Cutting Out: Queer Assemblages for Alternative Design Futures

Abstract

In this thesis, I argue that queerness is a practice of generative dismantling, which offers a framework for critically transforming conventional design methodologies. By designing queerly rather than designing queer things, generative dismantling emphasizes process and performativity to engender alternative design futures which adhere to a queer ethic of increasing sociopolitical awareness for more just built environments. The queerly infused collage methodologies that form the basis of my explorations enable a deeper understanding of queerness in relation to design and reveal spatial implications of a queered design practice. Selfie collages produce a queerer version of a queer body. Layered, hybrid site readings re-see alleys with a queer lens and project their intrinsic value outwardly and into the future. Deconstructions of alleys as three-dimensional spaces using two-dimensional collage operations embrace a queer practice of transformation and unlock potentialities unknown to uncritical designers. And finally, horizons are transformed from singular, linear, and horizontal representations of space to plural, broken, multi-directional intersections of space and time. Grounded in an entangled collage of queer spatial theories, queer design practices are positioned as potential and a queer future as a utopian endeavor. Like queerness, design operates in the realm of potential. This similarity figures both queerness and design as operative agents that when layered and reconfigured, result in an epistemological assemblage greater than the sum of its parts. This assemblage encourages us to leave behind the here and now, and lean into there and then, pushing queerness and design to the forefront of a future marked by transformational justice and wholeness.