The Infrastructural Drag

In this workshop taking place next to the gender-neutral bathroom of the Van Abbe Museum, the infrastructure of the gender binary will be deconstructed through drag, a performance of exaggerated gender expressions. Ranging in various scales – environmental hormones, contraceptive pill containers, gendered electric cables, public bathrooms, hotel rooms, brothels, suburban sprawls, Wikipedia, etc. – the gender binary has been maintained and reproduced through the designed structures constituting exclusionary material culture. Drag will be the strategy of appropriation in the workshop through which those normative infrastructures will be playfully unravelled, reconstructed and embodied. Meta Spark will be utilised during the workshop as a strategy for publication. Meta Spark is a digital toolkit for augmented reality creation developed and distributed by Meta. While Meta Spark itself is another infrastructure of the gender binary that promotes a certain representation of gender, we will discuss what it means to publish using such a tool and what agency we still have in the process. The workshop’s goal would be to take a bathroom selfie with the Infrastructural Drag makeup that will be collectively created during the workshop.

The session is held in English.