‘DEFEND, DEFEND, DEFEND’: women’s HIV health activism, embodied feminist performance-making and radical kindness

This article shares the learning from our project, <i>Positively Past, Positively Present</i> (PPPP), which started in 2022 in partnership with Positively UK, formerly known as Positively Women, a UK HIV support and advocacy organisation. The PPPP project is an archival, oral herstory project which focuses on capturing the herstories and experiences of women and others who were part of Positively Women. Our aim was to consolidate these women's herstories and by sharing this knowledge prevent these extraordinary narratives from being invisibilised again. In this article we articulate how our use of embodied feminist performance-making in health activism can help to nurture the roots and interconnections of these knowledges, and in doing so, 'DEFEND' the loss of these stories.