Golden Shit: (Un)Wrapping Gender Aesthetics

Lecture by Irina Hron, Docent and Co-Director of Thinking the European Republic of Letters.

Taking its point of departure from a poem by the Danish punk poet Michael Strunge, this paper explores the literary fascination with shiny, polished, and beautifully packaged surfaces that came to define the aesthetics of consumption in the 1980s. From gold-lacquered manure (“Gyldent lort”) and chocolate-coated waste products to layers of luxury wrapping around organic refuse, the imagery of the decade is gradually unwrapped – layer by layer, text by text.

Threaded through these many folds of gold, silk, and decorative ribbons is the narrative of women who are drawn into male visual worlds and desires shaped by luxury, fashion, and aggression. The result is a world in which violence is first staged as a fashion accessory and then turned into a weapon against women, exposing a gender aesthetic coated in gold lacquer. These women are caught in a perpetual cycle of wrapping and unwrapping, creating an eerie power structure of giving and receiving (uncanny gifts) between the sexes. Through close readings of literary works by Margaret Atwood, Mircea Cărtărescu, Bret Easton Ellis, and Michael Strunge this paper points out how 1980s ideologies resurface today in new and often uncanny wrappings. 

The seminar is organized by Komplitt (Lund University) in cooperation with CEMES.

Contact: oscar.jansson@litt.lu.se

Irina Hron 

Irina Hron is a Senior Researcher (docent) in the Department of Communication at the University of Copenhagen. She is the author of Hervorbringungen. Zur Poetik des Anfangens um 1900 (2013) and the editor of volumes such as Einheitsdenken. Figuren von Ganzheit, Präsenz und Transzendenz nach der Postmoderne (2015), Leseszenen. Poetologie – Geschichte – Medialität (2020), Lesegebärden (2024), and Neighborliness: Poetics, Politics, and Practices of Neighbor-Love (2025).

Hron is the editor-in-chief of the series LESESZENEN published by Universitätsverlag Winter (UWH). She is the director of the international interdisciplinary research platform Dermacriticism.