Polysemia

1. Design History Interrupted: A Queer Feminist Perspective

The gender-laden design agenda has seen intriguing novelties in recent years: smart menstrual cups that control women's menstruation cycles remotely, apps that provide touch-screen masturbation tutorials for female users, multinational clothing brands that herald gender-bending or unisex seasons, and doll corporations that introduce miscellaneous body types, skin tones and gender presentations in their new models. The change is noteworthy, and reasonable, considering today's increasing voices and visibility of post-feminists, queers and other marginalised persons. Before deeming this move affirmative, it is important to understand how these designed things' contribute to the broader discussion around gender, sexuality and identity both within and outside the design discipline. To attain that, it is crucial to analyse the issue in question, namely queer-feminist design theory and practice, from a historical and critical viewpoint. This is what I will seek to undertake in this essay.

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I will also dare to claim that there cannot be such thing as queer-feminist design history, but one can seek to capture different moments of theoretical and practical endeavours shuttling between past, present, future, and eventually, utopia. This kind of narration echoes what feminist graphic designer and scholar Martha Scotford has already called 'messy history' as an alternative way of recounting design activities that are non-normative, personal and expressive. Scotford opposes this to 'neat history' which is conventional, mainstream, dominantly white-male-middle-class and privileged. Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, a prominent feminist graphic designer and scholar, relates this messy and non-linear temporality to women's quilts and patchworks. De Bretteville considers these works as material assemblages of personal experiences and fragments of time-space, in contrast to the patriarchal rational that scorns individualisation and favours universal verification. My personal interpretation of rationale that scorns individualisation and favours queer-feminist design history in this essay will be as fragmented as a patchwork, and akin to a collage that will merge history, theory and practice with criticism. I am aware that I will inherently omit many existing, ongoing or vanished scholarly works and design practices. While one reason for this omission is that many works are being done worldwide that stay under the radar, another is intentional and therefore personal.

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As the answer to what makes design theory, practice and research feminist' might vary from person to person, for me, it is discourse, critical stance and political engagement. Even if this engagement emerges from a particular artefact tackling gender discrimination, it should end up targeting greater power structures. For instance, the effort of bringing the neglected works of woman designers and architects into view has surely been significant from the 1970s onwards. However, such monographic initiations have also been criticised for repeating the modernist historiography, mostly based on 'pioneers' and 'stars' who are already privileged to access special education and professional milieus. Thus, the projects of visibility that mostly align designers together just because they belong to the same gender presentation will not be included here. The role of design in gender disparity is a complex phenomenon, so, instead of recounting design works done by women' or 'products from women designers, I will touch upon those works that have a political discourse and dedication for unravelling the intrinsic alliance between design and gender construction.

2. Emergence and Emergency: A Feminist Turn

No ideology, school of thought or political agenda emanates out of nowhere independently of social contexts and paradigms. Likewise, the design discipline was thoroughly swayed by women's rising voices and visible exertions in social realms blasted open by the second-wave feminist movement, in the 1960s. Following the legal achievements of suffragettes who fought for the rights of women before the law, the second-wave feminists expanded the issue of women's liberation to a great deal of varied but correlated struggles: systematic discrimination of women in the workplace, domestication, anti-abortion enforcements, marital discords, uneven division of labour in the household, domestic violence, sexism, misogyny, and so on. Their resilience incited numerous disciplines and most conspicuously art. Feminist artists and their works, imbued with profound political agendas of women, not only stirred up significant debates around gender, but also demonstrated aesthetic-political ways of using art as a medium to tackle, resist, and counteract the man-made (art) world. A glowing feminist discourse did not, however, permeate from the artistic realm to the field of design immediately. In the early 1970s, some prominent figures started blurring the boundaries between art, graphic design, urban design and architecture. For instance, Susana Torre, co-founder of Heresies Journal, not only laid bare the miswritten histories of woman architects along with the feminist critiques towards the notions of body, space, and built environments; she also practised architecture to re-construct a non-sexist and egalitarian society.

