Mournful militancy names the integration of grief and political action where mourning becomes militant force rather than paralysing emotion. It describes how protests function not merely as political expression but as sites of collective mourning and healing. When state violence continues whilst being officially denied through selective memorialisation, mournful militancy erupts as demand for acknowledgement and justice.
The concept challenges traditional oppositions between mourning and militancy. Psychoanalytic frameworks often treat mourning as work requiring withdrawal from action. Political traditions sometimes dismiss grief as weakness undermining commitment. Mournful militancy insists these need not oppose each other. Grief can fuel sustained struggle when loss is neither denied nor accepted as inevitable.
Douglas Crimp’s mourning and militancy
Douglas Crimp’s work on AIDS activism provides crucial foundation. His essay “Mourning and Militancy” examined ACT UP’s response to mass death during the AIDS crisis. ACT UP combined care networks, public mourning rituals and direct action against institutions whose negligence enabled the epidemic’s spread.
Crimp reworked Freud’s definition of mourning to address social contexts where death continues rather than representing finite loss. Freud assumed mourning worked through specific loss of specific object. ACT UP confronted ongoing mass death where mourning one person occurred whilst others continued dying. The conditions producing death persisted whilst deaths accumulated.
Traditional mourning frameworks proved inadequate. Reality testing, Freud’s mechanism for accepting loss, failed when reality itself remained intolerable. ACT UP refused to accept deaths as inevitable natural processes. They insisted deaths resulted from political negligence, pharmaceutical profiteering and state abandonment. Mourning demanded action to transform conditions producing death.
This created integrated practice. ACT UP members cared for dying friends whilst disrupting pharmaceutical company meetings. They organised funerals as political demonstrations. They created memorial quilts whilst occupying government offices. Grief and rage, care and confrontation operated together rather than sequentially.
State violence and selective memorialisation
Mournful militancy emerges particularly when states selectively memorialise certain deaths whilst erasing others. The contrast between how 9/11 deaths and AIDS deaths were treated exemplifies this dynamic. The 2,742 people killed on September 11th received immediate national mourning, monuments and commemorative rituals. The 81,542 people who died of AIDS-related causes during the same period remained largely unmarked.
This selectivity reveals whose lives states consider worth grieving. Structural violence produces deaths treated as natural, inevitable or unworthy of collective attention. When marginalis
ed communities insist these deaths are political, when they publicly mourn what states render unmournable, this constitutes militant act.
Brazil demonstrates similar patterns. The state established truth commissions and monuments to dictatorship victims. It officially acknowledged past violence. Yet it brutally suppressed street protests making connections between past dictatorship and present police violence explicit. The state could tolerate institutional remembrance but not spontaneous demonstrations showing violence’s continuity.
An elderly protester addressing police during 2013 demonstrations connected current repression to military dictatorship she had survived. This intergenerational witnessing made visible what official memory obscured. The dictatorship had not simply ended. Its logics, personnel and practices persisted in democratic institutions. Mournful militancy insisted on this continuity against state narratives of clean breaks.
Collective mourning as political practice
Protests function as sites where collective mourning occurs. When Amarildo de Souza disappeared after police custody in Rio de Janeiro, demonstrations chanting his name created space for collective grief. His individual death connected to archive of disappeared bodies from dictatorship and to ongoing police killings. Saying his name collectively opened passage from unmournable loss to loss that can be mourned.
George Floyd’s murder produced global mournful militancy. His dying words “I can’t breathe” became ghostly reference echoing other deaths. Eric Garner used identical words during fatal police chokehold. Jimmy Mubenga died on deportation flight whilst restraint held him unable to breathe. The phrase connected individual deaths to structural police violence.
Protests following Floyd’s murder combined mourning rituals with militant demands. People knelt in silence whilst chanting names of the dead. Demonstrations blocked streets and occupied spaces whilst maintaining vigils. Grief fuelled rather than undermined action. The intensity of loss demanded transformation of conditions producing such losses.
This differs from both melancholic paralysis and vengeful violence. Mournful militancy maintains connection to specific losses whilst demanding systemic change. It refuses both acceptance of deaths as inevitable and displacement of grief into abstract fury. The dead remain present as claims on the living rather than as monuments to impossibility.
Haunting and spectral demands
Avery Gordon’s distinction between trauma and haunting illuminates mournful militancy’s operations. Trauma represents inescapable repetition, past events determining present without mediation. Ghosts differ from trauma. They make demands and produce transformative possibilities.
The murdered and disappeared haunt the living not as psychological symptoms but as political claims. Stephen Frosh articulates this: “Ghosts cannot be removed by being spoken about; they can only be set free by some kind of action to bring them the justice they deserve.” Speaking names during protests invokes ghosts whilst simultaneously working toward their freedom through demanding justice.
Urban spaces carry ghostly imprints of historical violence. Grenfell Tower’s colonial naming connected contemporary housing precarity to histories of racial capitalism. The building was named after an officer who waged war on colonial populations. Its residents, predominantly working-class people of colour, died in preventable fire enabled by negligent retrofitting with flammable cladding. The spectral connection between colonial violence and contemporary organised state abandonment became visible through the tragedy.
Mournful militancy engages these spectral presences. It does not simply commemorate the dead. It responds to their demands by fighting conditions that produced their deaths and continue producing similar deaths. This distinguishes it from official memorialisation that freezes the dead into monuments whilst leaving structures intact.
