“The Social Organization of Forgetting, AIDS Activism, and Resistant Relational Remembering”

Prof. Alexis Shotwell (Carleton University)

Tuesday 13 May 2025, 4.00 p.m. – 5.30 p.m.
Faculty Room, Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Blandijnberg 2, 9000 Ghent

Abstract: Social movement scholar Gary Kinsman forwards the idea that in queer liberation movements a “passion for remembering our resistance can be a very useful antidote to the social organization of forgetting.” In this paper, I put Kinsman’s imperative to resist the “social organization of forgetting” into conversation with philosopher Sue Campbell’s work on memory as a relational and co-constituted achievement. I take the example of remembering AIDS activism in the Canadian context. Against prevailing narratives of Canadian AIDS activists as basically polite, civil actors, I discuss the ways our findings in the AIDS Activist History Project illuminate a fractious, confrontational collective context through which people made history. I argue that especially in the early years of AIDS activism, remembering queer resistance of the past functioned as a powerful relational thread for working with and through unfinished trauma in order to co-create a world in which people living with AIDS had a future.

Bio: Alexis Shotwell’s work focuses on complexity, complicity, and collective transformation. A professor at Carleton University, on unceded Algonquin land, she is a co-investigator for the AIDS Activist History Project (aidsactivisthistory.ca) and the author of Knowing Otherwise: Race, Gender, and Implicit Understanding and Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times.