SITAC ​Gender Justice

We looked into constructions of gender, their deep entanglement with constructions of race, and the potential to destabilize these categories through performance-based strategies.

MuAC’s Campus Expandido hosted the international sound art collective Ultra-red for an extended workshop in November 2014, in collaboration with Museo Experimental El Eco and the Seminario: Estética, Arte y Política taught by Helena Chávez Mac Gregor. The experience of “listening” based on a structured protocol was shared by twelve workshop participants from Mexico City, was the topic of the first presentation. Founded in 1994 in California and with members internationally, Ultra- red is dedicated to “militant sound investigations” that explore acoustic space as generative of social space and apply it to political organizing. Formative for the workshop in Mexico was Ultra-red’s recent project Vogue’ology, developed within the New York City’s House/Ballroom scene, an intentional community of transgender, bisexual, lesbian and gay, primarily Latino/a and African American men and women organized as “houses” that function as social networks and artistic collectives.

Later on, the discussion broadened to analyze operations of exclusion and counter-strategies through the enactment of gender, class and racial identities in gendered spaces, including architectural, urban, and virtual settings.