in juxtaposition against, the White House: "I think what we want to see eventually is an end, a day when we can stop adding panels to this quilt and put it away, as a symbol of a terrible thing that happened and that's now over. You know we forget that some day this is going to be over. Some day there's going to be no such thing as AIDS, and people will just look back and remember that there was a terrible tragedy and we survived."4 Yesterday In the untimely loss of...

The AIDS Memorial Quilt

THE AIDS MEMORIAL QUILT was conceived in November 1985 by San Francisco, Calif, gay activist Cleve Jones. Jones had helped organize the annual march honoring Mayor George Moscone and gay San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk, who were assassinated in 1978. When planning the march, Jones learned that more than 1000 San Franciscans had died of AIDS, and he asked the marchers to write on their placards the names of friends, partners, and family members who had died of the disease. After the march, the marchers taped their placards onto the walls of the San Francisco Federal Building. The wall of names looked like a patchwork quilt.1 Jones and his fellow activists gathered in a San Francisco storefront to plan a more permanent memorial to those who had died of AIDS and to publicize the devastating impact of the disease. They created the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt. Generous donors supplied sewing machines and materials, and volunteers over the years have created more than 46000 individual 3- by 6-foot memorial panels, most of them honoring one particular person who died of AIDS. Some 35 countries, from Argentina to Japan to Uganda, have contributed panels. The quilt was displayed for the first time on the National Mall in Washington, DC, on October 11, 1987, during the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. In 1988, the quilt went on a national tour during which it was displayed in 20 cities. This tour raised $500 000 for AIDS service organizations. The quilt would return to Washington in 1988, 1989, 1992, and 1996. Each time it returned, the quilt had grown larger. Every panel is different, and the panels feature a multitude of materials: feather boas, lace, leather, love letters, cowboy boots, buttons and bows, paintings, photographs, fishnet, and fur are but a few of the materials used and objects attached. Each display of the quilt features celebrities, politicians, and family members, friends, and lovers reading aloud the names of the people for whom the quilt panels were made. The largest community art project in the world, the AIDS Memorial Quilt was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989. In the last 20 years, the quilt has been viewed by more than 15 million people and has raised more than $3 million for AIDS service organizations. The AIDS Memorial Quilt is an overwhelming sight, both a joyful remembrance and a reminder of the tragedy of lives lost. It is a beautiful broad expanse of color and feeling, each panel made with love for the person being honored and celebrated. The quilt is a powerful statement; its image serves as a memorial to all the people and their loved ones whose lives have been transformed by this epidemic over the past 25 years.

Characteristics of Female College Students Attending the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt

Following a weekend exhibit of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, we compared responses of a group of female introductory psychology students who had visited the Quilt exhibit (n = 29) to those from a group who had not (n = 58) to see whether Quilt attendance was correlated with differences in tolerance of people with AIDS (PWAs), perceived AIDS knowledge, and perceived susceptibility to HIV infection. Consistent differences in empathy for and tolerance of PWAs were noted, with Quilt attendees showing more empathy. However, there were no differences in students' perceived knowledge about AIDS or perceived susceptibility to HIV infection for themselves or family members. Also noted was a short-lived increase in the number of books on HIV/AIDS checked out from the campus library immediately after the Quilt display and again at exams. These data suggest that an AIDS awareness event such as the Quilt display is associated with increased interest in AIDS and empathy toward people with AIDS, but is not rela...

Patches of grief and rage: Visitor responses to the NAMES project AIDS Memorial Quilt

This paper presents an analysis of comments written on signature square panels of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt. In our paper we explore how collective memory regarding AIDS deaths emerges from conflict among members of vernacular, mainstream and official culture. The cultural contest waged over how individuals who have died from AIDS-related illnesses will be remembered in society fits within the realm of the sociology of collective memory. Visitor responses to the Quilt illustrate that as a form of commemoration the Quilt is interpreted as a therapeutic device and a political tool. Like other memorials, especially those for which there is social disdain or conflict (e.g., the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial), signature square comments provide an alternative conception of public memory. The fact that the Quilt is used to symbolically commemorate the dead, providing an outlet for collective grieving and inspiring social action, is what makes it an important sociological phenomenon. In our paper we put forward a conception of the politics of collective memory that extends previous work in this area. In doing so this paper contributes to an emerging understanding of public commemoration and to the debate over how different segments of society are to be remembered.

A rhetorical schema for the evaluation of visual imagery

In this essay, a schema is proposed for the evaluation of visual imagery from a rhetorical perspective. In the schema, judgments of quality about a visual image are made in terms of the function communicated by the image. Three processes are involved in such judgments— identification of a function or functions communicated by an image, assessment of the degree to which substantive and stylistic dimensions of the image support the communication of the function, and evaluation of the legitimacy of the function. The schema is illustrated in applications to a chair from the Memphis design consortium and to The NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt.