This project is looking at what effects collective silence has on our bodies, looking specifically at how laws that created silence in relationship to gender and sexuality affected a generation in the UK. How did we communicate beyond language, through music, movement and touch to express layers of unarticulated identity? What are the online and physical spaces we turned? What were our coping mechanisms?
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-2024/2025 around the impact on Section 28: a law that banned the promotion of homosexuality in schools between 1987-2003/5. I am talking to those who grew up under this, a generation trying to understand how the silencing effect of this law affected bodies and expression, focusing on queer pleasure and shame.