Historical Bodies: AIDS Feminism in the Works of Valerie Caris Blitz, Jerome Caja, and Affrekka Jefferson

In an interview with the ACT UP Oral History Project, the activist Risa Denenberg recalls that the predominantly white gay men making up the majority of ACT UP “didn’t have a real sense of history…of health movements. And so they were kind of like the blind leading the blind.”¹ Women like herself, who had been active in the Women’s Health Movement for years, “thought a little more historically,” and they brought their experiences organizing for bodily autonomy and accessible medical services to the struggle for AIDS treatment. In the realm of activism, the bonds between second wave feminism and AIDS organizing were clear, if often configured as an affinity between seronegative feminist women and seropositive gay men who had been previously uninvolved in feminist efforts.

While perhaps usefully indicating a historical lineage between movements, this configuration neglects the contributions of women with AIDS, both as activists and as theorists of AIDS experience. Regarding women and other transfeminine people² as theorists of AIDS feminism can help elucidate the contours of a specifically seropositive feminist vision: one that indeed thinks historically through the act of embodiment and seeks to meld feminist vision with the experience of illness in creative ways. In this essay, I will examine works by Valerie Caris Blitz, Affrekka Jefferson, and Jerome Caja, who each offer a specific AIDS-feminist point of view. AIDS feminism, as I posit it here, is a framework that links the politics of illness and disability, lived and historical ties to queerness, and resistance against gender oppression. The feminism I envision here must account for all people who are subjected to gender oppression, and simultaneously embraces, exceeds, and interrogates the category of “woman.” Caris Blitz, Jefferson, and Caja each offer their own vision of womanhood and/or femininity that finds grounding in a historically rooted sense of gender and gender oppression, and that draws on that understanding in order to illuminate the experience of life with AIDS in a misogynistic, racist, homophobic, and ableist world. It’s important to note here, too, that the commitment to social critique shared by these three artists is infused with joy, humor, and play. These artists, then, embody an ethos essential to both feminist and AIDS activist traditions: a love of and commitment to life itself that must undergird all liberatory politics.

Caris Blitz’s Vestment serves as a material manifestation of her AIDS-inflected feminism, presented through the artist’s own body. The piece is a hospital gown, meticulously crafted of Caris Blitz’s own printed blood-work charts and bearing a tear on the front right hip through which a facsimile of one of her tattoos peeks out. The immediate resonances between feminism and AIDS in this piece are clear: Caris Blitz draws on garment-making, a traditionally feminized craft, as an act of record-keeping of her own AIDS experience. Embedded within the hospital gown, typically a nondescript and mass-produced garment devoid of personal expression, the tear on the hip acts as a marker of selfhood. If the hospital gown threatens to symbolically turn person into patient, Caris Blitz insists on tearing through this anonymity to leave her bodily mark.

Caja was born to a large Catholic family in Cleveland, and moved as a young adult to San Francisco. His Midwestern Catholic roots and the San Francisco drag scene would both become major influences on his work as an artist. In a conversation with me, Caja’s longtime friend Anna van der Muelen described her as incredibly funny and empathetic, and as someone with a lifelong affinity with feminism. She recalled Caja asking questions about what it was like to move through the world as a cis woman, or to have heterosexual sex with men. Anna pointed specifically to Caja’s frequent works depicting Saint Lucy, who gouged her eyes out rather than marry a man, as feminist expressive acts. Particular labels weren’t important to Caja, according to Anna: rather, he was concerned with resisting the forces of oppression writ large. Caja’s work displays the same outrageous playfulness that she brought to her life. Her favored medium was nail polish, and Justin Vivian Bond recalls that “the fumes from all of those bottles of nail polish day after day could really go to your head.”⁶ The painstaking process of applying nail polish implied in Caja’s work can be read as a sort of feminized performance, and I argue that this performance ought to be read as part of not just a queer lineage but a feminist one.

