Not Just a Vector: Picturing Women, Love, and Pleasure in the Face of AIDS

The visual story of AIDS in photography is most often presented in terms of tragedy and death, images of suffering, of lesion covered limbs and wasting bodies, people only touched by those brave or distraught enough to hold the dying. It is also a story where women, from communities heavily affected by the crisis, have been underwritten or not placed within the context of the era as broadly as male artists. This paper considers photography created by Black women and lesbian-identified artists equally within the greater narrative of AIDS era art. I will be focusing on works made by the Kiss and Tell Collective, Renée Cox, Carrie Mae Weems, and Jill Posener and how select works they created during this time maintain notions of desire that construct counter-narratives to the mainstream rhetoric around the disease and its effects on affected populations.