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Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, another eminent figure from art and graphic design, brought these two kindred fields together even further and approached the image-making process as a feminist tool to thwart male supremacy. One of her iconic works that have inspired many successor artists and designers was the poster she designed for the Women in Design Conference held in Los Angeles in 1975. Over-turning the perception of hardware under the sway of the male user, she used eyebolts as visual concretisations of the Venus symbol, the female sign. Eyebolts, aligned as in parading till the horizon and heading towards an unknown but awaited future, symbolised the prospective visions of woman designers to be discussed during the conference. She also converted the eyebolt figures into necklaces that were distributed among the artists and designers at the conference and this became the symbol of the women's struggles and empowerment in design. This work was historically and politically significant in the sense that a designed image of an artefact (graphic of original eyebolt), which was turned into another designed artefact (eyebolt shaped chained-necklace), demonstrated how material modification of one single figure would challenge and provoke a malestream discipline while encouraging woman designers to act in solidarity. Except the few above examples, it was not until the 1980s that design, as a disciplinary activity, was charged with a critical discourse and feminist stance. When it started, feminist designers from near and afar, with numerous agendas, attacked the existing status quo. Early feminist design scholars transformed Linda Nochlin's well-echoed question into 'Why have there been no great women designers?’ to confront long-standing male dominance and patriarchal hegemony in design history, applied practice and design academia. They outlined how women designers were either displaced from design practice and scholarship or overshadowed by their husbands, male work-partners or family members.

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Moreover, some of them put dominant 'man-made design production in question and revealed how the discipline and its instruments reproduced the inferiority of ‘FORM/female' to ‘FUNCTION/male’. Because 'male' was associated with science, technology, machinery, public space, strength, assertiveness, rationality; 'female' with ornament, decoration, surface, domestic areas, fragility, spontaneity and emotion." Such stereotypes were reflected not only in the contempt for the creative works (i.e. textile, jewellery, crafts, ceramics, decorative arts) practised by women as a result of their socio-political and economic status but also in the daily ‘gendered objects’ and environments that systematically segregated bodies according to genders and sexes. Besides, other scholars, similarly challenging design as a 'product of bourgeois, patriarchal ideology,” focused on the women's representation in consumer culture either as sexually objectified presenters used for marketing strategies or passive domestic consumers. For instance, feminist critiques traced how, especially during the post-Second World War and Cold War era, women were targeted as potential consumers for capitalism-driven societies, and how the market, and thereby designed artefacts in it, went through 'feminisation' to sell better. They demonstrated the reciprocity between how technological artefacts and their marketing process were defined by gender codes, yet how gender codes were reproduced through the every-day objects.

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Moreover, most of the products promoted as 'design for women’ such as electrical appliances(i.e. microwaves, blenders, vacuum cleaners) did not lessen the women's workloads as alleged. On the contrary, they trapped women with a greater variety of work—with their 'saved time', thanks to technology- and underpinned their domestication as day labourers. This paradigm shift, as one of the pieces in my patchwork, which I would like to call ‘feminist-turn in design', constituted the backbone of the feminist discourse in design. This turn was an important endeavour that aimed to shake design to its patriarchal foundations by debunking its oppressive disposition and unfolded how 'man-made' things were the first-hand agencies in reproducing gender roles and corroborating power structures. Also, they have been an important inspiration for the newcomers to the field. However, if we lift our head from the linear feminist design pathway and see the time-space axis from a multidimensional perspective, we can also diagnose many shortcomings in these projects, which have yet to be overcome. With a critical stance, I would like to mention the most salient failures of their success.

3. A Critical Aperture in Criticality

First of all, scholarly critiques and theorisations have fallen short of practical implementations of what has been promised. How many design practitioners and initiators do we know since the 1980s who have genuinely worked on deconstructing existing gender segregation in our artificially designed world? The lucky ones will remember Matrix, the feminist design and architecture collective that was active during the 1980s and combined theory with practice through hands-on research in the field. They worked intensively with[in] communities via participatory methods, improved the built environment and women's engagement in the building practices, and also provided technical support to communities. They also contextualised their practices and criticisms in written works, and in 1984, published a book entitled Making Space: Women and the Man Made Environment. In this publication, through the theories of urban design, architecture and feminism, they elaborated on the systematic exclusion of women from public space and the dominance of male-oriented environments, Matrix was one of the vanguard groups that contributed to design theory and practice with a downright feminist discourse for the next generation of urban designers and architects. Then comes the gap. Although scholarly discussions and small-scale research projects in design schools continued and expanded into other new branches of design (e.g., Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Game Design), the 1980s, 1990s and even the early 2000s have not witnessed many practice-based initiatives in this respect outside academia. Some remarkable examples are no older than a decade: Femme Den design lab, powered by Smart Design, based in the UK and US, has been active since 2006 and still develops design projects fulfilling the female users' needs. Opposing the commonplace products designed for women by the process of pinking and shrinking', they propound female-friendly products ranging from sports to housewares.

