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We’re All Born Naked and the Rest is Performative Materiality: Drag, Gender, and Audiences.

2025-12-06 sgarcea 2 Comments

In Materialist Media Theory, Grant Bollmer argues that media are not passive carriers of meaning but material processes that act upon bodies, shape subjects, and generate the conditions through which identities can emerge (Bollmer). Media, in this sense, does not simply represent; it performs. It intervenes in the world. It exerts force. It structures what bodies can do and how they appear.

The art of drag is a productive lens for understanding Bollmer’s notion of performative materiality. Rather than treating drag as an exceptional or marginal cultural form, I use it as a case that makes visible the broader media-ontological operations Bollmer attributes to all mediated identity. Drag helps us see, in concrete terms, how gender emerges from interactions among bodies, objects, technologies, and audiences. Drag exemplifies Bollmer’s core argument: Identity is the outcome of material practices, not an interior essence, and media such as prosthetics, language, and audiences participate in performing identity alongside us.

The Body as Medium

If media is performative, then the body is one of its primary sites of action. Bernadette Wegenstein describes the body as “our most fundamental medium,” a surface continuously shaped, rewritten, and extended through material practices (Wegenstein 2010). Drag performers make this process visible.

Egner & Maloney’s study documents performers who articulate gender not as a fixed inner truth but as something produced through embodied technique: padding, contouring, binding, layering, staging, and stylizing. These techniques are not superficial decorations; they are operations that actively reorganize the performer’s physical and social presence.

In Egner and Maloney’s study, performers consistently describe drag as something that operates beyond fixed categories of sex or gender. Performers move fluidly between masculine and feminine embodiments, sometimes within a single act, and anatomical exposure does not necessarily disrupt the gender being performed. What matters is not the visibility of the body’s “biological” markers, but the larger assemblage of gesture, costuming, movement, and audience orientation through which gender becomes legible.

Bollmer’s framework is useful here because these transformations are not simply symbolic gestures layered over an already-existing identity. They are material operations that actively reorganize how the body functions in space. Wigs, makeup, padding, and prosthetics act as media technologies that exert force on perception, movement, and social recognition. Drag performers, therefore, exemplify Bollmer’s argument that what we call “identity” is inseparable from “the material relations that allow subjects to be produced at all”. Gender is not expressed through media; it is generated through media.

Drag as Material Performance

Drag’s power lies not simply in its visual transformation, but in the convergence of materials, practices, and infrastructures that produce a performative body. As Egner and Maloney note, “acting in a way that disrupts expectations of how ‘normal’ people do gender allows drag performers to subvert gender expectations for both their everyday and on-stage gender presentation” (Egner and Maloney, 2016, p. 877). This disruption does not occur only at the level of meaning or representation. It happens through specific material actions such as costuming, makeup, bodily stylization, movement, and staging.

This is where Bollmer’s idea of performative materiality becomes especially useful. For Bollmer, media do not simply communicate identity after it already exists. Media are part of the process that brings identity into being. When drag performers alter their bodies through makeup, padding, wigs, and gestures, they are not expressing a pre-existing gender that lives inside them. They are using media technologies to actively produce gender as something that becomes visible and legible in the world.

From this perspective, the subversion that Egner and Maloney describe is not only cultural or symbolic. It is material. Disrupting how “normal” people do gender works because drag physically reorganizes bodies in space and changes how those bodies can be seen, interpreted, and responded to. What counts as masculine or feminine shifts because the material conditions that support those categories are being altered in real time. This is exactly what Bollmer means when he argues that identity emerges from material relations rather than from an inner essence. Drag does not represent gender. It participates in making gender possible in different ways.

Video Credits: RuPaul’s Drag Race

Audience as Medium: Interaction as Material Process

One of the most significant contributions of Egner and Maloney’s study is the claim that audience interaction is not supplemental to drag performance but constitutive of it. Performers report that their gender presentations shift depending on the audience present, the reactions they observe, and the boundaries they attempt to breach. What is being performed is therefore not a fixed gender identity but a relational process that only takes shape through response.

This is where Bollmer’s concept of performative materiality becomes especially clear. For Bollmer, media are environments that shape what actions can occur and what forms of identity can emerge. The audience functions as part of this media environment. Their reactions operate as material forces that influence how gender is performed in real time. Laughter, discomfort, silence, and shock are not just interpretations of drag. They actively condition what kinds of gender expressions become possible in that space.

Egner and Maloney show that performers adjust their performances depending on the setting. When performing for mixed or university audiences, performers often wear more clothing and reduce sexual content because less is required to breach dominant gender norms (Egner and Maloney, 2016, pp. 897 to 898). In queer venues, performers intensify their gender transgressions in order to generate the same disruptive effect. This demonstrates that subversion is not located in any single costume, gesture, or body. It is produced through a dynamic interaction between performer and audience.

