Noam Youngrak Son

An infectious disease occasionally promotes certain ways of intimacy. For instance, health officials from New York and British Columbia suggested the use of glory holes as part of measures on dating and sex during the coronavirus pandemic to prevent face-to-face contact. Queerness can arise as an unforeseen side effect of the measures against the disease. We can further this by misusing the language of public hygiene as symbols of kink, a face mask as a ball gag, temporary floor marking tapes as bondage tapes, a PCR nose swab as a dilator. Online space, where fake news and memes flourish, is indeed an effective ground for these deliberate misunderstandings to propagate.

2022 February by Noam Youngrak Son
Cathair press (https://www.d-act.org/cathair.html)
@noam_yr

"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." More on www.d-act.org.