The Gendered Cable Manifesto

Gender as a concept is not only applicable to humans. When the idea of gender is applied to the cables, its meaning is reduced into a relationship of insertion. As a non-binary individual and designer, I find this problematic that such way of classifying gender violently erases the existence of everyone that doesn’t neatly fit into those categories. However, instead of insisting on abolishing those terms, I discovered that the idea of gender that we applied to the electric cables functioning in very queer ways that we couldn’t expect.

By applying some queer instances of the gendered electric cables back to that of human, I could come up with a post-human species whose sexual intercourse and reproductive system resembles that of the electric cables. Each of them has multiple genitalia with diverse shapes and textures, which makes this humankind androgynous.

Their sexual intercourse happens on a big-group scale involving countless connections of genitals. Genetic information(perhaps contained in the body fluid as a specific type of polymer) flows along with the connections, like electricity transmitted by cables, eventually forming a network of genetic information. Offsprings can(but also may not) be made from that network, from a melting pot of genetic information of every participant.

​​I, as a designer, wrote a visual-literal manifesto on this speculative human species, then visualized and materialized their reproductive infrastructure including their sex hotel, sex chair, sex toys.

— Noam Youngrak Son