Her book Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight Against AIDS (University of Chicago Press, 2009) won the Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Best Book Award from the American Sociological Association’s Political Sociology Section, the Ruth Benedict Book Prize from the American Anthropological Association, and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in LGBT Studies. She was involved in ACT UP for many years, and later in Queer to the Left, and was a founding member of Feel Tank Chicago, most famous for its International Parades of the Politically Depressed.