[Page 3: Another Kind of Love: A Performance of Prosthetic Politics by Debra Levine]

Evolution of prosthetic praxis

1989.  Ray and his lover Tony traveled to the Fifth International AIDS Conference in Montreal with  DIVA TV, to document the ACT UP demonstrations calling for "parallel track" drug testing.  During the demonstration, Tony contracted PCP (pneumocystis carinii pneumonia), and we in New York scrambled to send money to Canada to pay for his hospitalization.  Neither Ray nor Tony had been aware of their HIV status before Tony got sick; now Ray's friends had to contend with the notion that he too was probably HIV-positive. 

1990. Ray's friends and acquaintances from ACT UP had transformed themselves into his Army of Lovers, an affinity group held together by a love for Ray and for those who loved him.  We had all been taking shifts with Ray in the hospital, sleeping in bed with him, cleaning his body, wiping his lips with glycerin, reading, singing and gossiping with him, fighting and negotiating with doctors in the hospital, and sneaking in an acupuncturist.  Ray left the hospital for a brief time before his last birthday, a month before he died.   Zoe talks about the phone call she received from Ray during that time, asking her to help him create Equipped:

I was surprised when he asked me to come over and talk to him.  I was taken aback but a little honored. He expressed that he had a piece he wanted to make and he was blind at the time.  He couldn't make it.  He was in bed, he couldn't move around and he was blind. He could hear but it was impaired.  He wanted me to make this piece for him.  I just agreed.  (Leonard 2004)

images by: Ray Navarro and Zoe Leonard

Equipped consists of three black and white images: a horizontal photograph, 12 3/8" by 18 5/8," of Ray's upside down wheelchair lying outdoors on asphalt entitled, "HOT BUTT;"  a 12 ¼ by 18 ½ " horizontal photograph of his walker lying on its side in a the dark narrow entryway of his building entitled "STUD WALK;"  and a vertical photograph, 18 5/8" by  12 3/8" of his cane propped upside down against a door  entitled, "THIRD LEG."  The signs hung centered beneath their respective images.  The images were framed in wood sprayed to a high gloss finish with Crayola "flesh" colored paint to simulate plastic prosthetic material.  The images hung on the gallery walls eight to ten inches apart.

Zoe describes her meeting with Ray and her perception of her role:

He described the piece.  And we made some kind of a plan...But I'd been doing some collaborative work at that point and I kind of turned it over in my head and I realized that this isn't collaboration in the traditional sense.  This is not about my ideas meeting somebody else's ideas.  This is about becoming a conduit for someone else's ideas.  Becoming an extension of their body.  Because I could see, I could operate the camera.  I could choose the color. It was not going to be a collaborative thing or a collective project.  It was about becoming his hands.   (Leonard 2004)

A prosthesis is a device of some sort, which enhances one's limited abilities. It also authenticates a site of rupture: it exposes the failed part of the anatomy.  Healthy activist bodies were configured as prosthetics, fleshly machines to fill the holes indelibly left by infection.  But even if a prosthesis is intimately connected with a body so as to assist its function, it can never attain a full union: it will always be alien. This process of prosthetic politics can function only if each body accepts its singularity and then works in a state of what Nancy calls "beings-in-common." (Fynsk 2001: xxiv) For Nancy, acceptance of this state of commonality articulates the "between" that joins the two beings and defines them (even as they define it).  The otherness of this voice is always the different voice of community (Fynsk 2001: xxiv).  Zoe and Ray created this voice in the making of  Equipped.

I suspect Ray chose to make a photographic piece for two reasons.  First, he had been collaborating with Catherine Gund on a critique of AIDS activist discourse, which privileged white gay men over people of color and women. As a lesbian and a gay Chicano male, they highlighted the price minority subjects pay by joining a predominantly white gay male movement. Ray and Catherine argued that alienated self-representations in photography by minority artists "record a counter-memory" which "explodes the stability of the official history," thus highlighting stratification of resources along the lines of race and gender not only in dominant culture but in ACT UP itself (Saalfield and Navarro 1991: 347).

Their article, "Shocking Pink Praxis," also deconstructed the value-laden practice of captioning demonstration photographs in the dominant media (e.g., photos of  dynamic bodies being carried away by police during civil disobedience, with a caption reading, "AIDS Victims").  Quoting Barthes' discussion of photography, they cautioned that "a photograph is a message without a code, until it is captured or captioned" (Saalfied and Navarro 1991: 345).  The captions of Equipped –  "HOT BUTT," "STUD WALK" and "THIRD LEG" – link ordinary objects associated with disability to notions of fetishized queer desire.