Politics of Care in Times of Crisis: What Feminists Can Learn from the Nurses of Australia’s AIDS Response

Politics of Care in Times of Crisis: What Feminists Can Learn from the Nurses of Australia’s AIDS Response

In this piece, Harriet Goddard offers a personal response to a talk by Dr Geraldine Fela, ‘Blood Politics: Nurses and Australia’s AIDS Crisis’, reflecting on the feminist lessons that might be derived from Fela’s study of this period.

Harriet Goddard

Dr Geraldine Fela is a postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of History and Archaeology at Macquarie University, Sydney. Her first book, Critical Care: Nurses on the Frontline of Australia’s AIDS Crisis (2024), which formed the basis of this talk, was awarded the prestigious Prime Minister’s Literary Award in October 2025. As part of the Feminist Thinking Seminar Series organised by students on the University of Oxford’s Master’s programme in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Fela was invited on the 31^st of October 2025 to give a talk entitled ‘Blood Politics: Nurses and Australia’s AIDS Crisis’.

Fela highlighted the overlooked political activism and community-centred care work of the HIV and AIDS nurses who shaped the so called ‘Australian model’ response to the crisis. The ‘Australian model’ is often characterised as a ‘working partnership’ between gay community activists, parts of the medical establishment, and state and federal governments (Fela 2024, 93). Gay community groups agreed, in what has come to be described in scholarship as an ‘alliance’ with those governments, to stop the spread of AIDS amongst the gay community, and, in turn, the governments agreed not to implement harsh targeted measures like mass testing or forced quarantines (Fela 2024, 94). However, as Fela argued in her talk, this version of events obscures the crucial role of HIV and AIDS nurses in challenging and shaping the AIDS response. Opposing gendered and professional hierarchies and entrenched homophobia and racism within the medical system, these nurses made sure that respect, compassion, and, most importantly, joy were at the heart of their patients’ end-of-life care. They were unafraid to take a militant approach in securing this holistic support, with the Australian Nursing Federation organising strikes and threatening work bans against, for example, compulsory testing (Fela 2024, 63-5). In this way, Australia’s HIV and AIDS nurses are a poignant example of an uncompromising, community-centred politics of care.

                One particularly influential example was Aunty Gracelyn Smallwood, a proud Birrigubba, Kalkadoon, and South-Sea Islander nurse and midwife who joined the National Advisory Commission on AIDS (NACAIDS) as the new Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander representative in 1987 (Fela and Smallwood 2024). NACAIDS was established in November 1984 by Australian Health Ministers as the supposedly preeminent advisory committee on ‘prevention education, care and treatment of those living with HIV/AIDS and [Australian] social policy’ (Bowtell 2005, 21). However, Smallwood’s appointment demonstrates how cruel, targeted policies meant that nurses often had to take these roles into their own hands: her appointment followed the resignation of commission chair David Penington who had attempted to enforce compulsory HIV testing for Aboriginal people (Fela 2024, 142). In the face of stark systemic racism, Smallwood led a team of Aboriginal health and community workers, elders, and graphic designers in Queensland to develop the highly successful ‘Condoman’ sexual health campaign (Figure A), designed by and for Aboriginal communities (Fela and Smallwood 2024). Aunty Gracelyn Smallwood’s work demonstrates the necessity, and often overlooked effectiveness, of community-centred care approaches against institutional neglect.

                I came to this event not knowing anything about the AIDS crisis response in Australia. Yet, having recently watched the beautiful and devastating Channel 4 mini-series It’s a Sin (2021), set primarily in 1980s London, I looked forward to improving my knowledge. One of the most haunting scenes of the series for me is when one of the main characters, Colin Morris-Jones (played by Callum Scott Howells), is left quarantined, alone in a massive hospital room after he is first admitted with HIV/AIDS (Davies 2021, 19:10-26). When Colin is locked away under the 1984 Public Health Act, his housemate, Jill Baxter (played by Lydia West), is left to pursue legal action to force his release (Davies 2021, 28:57-30:43). Jill – who is based on writer and executive producer Russell T Davies’ childhood friend Jill Nalder – demonstrates a fierce determination and love for Colin and his mother Eileen (played by Andria Doherty) in the face of homophobic pathologisation. In Fela’s talk, I noticed striking parallels between the character Jill and a nurse named Sian Edwards who, Fela noted, learnt to massage in order to provide better holistic care for her patients. The talk also emphasised how Edwards, like Jill, prioritised human dignity and connection against punitive institutional measures. When the Australian Medical Association pushed to make medical care conditional on ‘consensual’ HIV testing of groups deemed ‘high-risk’, for example, nurses like Edwards challenged the discriminatory nature of this policy and threatened industrial action until it was dropped. Both Jill and Edwards demonstrated how attentiveness and unrelenting advocacy, forged through often intense grief and systemic homophobia, formed the foundations of feminist networks of care.