This playfulness can turn sharp, as in “Nurse’s Prayer,” a small painting that depicts an unsmiling green-faced nurse adorned with skull earrings and necklace. Alongside her, the text reads: “Nurse’s Prayer/Fuck off and Die/Amen.” The nurse’s green pallor grants her a whiff of the undead, while her arched brows, heavy blue eyeshadow, and red lipstick scream “drag.” In my conversation with van der Muelen, she cautioned me that I shouldn’t too easily assume that I can correctly parse the genders and sexes of people depicted in Caja’s work: figures easily interpreted as drag queens were sometimes cis woman friends of Caja’s, and vice versa. Of course, this slipperiness is exactly the point. The nurse in “Nurse’s Prayer” might be a particular nurse, an amalgam of all hostile nurses, and a drag send-up of the figure of the cruel nurse all at once. The piece simultaneously skewers the cruelty that unsympathetic medical providers showed toward AIDS patients and ironically embraces the mean nurse as a sort of camp figure, a la Mommy Dearest: you’d almost love her, if you didn’t hate her. The presentation of the text as a prayer wraps in another of Caja’s frequent tropes: the aesthetic excesses and moral hypocrisies of Catholicism. Christianity here is cast as a death cult, made only more odious by the feminine adornment of the plaque with rosettes and a pink bow. Caja demonstrates a commitment to gaiety, one that resonates with queer and feminist lineages, in the face of abjection.

Jefferson’s prints, which frequently employ text and employ strikingly graphic compositions, resonate not only with a “fine art” tradition but also with the activist practice of poster-making. In her print “Two Sapphos,” Jefferson plays with the format of the poster to celebrate queerness and bodily pleasure. One woman kisses the breast of another woman, kneeling above her. Both women are nude, and the format of the piece suggests a voyeuristic poster for a porno, but Jefferson cleverly pivots the meaning of the piece with the text running along its bottom: “FOR ADULT WOMEN ONLY.” This text simultaneously resonates with a pornographic interpretation (adults only!) while also closing out the male gaze. The pleasure displayed in the image is not marked as private; it’s meant to be shared, but only between women. Jefferson enacts here what art historian Julia Skelly terms “radical decadence”: a feminist practice of artmaking that uses nontraditional or craft mediums in order to create artistic space for women’s pleasure.⁸ Jefferson repurposes the format of the porno flick poster to insist on pleasure shared only between women, and she does so through the medium of woodcut print, one that reminds viewers insistently of the artist’s hand and control over the image.

What I have laid out here is not a cohesive theory of AIDS feminism, but rather the suggestion that such a framework can helpfully illuminate interpretations of the work of woman and gender non-conforming artists with AIDS. Conversely, the works of these artists point the way toward a vision of AIDS feminism that centers the embodied experiences of people with AIDS. This framework situates these artists as being in relationship with both the historical feminist and AIDS activist movements, and in lively conversations about womanhood, queerness, and illness.

Activists and artists have been arguing since the 1980s for inclusion of women in AIDS medical research and for representation of women with AIDS in spaces concerned with AIDS politics, yet the work remains unfinished, and feminism and AIDS activism remain historical and contemporary categories largely imagined as side-by-side rather than significantly overlapping. We find ourselves now in a present historical moment where access to abortion is curtailed; where an ongoing pandemic causing mass illness and disability continues to be grossly mismanaged; where access to gender appropriate care for transgender people is actively under threat. The ongoing legacy of AIDS feminism as a practice to help us think about illness, care, gender, and sexuality as an enmeshed matrix could hardly be more necessary. Caja, Caris Blitz, and Jefferson offer three artistic entry points to this practice. Though AIDS and related complications took the lives of all three artists, their work remains insistent, vital, alive.

About the Author

Julia Harris (she/her) is a doctoral candidate in American Studies at Harvard University, where she studies the entanglements between lesbian and trans communities in the 1970s. She recently worked with librarians at Harvard to curate a digital exhibition featuring the ACT UP Oral History Project interviews. She is so excited to be joining Visual AIDS this summer as a research fellow, where she is researching the concept of embodied AIDS feminism as expressed through the works of several artists.