Abstract
This essay posits in Vaginal Davis's 1987 video That Fertile Feeling a strategy of resistance to HIV/AIDS rooted in the dynamic of transfeminine pregnancy and fertility, arguing that Davis develops a range of aesthetic strategies for undermining, inverting, and appropriating mainstream discourses of reproduction as they intersect with legal strictures and cultural scripts around normative understandings of embodiment, health, and the notion of morality embedded in the period's dominant set of “family values.” AIDS is not, on the surface of things, a central referent in That Fertile Feeling, but the author shows how precisely this submerged status of the crisis as a signifier in the video allows Davis to visualize a broad biopolitical field and situate the epidemic within that field to address the interrelated, mutually supporting injustices perpetuated at its peak in Los Angeles. The figure of the excessively fertile trans woman emerges as useful for theorizing this oblique yet radiant approach to developing a coalitional ethos to confront both the politics around the AIDS crisis in LA at the time and its material and psychic impact.
