P. Staff: An Interview

The following is an interview with visual performance artist P. Staff conducted by Che Gossett and Eva Hayward. In the interview Staff thinks about kinship and AIDS, “desire and dispossession,” AIDS and art, justice and ACT UP, and a trans aesthetics of refusal. How might art and art-making refuse to represent AIDS and trans? How is the imperative to represent trans and AIDS part of the violence of trans/AIDSphobia? Staff questions the progressive projects of social uplift, of well-being, and the endlessly reparative subject. Working through a “trans negativity,” Staff's work tracks the corrosive and unbinding force of sexuality that is hidden by contemporary trans and AIDS discourses.