Assembling Gender

with M. Torres

Assembling Gender is a set of trans paper dolls – composed through digital and manual collage – with accessories including sex objects, clothes, body parts (human and otherwise), and other things that might constitute the ensemble that is gender. These objects – and their accompanying styles of embodiment and meaning – have been sourced from various archives of creative and material culture. Featured objects are sourced from lesbian/gay porn magazines (such as On Our Backs, Taste of Latex, and Bad Attitude) accessed through the Susan Morgan collection (1990-2006) of the Arizona Queer Archives; contemporary art from zingmagazine and other art publications sourced from the dumpster of Tucson’s Museum of Contemporary Art; images from the internet’s pop and sex cultures; and kink objects from our personal collections.

In assembling these materials, we reanimate these archives, drawing queer traces across time and space and reordering them into a universe of gendered possibility and play that are accessed through our own bodies. The digital collage was printed, cut out, and manually assembled into compositions ("possible genders"). These compositions situate gendered embodiment and sexual practices within a living cultural and material archive while speculating on and experimenting with yet-unimagined gendered forms and bodies to come.