Mx. science is a performance intervention. As a practice it introduces an embodied instance of transpositionality into a context that continues to highly value the representative: the scientific instititute.

 

My performance as Mx. Science draws from trans/formative techniques of drag – classically understood as a performance that impersonates the gender of the opposite sex. Rather than such a binary crossing over from one category to another: male/female, however, my drag practice focusses on becoming “other.” This practice takes transformation, not as something that happens across differences (becoming the other), but rather as a diffractive cut in-between such differences. It is a cutting together-apart in one motion, as Karen Barad puts it.

 

So what does this all mean for people that don’t know what “embodied transpositionality” and “diffraction” is?

 

It means that Mx. Science can have a disorienting effect on people. This may be due to the context in which they encounter Mx. Science; a professionalized place – in which the unspoken social contract does usually not allow for “funny” or “weird”. It may also be due to the fact that Mx. Science doesn’t seem fully representative of any category; species, race, gender, scientific discipline. Depending on the disciplinary, educational and cultural background of the people that encounter Mx. Science, the mere presence and visibility of its other/ed body can already be disorienting or even unsettling.

 

My presence as Mx. Science implicate matters of the body to always already be part of any research practice- whether our voices and bodies are visibly and recognizably marked in the narratives, reports or presentations that we produce, or not. Any kind of research engagement is relational. It consists of responsive, intra-dependent practices, and is therefore a constant re-production of the vulnerable self/other. Mx. Science does not so much facilitate or bring such vulnerabilities into a context, as much as they make these vulnerabilities more visible and tangible.

 

This disorienting – potentially even unsettling- effect, could be argued from a queer phenomenological perspective (see Ahmed, 2006) to provide a possible opening to think and do things differently, to find new grounds to encounter each other on, and create new patterns. Becoming “other”, of course, can not be exteriorized from myself either. Every time I stop to take notes, step up to give a presentation, introduce myself, or remove all my lenses to see where I walk, I produce new configurative cuts with-in myself as well. It’s a transformation that happens in between us, and is shaped again and again, depending on who engages.

 

Mx. Science allowed me to rethink self/otherness, as much as it might enable someone else to become more aware of the vulnerable self/other relations within their research.