ABSTRACT
This article offers a Bourdieusian analysis of the demobilization of Brazil’s AIDS movement, once a globally celebrated force in shaping innovative, rights-based public health responses. Drawing on extensive qualitative data, I argue that the movement’s decline cannot be explained solely by institutional co-optation, biomedicalisation, or defunding, as suggested in previous scholarship. Instead, I conceptualise demobilisation as a deeper process of depoliticisation that emerges from transformations in the distribution of capital, shifts in habitus, and structural changes in the field of power under neoliberalism. I trace how the pauperisation of the epidemic brought into the field new agents with different dispositions, challenging the movement’s politicised doxa forged in the 1980s and 1990s and fragmenting the field. The analysis emphasises the role of symbolic struggles over legitimacy and the effects of changing political-economic logics on activist practices. By combining field theory with a grounded empirical study of Brazil’s AIDS movement, the article contributes to broader debates on the sociology of social movements, the neoliberal restructuring of civil society and the conditions of possibility for re-politicisation.