Visualizing BDSM and AIDS Activism: Archiving Pleasures, Sanitizing History

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. This article explores AIDS and fetish activism imagery from the first two decades of the Norwegian AIDS crisis. Interrogating the materiality and visual context of images – photographs, posters, flyers, and safer sex instructions – it maps out visualization practices in leather, BDSM and AIDS activism. AIDS and fetish imagery made some bodies, pleasures, and political goals visible – 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. The politics of visibility in Norwegian fetish activism point to the vulnerable project of fighting for acceptance through “respectability,” while preserving the individuality and “otherness” of leather and fetish culture.