ABSTRACT
The prerogative to apply names is one of the most contentious forms of power in the late twentieth century. Disenfranchised groups had high hopes for the names and concepts they forged for themselves in the 1960s and 1970s. But the 1980s and 1990s have been a sobering object lesson in the relatively greater power held by science, government, and media to name, rename, and take over the names groups make for themselves. AIDS organisers and activists learned a hard lesson: it is difficult to predict results of discursive battles. But this is not just a problem of securing activists’ meanings. Ideas proposed by activists are taken up and modified by officials, rendering activism partially successful, but without affording activists any real power.
