Infrastructural Drag

Face filter template designed during the event

In this workshop that took place next to the gender-neutral bathroom of Van Abbe Museum, the infrastructure of the gender binary was deconstructed through drag, a performance of exaggerated gender expressions.

Process of making face filters during the workshop Infrastructural Drag

Ranging across various scales – environmental hormones, contraceptive pill containers, gendered electric cables, public bathrooms, hotel rooms, brothels, suburban sprawls, Wikipedia, etc. – the gender binary had been maintained and reproduced through the designed structures constituting exclusionary material culture. Drag was the strategy of appropriation in the workshop through which those normative infrastructures were playfully unraveled, reconstructed, and embodied.

During the workshop, Meta Spark was utilized as a strategy of 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, participants discussed what it meant to publish using such a tool and what agency they still had in the process.

The goal of the workshop was to take a bathroom selfie with the Infrastructural Drag makeup collectively created during the session.

Application of the face filter on the face of one of the participants, Elvia Vasconcelos

The workshop consisted of the following steps:

1. Participants were guided through the cases of gendered infrastructure and collectively created an image collection showing how such infrastructures function as material constituents of the social construct of gender.

2. The images were printed out, and participants were provided with face template sheets on which they could make collages using the prints as part of their drag makeup. The sheets could also be decorated using other means.

3. At the same time, participants were invited to use actual makeup equipment and wear drag makeup on their faces spontaneously with the Meta Spark face filters. This process was supported by Malou van Doormaal.

4. The finalized sheets were scanned and applied as a face texture on Meta Spark. Using the test-on-device function, participants were able to take bathroom selfies using the infrastructural makeup they created.