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.

The Pasts, Presents and Futures of AIDS, Norway (1983-1996).

This article explores the Norwegian AIDS epidemic from a temporal perspective. It argues that interrogating the epidemic's tempos and rhythms provides useful tools in writing the history of an epidemic by drawing on a wide array of material from its first decade. By using various theories of temporality and chronology, this article maps out three phases of the Norwegian AIDS epidemic. In the first phase (1983-85), the emergence of the first cases of AIDS threw the positive perception of medicine's past into question and fundamentally challenged the notion of incessant medical progress. In the second phase (1985-87), as grim epidemiological prognoses were created and the general population was increasingly targeted, panic grew across Norwegian society. In the third phase (1987-96), as it was slowly realised that the initial prognoses would not materialise, the epidemic faded from the public imagination. With the unremembering of AIDS, HIV was turned into a chronic disease. The article argues that analysing past temporalities, like past pasts and past futures, provides insights into the presents of the past.

Society as Cause and Cure: The Norms of Transgender Social Medicine.

This article analyzes how trans health was negotiated on the margins of psychiatry from the late 1970s and early 1980s. In this period, a new model of medical transition was established for trans people in Norway. Psychiatrists and other medical doctors as well as psychologists and social workers with a special interest and training in social medicine created a new diagnostic and therapeutic regime in which the social aspects of transitioning took center stage. The article situates this regime in a long Norwegian tradition of social medicine, including the important political role of social medicine in the creation of the postwar welfare state and its scope of addressing and changing the societal structures involved in disease. By using archival material, medical records and oral history interviews with former patients and health professionals, I demonstrate how social aspects not only underpinned diagnostic evaluations but were an integral component of the entire therapeutic regime. Sex reassignment became an integrative way of imagining and practicing psychiatry as social medicine. The article specifically unpacks the social element of these diagnostic and therapeutic approaches in trans medicine. Because the locus of intervention and treatment remained the individual, an approach with subversive potential ended up reproducing the norms that caused illness in the first place: "the social" became a conformist tool to help the patient integrate, adjust to and transform the pathology-producing forces of society.