Golding, Sue, 1994, Journal Article, Pariah Bodies Critical Quarterly, 36 (1). pp. 28-36. ISSN 1467-8705
Abstract or Description: | This piece, translated into many languages, and, the last section of which (a fable between a frog and nightgown, an eye and a shoe) is being animated into video, chronicles the rage, horror, depression, courage of all those infected and/or affected by the HIV-Aids pandemic. Like many of her generation -- and before anti-virals were discovered -- Golding lost over 50+ beloved wild and beautiful lovers, friends and comrades to this ugly disease, though at the time of writing, the 'number' was recorded at slightly less (40); each one precious, real, searing. The curious aspect of the piece was in its immediate aftermath of publication. For many it seemed 'odd' that HIV-Aids might affect anyone who was not 'gay-male'; so that when Golding herself went to seek grief counseling over this mad, traumatic, relentless tsunami of grief, the doctors told her that she should go read this 'really important piece written by a woman!' "But I AM the woman who wrote that piece!!". Abstract from the published version: "This is an angry, melancholic piece about death and dying and carrying on. It laces together the rawness of those 'problems' with the vitality and courage that all of us have had to muster in order to begin again, always and forever again, whether this 'us' be packaged as dyke or fag or tranny or queen or bisexual or queer or anything else yet to be invented. The people and their situations recorded are personal and particular; the deaths diverse and painful; yet their lives resonate at the more universal - dare we say 'political' - level. At the risk of saying both too much and too little, what has become clear for all of us who are a part of THIS community, this glorious gay community (stuffed to its multiple gills with frivolity, mutation and decay), is that our 'beginnings' create the very surface of an adult version - not to put too fine a point on it, of childhood itself. But this is an odd, often cruel form of childhood - one that skates upon the carnal knowledge of sex and sweat, encapsulated at the boundaries of our skin. We are the adult-children who refuse to give up our friendships and our loves in the face of this damnable brutality. We are the horror-children, the exiles, the journeyers, with the wrong outfits, the wrong loves, wrong jokes, wrong sicknesses, wrong deaths, carrying on, despite all odds. A bravado etched across always-already-beginning beginnings, making us in one word: pariah." |
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Official URL: | http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-... |
Subjects: | Other > Historical and Philosophical studies > V500 Philosophy Creative Arts and Design > W100 Fine Art |
School or Centre: | School of Arts & Humanities |
Identification Number or DOI: | 10.1111/j.1467-8705.1994.tb01007.x |
Date Deposited: | 11 Dec 2017 17:46 |
Last Modified: | 09 Nov 2018 15:48 |
URI: | https://researchonline.rca.ac.uk/id/eprint/3013 |
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