Binary by Design: Unfolding Corporeal Segregation at the Intersection of Gender, Identity and Materiality

Abstract

This article offers a critical reading on how the binary logic, as a milestone of Western modernity, resides in the very construction and reproduction of gender and design. Through a decolonial queer feminist lens, it argues how the binary regime of gender, sexuality and identity is constitutive of and constituted by dichotomously designed materialities, fostering systematic categorization and segregation of bodies. It unfolds the interdependence between material-based and gender-based segregation by epitomizing some prominent binary visual, spatial and sartorial material practices as the designed that corroborate the system of identity-based inclusion/exclusion and privilege/oppression. To go beyond such dichotomizations, the article, then, proposes an epistemological and methodological shift for designers and design researchers as a possible way of challenging binary regimes from within the design discipline.

Keywords:

• Binarism
• coloniality
• design
• gender and sexuality
• material practices

Notes

1 Rather than indicating a direct territorial reference, the terms ‘Western’ and ‘Euro-American’ in this article imply the geocultural extension of colonial power, modernity, world capitalism and epistemic dominance (Quijano 2000; Lugones 2007).

2 Dualism also exists in oriental philosophies; yet, what differentiates it from the binary structuralism of the West is that the former considers binaries rather as pairs, complementary and ‘both/and’, instead of oppositional, hierarchal and ‘either/or’. Accordingly, what is problematized in this article is not the binary worldview per se, but how its parties exist asymmetrically in a hierarchal relationship.

3 ‘Cis’ is used for a person whose gender identity and biologic sex assigned at birth conform the heterosexual matrix. The term heterocisnormativity refers to the assumption that heterosexuality and cisgender are the only legitimate ways of being.

4 This is not to argue that gender and sex dichotomy had never existed in pre-colonial societies, since neither there are sufficient number of studies to prove this argument, nor pre-colonial societies were homogenous. Yet some accounts indicate that even if such binarisms had existed before, they had non-oppressive social organizations and different mythologies (see Anzaldúa 1987; Oyewùmí 1997).

5 Vernacular non-Western crafts might show us different divisions of labour, but here I focus on the discourse around Western design discipline, disseminated to the rest of the world as a dominant way of practicing.

6 See the research project White Standard (2016) by visual journalist Márton Kabai. http://www.martonkabai.com/index/white-standard (Accessed November 16, 2016).

7 See http://metro.co.uk/2016/08/24/just-a-reminder-that-telling-women-what-they-can-and-cant-wear-on-beaches-has-been-going-on-for-a-long-time-6087992/ (Accessed December 10, 2017)

8 A term that refers to ‘the study of practices of knowing in being’, as an undoing of yet another polarization between ontology and epistemology (Barad 2003, 829).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) under Grant PD/BD/105808/2014.

Notes on contributors

Ece Canlı

Ece Canlı is a design researcher and artist, born and raised in Turkey and based in Porto, Portugal. She holds a Ph.D. in Design from University of Porto. In her work, from a decolonial queer feminist viewpoint, she investigates how design, as material practices, is invested in and reproduced through gender, sexuality, intersectional identities and body politics. She is a founding member of Decolonising Design Group. www.ececanli.com