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

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.