Creative repetition versus compulsive repetition
Sándor Ferenczi distinguished between compulsive repetition that entrenches trauma and creative repetition enabling healing. Freud identified repetition compulsion where traumatised people endlessly re-enact painful experiences without working through them. Ferenczi proposed a third form he termed “reliving” that operates reparatively.
Protests demonstrate creative repetition when they engage with traumatic pasts in ways tending toward healing rather than entrenchment. This differs from both compulsive re-enactment and complete avoidance. It involves returning to historical trauma whilst introducing elements enabling transformation.
Brazilian demonstrations connecting past dictatorship to present police violence exemplify creative repetition. They do not simply repeat trauma. They establish connections enabling collective working through. The repetition becomes reparative when it clarifies patterns, builds solidarity across generations, and enables recognition of continuing violence that official narratives obscure.
This creative dimension distinguishes mournful militancy from melancholic fixation. Melancholy preserves lost objects internally, attacking the self for their absence. Mournful militancy externalises loss, directing anger toward conditions that produced it. The movement is toward transformation rather than preservation.
Political love and antagonism
Protests embody complex emotional textures combining care and confrontation. Raluca Soreanu captures this as simultaneously experiencing solidarity and antagonism, love and violence. Crowds traverse tear gas together. Vinegar gets shared as antidote. Strangers form temporary communities whilst confronting police.
This dialectical emotional experience cannot be reduced to singular sentiment. It proves more complex than either pure rage or pure compassion. Mournful militancy holds grief and anger together, care for each other and confrontation with systems, mourning what was lost and fighting for different futures.
The affective intensity differs from everyday political engagement. Participation in mournful protests often produces experiences of aliveness and meaning amid conditions producing despair. The 2020 uprisings following George Floyd’s murder broke through isolation and hopelessness many experienced during pandemic lockdowns. Collective presence in streets, shared risk and purpose created moments of transformation.
Yet this intensity cannot be sustained indefinitely. Movements rise and fall. Crowds disperse. The challenge becomes how to maintain political commitment after intensity fades, how to continue work when mournful militancy’s dramatic moments give way to slower organising.
The miners’ strike and transformation through struggle
The 1984-85 UK miners’ strike demonstrates how political engagement itself produces psychological transformation. Women involved described the strike as profoundly difficult yet also as making them feel reborn. One woman overcame thirteen years of agoraphobia through strike kitchen work. The collective action created conditions enabling healing that individual therapy had not achieved.
This complicates narratives positioning political struggle as purely draining. Whilst activism produces genuine exhaustion and burnout, it also generates solidarity, purpose and forms of healing unavailable through privatised therapeutic interventions. The women did not idealise the strike. They described exhaustion, poverty and pain. Yet they also described transformation.
The strike’s defeat created particular form of grief. The material infrastructure built during struggle dissolved. Friendships fractured. The intensity of collective life gave way to isolation. Women described profound shock and sadness whilst maintaining that participation was worth the costs. This ambivalent mourning neither idealised the struggle nor regretted it.
Conditions for mournful militancy
Several conditions enable mournful militancy’s emergence. First, ongoing violence that official narratives deny or minimise. When states acknowledge past violence whilst continuing similar violence in present, this creates conditions for militant mourning insisting on continuity.
Second, communities with traditions of resistance and collective memory. Mournful militancy draws on archived struggles, connecting current losses to historical patterns. This differs from spontaneous rage without historical consciousness.
Third, spaces where public mourning can occur. Streets, squares and other commons enable collective grief impossible in privatised spaces. Enclosures and dispersals of crowds prevent mournful militancy by atomising grief.
Fourth, willingness to remain with difficulty rather than seeking premature closure. Mournful militancy refuses both naive optimism and resigned pessimism. It holds together contradictory emotions and maintains commitment amid ongoing loss.
Limits and recuperation
Mournful militancy faces limitations and risks. States can incorporate mourning rituals whilst ignoring demands for systemic change. Official recognition of past violence can substitute for present transformation. Truth commissions, memorials and apologies sometimes function as pressure relief enabling continued violence.
The concept also risks romanticising grief or treating it as necessary for political commitment. Not all mourning produces militancy. Grief can produce paralysis, depression or withdrawal. Mournful militancy names specific configuration where grief fuels action, not universal relationship between loss and politics.
Additionally, the intensity of mournful protests can obscure slower work of building institutions and sustained movements. Dramatic confrontations provide affective charge that everyday organising lacks. Movements cannot survive on intense mourning alone. They require mundane labour, strategic planning and institutional development.
Revolutionary mourning practice
Hannah Black proposes “revolutionary mourning practice” imagining how healing might continue after revolutionary transformation. She rejects fantasy that revolution cures all wounds instantly. Even after overthrowing oppressive systems, people will carry trauma requiring ongoing care.
This temporal framework proves crucial. Mournful militancy operates before revolution, when losses accumulate under continuing violence. Revolutionary mourning practice extends beyond it, acknowledging that healing begins rather than ends with systemic transformation. The work of addressing historical trauma and current suffering continues across both periods.
This refuses both postponement and collapse. It rejects postponing healing until after revolution whilst also refusing to collapse political struggle into therapeutic project. Transformation requires simultaneous attention to psychic wounds and social structures. Mournful militancy integrates rather than sequences these dimensions.