This project is looking at what affects collective silence has on our bodies, looking specifically at how laws that created silence in relationship to gender and sexuaility effected a generation in the UK. How did we communicate beyond language through music, movement and touch to express layers of unarticulated identity.
The first time I went to the club Fabric I was 14, I found a potential utopic space, at 17 I fell head first into drum and bass and trance London rave scene. These were the first places I found gender abstraction, the drugs, the music, the movement stripped us of gender norms. Before I had ever conceived to identify as queer and non binary these sounds and movements created a temporary escape from normative gender and sexuality. I found in these spaces a way to connect to ideas that I had no context or words for, however the music and drugs didn’t last forever.
This research builds from a series of interviews which I am doing in the UK during 2024/205 around the impact on Section 28 that banned the ‘promotion of homosexuality’ in schools between 1988 - 2003. I am talking to those who grew up under this generation trying to understand how the silencing effect of this law affected bodies and expression, focusing on queer pleasure and shame.