Keep Your Laws Off My Body: Zoe Leonard, ACTUP, and Activist Art Collectives

Motivated by the violence of the AIDS epidemic and fostered by the cultural community of ACTUP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), radical art collectives such as Gran Fury, DIVA TV, fierce pussy, and Gang emerged in New York City in the late 1980s. These collectives produced a range of film, photography, graphic art, and performance art to convey public messages of urgency vilifying discriminatory and sexist acts of the U.S. government. Artists employed alternative mediums such as tacks, silkscreens, acid colors, printed matter, and photographs to create posters; borrowed cameras to shoot films and photographs documenting their sexuality; wheat-pasted and painted murals; and held teach-ins at university campuses.

Artist Zoe Leonard, along with filmmaker Catherine Gund, produced a video installation entitled “Keep Your Laws Off My Body” (1989) featuring images of lesbian sexuality, police enforcement, and text of legislation restricting the freedom of queer and women’s bodies. Leonard credits her participation in the ACTUP Women’s Caucus and associated art collectives as the force which politicized her queer and feminist artistic practice. Deconstructing Leonard’s “Keep Your Laws Off My Body,” my paper will analyze the convergence of materials, ideas, and aesthetics within the feminist art collectives of ACTUP.