Pain-Fear-Neglect-Repugnance

PAIN-FEAR-NEGLECT-REPUGNANCE Socio-psychological side effects

Didi Hock

This personal supplement to the information leaflet of a morning-after pill I voluntarily took in April 2016 represents the final point of the lonely fight I struggled out with my own body and mind after abundant pain, bleedings, and friendship related disillusions.

PAIN-FEAR-NEGLECT-REPUGNANCE is the first piece of a series of paintings done with my (pseudo-)menstrual blood. With this practice, I do not search for any link to my supposed femininity. I neither connect with my cyclic rhythm, nor do I embrace my menstruation with pleasure. Loads of people criticize me when I talk like this. They correct me, they judge me, they make fun of me. But I cannot follow the rules of the essentialist game, not of the patriarchal nor of the feminist one. My so-called sex organs are a strange body inside my own body. They are pain, they are alienating. I cannot use them to empower myself.

To paint with my blood does, hence, not represent a gesture of honoring my menstruation but my resistance to cyclic bleedings and to those off-site the script. Finally, they are good for something. Ejecting them over some pan, paper, or piece of fabric. Smoothing this thick and stretchable liquid. Tarnishing a drawing in process (or the floor around it) with randomly falling drops—observing how the saturated red turns into an opaque and incrusted brown—distract myself during a moment of suffering. These paintings are agency not naturalness, they are mental and social cleaning, they are alleviation of pain.