Let’s Talk: How Jessica Lynn Whitbread challenges gender bias in the representation of the HIV/AIDS individual.
By Beth James
Since the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, there have been cases of HIV/AIDS in women but in the early years of the epidemic, the medical and scientific community branded HIV/AIDS as a disease that affected the gay male community and did not affect women. The representation in the media of HIV/AIDS as a virus that predominantly affected men, as well as in medical discourse, only reinforced existing social divisions and boundaries that disproportionately dismissed women, even to this day there is an association between the virus and the gay male population. The HIV/AIDS epidemic could be seen as an epidemic of disease but also one of signification and meaning. The original narrative created in the early 1980s surrounding HIV/AIDS-associated risk with being a particular individual rather than risk being related to practising particular acts, and in the early years of the epidemic this was supported by both medical literature and the media.
The HIV/AIDS epidemic toed both gender and social divisions. Societal gender roles and norms have created an unequal power dynamic between women and men, with women having fewer legal rights and less access to education, health services, and opportunities to gain further income. These multiple intersections and opportunities for vulnerability put women more at risk of contracting HIV than men. The representation of individuals living with HIV in the visual arts has repeatedly been controversial regarding who is represented, who can create representation, and how this representation affects, positively or negatively, those who are living with HIV. These representations also affect those for whom the experience of living with HIV is far removed and only a representation.
Jessica Lynn Whitbread is an artist, activist, and community organiser whose work focuses on the creation of spaces to facilitate dialogue of social justice and change. The work she creates is often concerned with her experience as a woman living with HIV as well as exploring her queer identity in a heteronormative society. Whitbread’s project Tea Time: Mapping Informal Networks (2012 – ongoing), began as part of her master’s thesis in the Environmental Studies Program at York University, Toronto. Whitbread started the project as a way to discover her own understanding of HIV in relation to gender, especially as a queer woman who is living with an HIV positive status. Along with the participatory project, Whitbread published a book of the same name that documents her numerous tea parties.
Jessica Lynn Whitbread, Tea Time, 2012 – ongoing. Source: https://visualaids.org/artists/jessica-whitbread
Tea Time is a community-based arts research project that seeks to bring HIV positive women together to create networks and to aid in the research of determining health care and social support needs through the medium of a tea party. As a woman living with HIV, Whitbread sought to create a project and network that was led by and for women who were HIV positive where they could safely and openly share their experiences and knowledge of life as HIV positive individuals. The stories shared are often silenced or pushed to the margins and left out of representation in visual culture. At the tea parties, the women leave a handwritten letter along with a teacup and in turn receive a letter and teacup left by another woman. The book details fourteen of the tea parties held throughout North America, and there has continued to be more tea parties on a global scale after the publishing of the book highlighting the need for this specific line of communication to be opened. Whitbread herself has often been present and emphasises that the tea parties are community-led; the women will decide where and when the tea party will be held ensuring that there is a desire for community and networks to be built. By drawing on the consciousness-raising workshops fundamental to feminist activism of the 1970s, Whitbread’s Tea Time aims to facilitate and encourage critical dialogue and establish networks of support within a society that so often elides narratives that deviate from the dominant one.
Jessica Lynn Whitbread, Tea Time, 2012 – ongoing. Source: https://visualaids.org/artists/jessica-whitbread
Through the creation of a project that is run by women living with HIV for women who are living with HIV, space is carved out that is accessible to those of identities with multiple intersections – race, class, and ability. By doing this Whitbread sets up networks that are not restricted by traditional boundaries, both geographical and social, and creates a discourse surrounding the multiple lived realities of HIV. Tea Time challenges the notion of who is and can be, affected by HIV and moves toward a change in the primary understanding of what the virus is, as well as the representation of a contemporary survivor.
There are three levels of connection created through Tea Time. The first is the face-to-face tea party where women meet in a safe and intimate environment to discuss their own experiences of living with HIV. The second is through the physical exchange of teacups and letters which allow for a token reminder of their participation in the project. The final is post-tea party correspondence, by creating these tea parties Whitbread hopes to establish long term relationships between the women who attend as a form of continued support. By giving these women a space for collaboration, Whitbread is employing collaborative feminist activist art practices that were born in the 1970s. These collaborations help in fostering relationships between women who share a lived experience that is so often sensationalised in the media, medical discourse, and the visual arts and does not reflect the multiple realities of these women’s lives.
Notes:
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