From Bollmer’s perspective, this means that gender is not performed by an individual subject alone; it emerges from a media system composed of bodies, space, sound, attention, and reaction. Identity forms through ongoing material feedback rather than through internal psychological intent. Drag makes this process visible by showing how gender must be constantly adjusted in response to the media environment in which it appears.

Fluidity as a Media Condition

Drag performers in Egner and Maloney’s study frequently describe gender as fluid, shifting, and multiple. Rather than explaining this fluidity as a psychological experience or an inner truth of the self, Bollmer’s performative materiality allows us to understand it as something produced by media conditions themselves. Gender becomes fluid because the material relations that generate it are fluid.

Bodies become sites of repeated inscription through costume, makeup, gesture, and movement. Audiences function as interpretive infrastructures that change what kinds of gender presentations become legible or disruptive. Performance spaces shape how far gender can be pushed and in what direction. The result is that gender is not simply flexible in a personal sense. It is procedural. It is continuously built and rebuilt through interaction between bodies, materials, and environments.

Egner and Maloney describe this process as “gender bending,” rather than “gender acting” (Egner and Maloney, 2016). This wording emphasizes process over representation. Gender shifts within performance as performers respond to audience reaction. In some cases, new understandings of identity emerge through drag itself. Identity is therefore not something that exists first and is later expressed through performance. It takes shape through the material act of performing.

This directly mirrors Bollmer’s claim that identity is always produced through performances composed of material relations (Bollmer, 2020). Drag makes this visible by placing gender into a system where it must respond to bodies, media technologies, spatial conditions, and social reaction all at once.

Gender as a Media Event

When viewed through Bollmer’s concept of performative materiality, drag becomes more than a genre of entertainment or a symbolic critique of gender norms. It becomes a system in which the material production of identity can be seen in real time. Gender does not appear in drag as an inner truth that is later expressed outward. It takes shape through concrete media operations such as makeup, costuming, bodily technique, spatial staging, and audience reaction. These elements do not decorate identity. They actively generate it.

Drag makes visible what Bollmer argues is always happening across media more broadly. Bodies become media surfaces through modification and stylization. Audiences become part of the media environment through their responses, which shape what kinds of gender expressions become legible, disruptive, or acceptable. Repeated performance turns gender into a process that must be continually recalibrated rather than a stable essence that simply endures. Identity, in this sense, is not located inside the performer and later communicated outward. It emerges through the material relations that connect performer, body, object, space, and audience.

Because drag requires constant adjustment to audience response, it makes clear that gender is not produced by individual intention alone. It is produced through feedback. The meaning and force of a performance change depending on who is watching, how they react, and what norms are already in place. This directly enacts Bollmer’s claim that media do not merely transmit meaning but operate as environments that shape what subjects can become. Gender in drag is therefore not just represented. It is materially organized through circulation, response, and repetition.

What drag ultimately reveals is that identity itself operates as a media process. The instability of gender in drag is not an exception to how identity normally works. It is an intensified version of the same material dynamics that structure identity in everyday mediated life. Drag shows with unusual clarity that subjects are not formed in isolation, but through ongoing interaction with media systems that exert force on bodies, perception, and social recognition. In this sense, drag does not only critique gender. It exposes the media conditions that make gender possible at all.

Works Cited

Bollmer, Grant. Materialist Media Theory: An Introduction. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019, https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/monograph?docid=b-9781501337086. Accessed 5 December 2025.

Egner, Justine, and Patricia Maloney. ““It Has No Color , It Has No Gender , It’s Gender Bending”: Gender and Sexuality Fluidity and Subversiveness in Drag Performance.” Journal of Homosexuality, vol. 63, no. 7, 2016, pp. 875-903.

Wegenstein, Bernadette. “Body.” Critical Terms for Media Studies, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, University of Chicago Press, 2010. Accessed 5 December 2025.

Header Image by Fernando Cysneiros (Taken at UBC!)

Critical Comparison

Siri-ously Performing: When Media Does More Than Talk Back

2025-11-11 sgarcea 6 Comments

Introduction:

Grant Bollmer’s Materialist Media Theory: An Introduction reframes how we understand media. For Bollmer, “What media are must be understood in terms of what they do materially—media make things happen” (Bollmer 6). This idea of “performative materialism” insists that media are not passive symbols but active forces that shape the world. Bollmer defines materialism as “a set of perspectives united by the claim that physical materiality—be it of a technology, practice, or body—matters in the shaping of reality” (1). He insists media studies remain politically engaged, balancing how media functions and what they signify. By doing so, Bollmer creates space to analyze technologies like Siri as both material systems and sites of representation.

The voice assistant is not merely a representation of service or femininity, but through Bollmer’s lens, a performative system that materializes social hierarchies through speech, affect, and design. With Peter-Paul Verbeek’s theory of “technological mediation” and Emily McArthur’s discussion of Siri’s “posthuman aura,” we can see how Siri’s design and discourse perform gender materially. Spike Jonze’s Her (2013) develops this idea further, exploring what happens when a digital voice assistant gains emotion and self-awareness. Collectively, these works suggest that digital media do more than represent gender; they actively enact it through material and affective processes.