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Another three-year research project that finished in 2012, called 'Female Interaction', run by the Danish design company design-people, also focused on females as users of technology, and aimed to foster their interaction with innovative design artefacts such as smartphones, mobile apps and climate controllers. The Berlin-based Design Research Lab also ran several design research projects (including G-Gender Inspired Technology, Women's Phone and Gendered Interfaces) for women as a neglected group, and by using participatory methods they designed apps and technologies fulfilling women's needs. In addition, the International Gender Design Network (IGDN) founded by Uta Brandes and Simone Douglas also supports events, knowledge exchange, and exploring practice and theory on the issues of gender and design. However, the 'gap' appears not only in the quantity of such projects but also in their contents. Although these groups have managed to challenge the subjugation of women in design and through designed things, their approach falls behind the contemporary discourse of gender. Since the 1980s, with third-wave feminism, along with sexuality studies, cultural Theories, political philosophy and post-structural critiques, scholars have demonstrated how gender is only one thread of a greater 'matrix of domination.’ They claimed that hegemonic power and its oppression based on one's gender cannot be understood without understanding other identity constructions such as: sexuality, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, class, religion, age, nationality, ability and so on, also known in the literature as intersectionality.

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Meanwhile, queer theory, mainly evolved during the 1990s, not only debunked the stability of dichotomous gender and sex attributions (i.e. man/woman, female/male, feminine/masculine and hetero/homo), but embraced the plethora of non-conforming positions as places of the marginalised, disenfranchised, excluded, precarious and deviant bodies. Queer theory showed us that there are not just binary but miscellaneous genders and sexualities and that these identity categories are fluid as well. Last but not least, post-colonial-queer-feminist scholars more recently stressed that gender-based oppressions cannot be tackled as long as they are not seen as part of a colonial project strongly tied in with westernisation, modernism and capitalism-which are the 'fathers' of design. All in all, these critiques declare that without understanding the complexity of power structures, to counteract this status quo is no more impactful than sweeping the sands on the beach. Looking at the contemporary feminist projects as mentioned above, a critical view shows that some elements are lacking, in terms of discourse around gender and feminist ideology. First and foremost, most of such works still deem 'woman' a monolithic category with a strong essentialism. Their concept of woman mostly equals to female, feminine, heterosexual, and, in some contexts, monogamous and mother; this eventually reproduces stereotypes about women, their 'taste', their technological abilities and their roles both in their public and domestic life. Moreover, the discourse of some of the projects is overtly based on companies' economic plans and therefore women remain, once again, potential consumers that would buy more gender-segregated products, but this time with 'feminist' concerns. Meanwhile, a great percentage of the scholarly works and practices were or are based in the UK or the US, and few others in Western Europe.

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I am not favouring the 'feminism is the first world problem’ aphorism here, nor do l underestimate their significant contributions to feminist struggle. I claim, however, that these projects run the risk of being ethnocentric, class-privileged and normative, since the targets, participants, doers and presenters of these projects are invariably white, hetero-cis-sexual, [upper]middle-class, young and able-bodied. So, one may ask who is in the ‘feminist-design' agenda and who is not, and according to what criteria? Is there a threshold for being unprivileged enough? Besides, the scope of design is not limited to artefacts and their use, but belongs to a more complex system of manufacturing, dissemination and various forms of labour based on gender bias. Since the early 1980s, for instance, researchers have been revealing the exploitation of women working in Third World countries for multinational corporations. For the product, technology and fashion industries in particular, from Latin America to Asia, millions of young women, as the 'world's new industrial proletariat' toil for inhuman working hours without insurance, safety, health considerations or sufficient wage. This multi-layered torment, which affects and is affected by gender, ethnicity, nationality, age and the like, is not only a socio-economic issue, but also of utmost interest to the design field. Therefore, the agenda of feminist-design urgently needs to be shifted from exclusive to expansive and subversive in ways that would challenge the existing modus operandi of design, its norms and misused privileges.

4. Need for a New Turn: Queer Agenda in Design

Now, I would like to take that good old question and re-modify it to 'Why have there been no queer-intersectional-decolonial-feminist design[ers]?', whereas mainstream culture, fashion, and areas such as visual and performing arts, literature, geography, and cultural studies have been already taken hold of a 'queer turn? One of the possible answers would be the very status of design as a discipline that was born and spread from an already privileged position: Western, Euro-American-centric, white, male, heteronormative, prosperous, able, and the like. However, since this is also true of the fields mentioned above, other reasons may be the designers’ over-concentration on object-oriented projects, the public image of these projects and of design itself, as well as their reluctance to move beyond the dichotomous gender discussion. As a result, they overlook the interconnectedness of all forms of identity-based oppressions and material power that overstep the limits of disciplinary interests. On the other hand, there have already been several research-led design works with an intriguing critical queer discourse on gender fluidity, non-binary sexual identity, and their possible reflections in designed materials. Some projects remain on the margins of art and design, but trying not to fall into the trap of the disciplinary divisions, I will stick to analysing the image, artefact and discourse production around gender, sexuality, identity, materiality, and visit some of them and their content.

