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Critical transfeminist design

“Transfeminism is a part of what is known as new feminisms. It expands the subjects considered within feminism to include others who are also oppressed by cisheteropatriarchy, who are not necessarily cisgender women. Transfeminism understands the concept of gender as a social construction used to oppress and exclude…

Many concepts were covered and many things were stirred inside me during this seminar. At times, it can be paralyzing to think how many actions and attitudes we do without realizing it but which have deep abusive and oppressive implications on other entities, people, groups or societies that relegate them to powerless and marginate positions. The social baggage that we all carry as a standard rucksack, regardless of the society we come from, has implicit consequences, roles, power systems, inequalities, which we must be taken into account when we design so as not to perpetuate these inequalities. Critical movements as transfeminism perform a very important task to bring these inequalities to light and help generate a conceptual framework for initiatives, actions and the development of strategies to combat heteropatriarchy and the multiple problems it generates.

We didn’t talk about it explicitly in theory class, but I see part of the same forms of oppression in the ways some societies treat natural systems as mere resources and nature in general as something we have to tame and control.

Opressing nature

Some take aways:

  • Imagine non-binary design elements
  • Take advantage of our opportunity to design actions and products to design with more justice.
  • For each day and for oneself, try to understand this intersectionality of different forms of oppression and try not to feed it more with our daily actions.
Some authors, works and projects which I would like to explore better in the future