                Fela’s talk and the following discussion, therefore, invited the audience to think through and with the AIDS crisis in new ways. In one moment, we were deeply astounded at the NACAIDS ‘Grim Reaper’ (1987) television campaign which was broadcast as part of NACAIDS’s prevention education programming. The campaign shows a haunting Grim Reaper figure at the end of a bowling lane who bowls a ball that dramatically knocks out groups of white men, women and children positioned as bowling pins (Reynolds 1987).¹ Although the bowling pin metaphor and ‘special effects’ seem almost comedically exaggerated to a modern audience (we indeed let out an astonished laugh), the ‘Grim Reaper’ campaign nevertheless provided a striking example of the homophobic and racialised association of ‘gay men, AIDS and death’ (Fela 2024, 26). As Fela (2024) notes, this prevention broadcast was meant to strike fear by depicting ‘the supposedly “innocent’ victims”’ who could be affected by AIDS (26), rather than the usual ‘gays and drug users’ as the advert’s voiceover claims (Reynolds 1987). Yet, in another deeply personal moment, an audience member was moved to share his own experience of the AIDS crisis in the UK, detailing the exceptional end-of-life care his dying partner received from HIV and AIDS nurses. Through this range of audience responses, the event thus produced what Ann Cvetkovich (2003) has called ‘an archive of feelings’: a gathering of multiple ‘cultural texts’ which serve as ‘repositories’ for a range of ‘feelings and emotions’ (7). Fela’s research, popular media (including It’s a Sin) and this talk as a kind of ‘performance’, formed our ‘cultural texts’ which entangled and reformulated our ‘many forms of love, rage, intimacy, grief, shame, and more’ (Cvetkovich 2003, 7). Through Fela’s talk, we were therefore able to tap into and create new affective relations with the transnational legacies of the AIDS crisis and each other, even creating our own timebound space for collective care.

                The nurses of the AIDS crisis, therefore, pointed the way for how an ongoing feminist politics of care can take shape through shared acts of compassion, listening, advocacy, creating, and remembering. They provided an important intergenerational reminder of the necessity for collective action during what feminist scholars have widely called a global ‘crisis of care’: the undervaluation and overexploitation of gendered and racialised care work, conducted across the home, markets, public and not-for-profit sectors, necessary to the perpetuation of ‘neoliberal global economies’ (Harcourt 2026, 153; Razavi 2007).

 In our current manifestation of this ‘crisis’, LGBTQIA+ community care continues to be threatened. Donald Trump’s recent attacks on ‘DEI’ and dismantling of USAID (United States Agency for International Development), for example, have put $105m in donor government funding to LGBTQIA+ movements in the Global South and East at risk  (GPP 2025); caused critical US-funded HIV/AIDS clinics across Nigeria, Indonesia, Malawi and more to cease operations (Lazo 2025) and contributed to a significant drop in corporate sponsors to LGBTQIA+ charities in the UK (Brooks 2026). Facing attempts to completely undercut LGBTQIA+ care services, nurses like Aunty Gracelyn Smallwood and Sian Edwards, finding their parallels in the nurses of today who continue HIV/AIDS services despite crippling cuts (see Context 2025), provided resounding examples of the unrelenting spirit which drives feminist care work as an ongoing, collective political project. In the end, it is not just ‘the dead [who] stay with us’, as Cvetkovich (2003, 238) argues, but our ongoing connections with each other.

Appendix

Figure A: Christian Haugen/Flickr, CC BY. https://www.flickr.com/photos/34073237@N04/3343094313.

Notes

1.A full YouTube video of this advertisement can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOcDcivCjxk.

References

Bowtell, William. 2005. Australia’s Response to HIV/AIDS 1982-2005. Sydney: Lowy Institute for International Policy. https://www.lowyinstitute.org/sites/default/files/pubfiles/Bowtell,_Aust....

Brooks, Libby. 2026. ‘UK LGBTQ+ charities are in “hostile environment” amid falling donations, experts warn’. The Guardian, January 7, 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/jan/07/uk-lgbtq-charities-are-in-hostile-environment-amid-falling-donations-experts-warn.

Context. 2025. ‘What Trump’s Aid Cuts Mean for Trans Africans’. YouTube video, March 19, 2025, 8:14. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ms9CqNL9UVY.

Cvetkovich, Ann. 2003. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822384434.

Davies, Russel T. 2021. ‘Episode 3’. Season 1, episode 3.  It’s A Sin. Television programme. United Kingdom: Channel 4.

Fela, Geraldine and Gracelyn Smallwood. 2024. ‘First Nations superhero “Condoman” was a world leader in HIV prevention. Aunty Gracelyn Smallwood made it happen’. The Conversation, July 11, 2024, https://doi.org/10.64628/aa.qyke9xr9v.

Fela, Geraldine. 2024. Critical Care: Nurses on the Frontline of Australia's AIDS Crisis. Sydney: NewSouth Publishing.

Global Philanthropy Project (GPP). 2025. ‘GPP’s Recommended Philanthropic Interventions to Support LGBTI Communities in the Global South and East’. Last Modified March 5, 2025. https://globalphilanthropyproject.org/coordinatedresponseodacuts/.

Harcourt, Wendy. 2026. ‘The Ethics and Politics of Care: Reshaping Economic Thinking and Practice’. Review of Political Economy 38 (1): 150-166. https://doi.org/10.1080/09538259.2023.2241395.

Lazo, Enrique Anarte. 2025. ‘How LGBTQ+ Rights Funding Collapsed in 2025’. Context, December 12, 2025. https://www.context.news/money-power-people/feature-how-lgbtq-rights-fun....

Razavi, Shahra. 2007. The Political and Social Economy of Care in a Development Context Conceptual Issues, Research Questions and Policy Options. Gender and Development Programme Paper No. 3. Geneva: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development.

Reynolds, Siimon. 1987. Grim Reaper. Television Advertisement, 5 April 1987. Grey Advertising.