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The visual archive of AIDS and fetish activism is a rich resource for studying interlinkages between art and science, activism and public health, politics and medicine, pleasure and sexual health prevention.
Interrogating the materiality and visual context of images โ photographs, posters, flyers, and safer sex instructions โ it maps out visualization practices in leather, BDSM and AIDS activism. AIDS and fetish imagery made some bodies, pleasures, and political goals visible โ and rendered others unseen. The article explores the materiality of images and their visual, social, and historical context of production, and traces their social biographies and afterlives.
Fetish images were vehicles for change and actors co-producing history. They took part in destigmatizing BDSM, challenging psychiatric classification, and creating infrastructure and networks between subcultures, communities, and authorities. The visualization of fetish activism was as much about communication strategies as it was about aesthetic, style, and motive.
A muscular man in leather harness, armbands, chaps, and boots was hanging on a cross with his naked buttocks directed towards the spectator Figure 1. The poster embodied the thorny issues, medical controversies, and political tensions of Norwegian AIDS history. Another was the relationship between BDSM activists and the state. The health authorities funded fetish and AIDS activist organizations but refused to remove the psychiatric diagnoses pathologizing the very same communities.