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Some of the best-known queer-feminist-oriented material works come from Zach Blas, creator of Queer Technologies, whose works humorously render the repressive implementation of technology, hegemonic surveillance and binary system of gender and sexuality dysfunctional. His works are significant not only contextually, but also in how he overturns the normative understanding of design that is functional, utilitarian, ОТ aesthetically charming and having use value. However, they do not serve as mere critical objects either, as in operating only as provocateurs, awareness-raisers or cultural mediators from the position of the bell jar; they actively confront the repressive technological regimes from within techno-material culture, in circulation. For instance, with the project ENgenderingGenderChangers, he re-designed hardware connections in opposition to the existing binary connection system based on gender subordination and heterosexuality. Questioning the technology's strong association with gender and ENgendering sexuality, he divulged the limits of interlockable female/anger, Queer male plugs and aimed to challenge users' perceptions on 'functionality, compatibility, and affordability that sustain consumption and capitalist flow. He proposed a wide range of gender adapters such as Male to Butch, Female to Power Bottom, Male to Femme, Male to Admin or Female to CEO to expand the complexity of IT solutions, beyond the sex bifurcation. Another work, Facial Weaponization Suite, triggered by the world-wide social movements and protests that blasted in 2011, is an ongoing series of site-specific community workshops to disrupt racial recognition technologies. The work speaks out against governmental biometric standardizations that scan bodies and faces in airports, on borders or streets, yet put marginalized bodies at risk of being detected, caught, deported, fined or humiliated (e.g., immigrants, protesters, non-Caucasian faces, transgender people or people whose biological/certificated sex and facial gender presentation do not match). During the workshops, participants get their faces scanned and gather their different facial features into one single mask that is non-human, non-animal, distorted, and eventually uncatchable by biometric technologies. Alongside his other subversive works (transCoder, Gay Bombs), Blas interlaces intersectional queer theory, technology studies and practice not with a naive ‘changing the world' platitude but for and through 'political desire, pedagogy, and collective experiences’.

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DE_SIGN, as another queer-driven practice-based research by Gabriel Ann Maher, holds design's media apparatuses such as magazines under the microscope. With that, Maher analyses critically how designed things' and the media that portray and disseminate them (i.e. magazines, websites, posters, video commercials) work hand in hand in repeating the cultural stereotypes and binary thinking about gender, sexuality, and thereby identity. By taking the Dutch design and architecture magazine FRAME as a case study, Maher analyses the representations of gendered and sexed bodies in the magazine and reveals the problematic imagery and discourse embedded in various examples. Through visual deconstruction as a method-cutting out bodies from the pages and re-positioning them as montage—as well as by semantic analyses of the artefacts and their representations, DE__SIGN unfolds how the design practice is still conditioned and conditioning the dichotomous genders and sexualities, and cultural artefacts accordingly. Moreover, the project incorporates meticulous inspection of bodies of the colour and demonstrates the repetition of the colonial past to present that appears in stereotypical images of racial subordination and female sexuality. Finally, by problematizing the cultural codes of the body positions and their relation to gender and power dynamics, Maher focuses particularly on the sitting body.DE__SIGN: Act of Sitting, therefore, ensues as a material exploration and performance of some deconstructed postures and manifests the fluid ways of positioning the self. Another outstanding recent work was performed by the graphic designer, artist and queer-feminist activist Hélène Mourrier. She designed both the graphics and the content of the trans-formations booklets, Ft* and Mt* for and in collaboration with OUTrans, a non-profit feminist activist organization that supports transgender, FtM, MtF, as well as cisgendered individuals. Being strongly involved with trans-feminist activism and well-informed with the surgical and scientific terms; Mourrier designed the catalogues that illustrate gender reassignment processes for transgender people as still one of the most marginalized, isolated, and disenfranchised group in society. Merging the medical lexicon with her own political queer discourse, anatomic shapes with her own graphic aesthetics, she provided a piece of work reflecting a hybrid corpus, a surgical processes. In ‘knowledge in resistance’. In her detailed illustrations of body parts involved in the transition process, she tel colours in contrast with overtly depictive, realistic and exhibitory medical imagery. Also, her use of flesh-question, as an implicit reminder that trans bodies are also for sex and love. Eluding the mere representation of a highly delicate matter, Mourrier's work introduces well as its practical implementation specifically for the outcasts and bodies on the fringes.

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As to the subject of graphic design, gender segregation, sexuality and designed environments, today many people are aware of public toilets, not only with regard to their spatial divisions but also their pictogrammic references. Compared to other material artefacts, signage systems and spaces, bathrooms have been extensively and frequently discussed by queer theoreticians, activists, scholars and practitioners. However, every day people are subjected to verbal or physical violence for 'misusing' public bathrooms as a result of their non-conforming gender presentations and sexual orientations. Genderpoo is a queer-graphic work about bathroom signs being carried out by Coco Guzman-a.k.a. Coco Riot-since 2008, as a manifestation against normalcy of bodies. Based on simple but sophisticated vector-based drawings, the work grows through participants in workshops as an assemblage of miscellaneous deviant, mutant and monster-like bodies that confront the ideal form of anatomy and identity presentation. A mermaid with breasts and moustache, two skirted-figures in sixty-nine position, a nun peeing standing up, a hairy protestor with Molotov cocktail and veil, or a brunette amputee dissident not only depict myriad forms of gender and sexuality, but also put other biased and marginalized identity categories in question. Moreover, the project was not limited to pictorial tions, but also spread to other material forms such as garments, publications and the physical façades of bathrooms, as other examples for multiple material modifications.

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Last but not least, design researcher Luiza Prado de O. Martins takes a closer look at the politics of contraceptive pills and their historicity from an intersectional and decolonial point of view. Considering pills as designed artefacts, she examines not only their role in controlling bodies' gender (presentation) and reproductive functions through hormonal manipulations, but also their partaking in taming and restraining raced and classed sexuality. Her theoretically rich work blooms with the new methodologies and participatory workshops where she scrutinizes the direct effects of material artefacts on our material bodies through anachronistic processes of history-re-making. As can be seen from the examples, a queer turn in design does not mean 'design for queer people' as a new marketplace for production or to make an inventory of queer designers: Nor does it regard queerness in design as a stylistic umbrella for all marginalized identities or merely being genderless or 'unisex'. A queer turn, however, is first to acknowledge design's direct and ruthless impacts on people based on artefactual, spatial, sartorial or digital segregations; and, in turn, how bodies reiterate and reactivate the meanings embedded in these materials by performing, embodying or inhabiting them every day. Therefore, new generation queer-feminist protagonists of design will undertake several challenging tasks: bearing in mind that design is a material form of dominant power, they must constantly call design's intentions and outcomes into question, deconstruct its exclusionary and oppressive modes and unceasingly re-politicize it.

5. Towards a Messier History

An urge for a queer turn is not to call for a new trend or a movement in design for the sake of design. Nor is it a linear progression from feminism. It is a project of excavating, unfolding and unravelling the hegemonies speculate about possible dystopias and use designed tural, social, and daily contexts. Some design projects artefacts to raise awareness about what may happen in the future. However, as many design scholars already pointed out, this dystopia happens right now, in places to many people, in real life. So, a queer turn is also a project of turning this dystopia into utopian imaginations instead of bogging down in an inert cynicism, and using design to counteract itself. To observe the proliferation of today's designed artefacts that target gender and sexuality-such as the ones listed in the beginning of this essay-is certainly thought-provoking. However, it is important to keep a wary eye on the inclusive guise of profit-oriented productions and to remember that every inclusion means someone else's exclusion, if not persecution. A genuine queer-feminist agenda is to construe the historical, political and material aspects of sex, gender, and other identity discrimination and contextualize them carefully within larger power structures. History is already being written; it is not an irreversible past, but an extricable today. Thus, instead of waiting for reclaiming or re-writing another history in the future, the queer-feminist-design agenda should interrupt the ongoing history here and now, load it with anti-hegemonic, intersectional, and decolonial discourses and criticisms, make it even 'messier'. I believe that it might be one of the ways to resist oppressive, discriminatory and 'neat' material power, and to turn design and its history from a patchwork to a queer amalgam.

Issue 01

Polysemia is a new curated space commited to presenting a history of socially committed design strategies in a way that allows for more digital dynamism and ease of access. With the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown hindering the already dwindling reach, viability and market for print media, how will such material be distributed?

We hope these prove to be insightful and fun experiments that help platform works that would not otherwise be found outside the realms of print media or scholarly archives. Issue 01 showcases Ece Canli’s essay ‘Design History Interrupted: A Queer Feminist Perspective’.