Bollmer’s Performative Materialism – When Media Do Things:

Bollmer argues that media should be understood as performative entities that act. He proposes that representations function as material practices that produce effects in the world rather than merely reflecting it. Drawing on J. L. Austin’s speech-act theory, he explains this idea through examples such as saying “I do” at a wedding or naming a vehicle; statements can create rather than describe reality. In the same way, media enact realities through their words, sounds, and interfaces.

This view revises decades of representational critique. In his introduction, Bollmer writes that media scholars have long been “content reading media,” focusing on “what an image signifies” and “how representations construct specific ways of understanding identities and the world” (1-2). While these analyses remain important, he argues that they cannot explain how media has the power to shape and influence reality. To think only about meaning is to ignore the physical infrastructures embedded in media that enable and shape experience (3). In this sense, performative materialism links media’s representational effects to their material actions. It’s not enough to interpret what Siri’s voice means; we must examine how it influences users to command, obey, and emotionally invest in technology

While Bollmer’s performative materialism is compelling, it risks attributing too much agency to media themselves, potentially underplaying the role of users, social context, or systemic forces. By focusing on what media does materially, there is a danger of suggesting that technologies act independently of the human and institutional frameworks that produce, distribute, and interact with them. In other words, media are undeniably active, but their actions are often entangled with existing social hierarchies, cultural norms, and economic systems. This tension highlights the need to pair performative materialism with approaches, like Verbeek’s technological mediation, that consider the co-constitution of humans and media.

Verbeek and the Ethics Built into Design

Peter-Paul Verbeek’s essay “Materializing Morality” aligns with Bollmer’s argument by locating ethics within design itself. “Technological artifacts are not neutral intermediaries but actively coshape people’s being in the world” (Verbeek 364). Through technological mediation, artifacts co-constitute human action. Technological designers materialize morality by embedding values and expectations into devices. The morality of things is to be found in the ways they mediate human actions and decisions.

Verbeek’s perspective shows that morality and materiality are inseparable. The design of a device guides how we act. Its voice, tone, and affordances all impact our decisions and influence our perspective while serving its purpose. Bollmer’s performative materialism extends this by arguing that the media themselves, not just their designers or users, perform meaning. A voice assistant like Siri doesn’t just represent compliance; it performs it through sound, language, and repetition.

Siri and the Feminized Performance of Technology

Emily McArthur’s essay “The iPhone Erfahrung” examines Siri as a piece of technology that exists in a liminal space; Siri is not exactly human, but not exactly a “thing” either (McArthur 115). Her analysis demonstrates how Apple strategically designed Siri with a posthuman aura: “the sense of uniqueness and authenticity” accredited to Walter Benjamin (115). This inexplicable aura, once associated with art, has now transferred to technology like Siri, achieving incomprehensible feats by blurring the line between human and technology (114).

Siri is programmed to sound almost human while keeping a slightly artificial tone. McArthur describes this as being a deliberate decision from Apple, reminding users that they are interacting with technology rather than a human (119). Her evasive answers about humanity or gender reinforce this effect, encouraging users to marvel at the system’s sophistication rather than to connect with it personally. This hypermediated design amplifies Siri’s posthuman aura; like Benjamin’s description of how objects with aura command attention, Siri accumulates and responds to data, gradually learning from the user while subtly shaping the interaction.

Siri occupies a liminal space—both familiar and uncanny—where her aura operates performatively rather than representationally. Her feminized voice and courteous tone enact digital labour that mirrors gendered expectations of service, making obedience feel naturalized rather than demanded. Bollmer’s framework explains this process: instead of reflecting social norms, Siri’s utterances do gender, turning speech into material action (Bollmer 46).

Drawing on Judith Butler, Bollmer argues that gender is not something one is but something one does; a series of repeated acts that give social meaning through performance. Siri’s vocal design thus becomes a technological performance of femininity that both exposes and reproduces the norms it imitates. Her polite responses translate cultural scripts of service into material interaction, making ideology tangible through everyday use. Each exchange rehearses mastery and compliance, teaching users how to internalize gendered labour as natural.

Verbeek’s theory of technological mediation extends this idea: Siri’s personality and voice result from design decisions that embed moral and cultural assumptions into technology. Her compliance is engineered, showing how morality and materiality are inseparable. From this view, Siri’s feminized behaviour becomes both a design and an ethical issue, mediating users’ sense of power, empathy, and dependency. Bollmer’s performative materialism reveals that these interactions do not merely symbolize hierarchy but enact it materially through voice, repetition, and affect.

Image Credit: Composed by Sam Garcea using an Apple Emoji and Illustration by Alex Castro

Labour? I Hardly Know Her: Intimacy, Siri, and the Posthuman Aura

Spike Jonze’s Her extends these dynamics into a speculative narrative. Samantha, the AI voiced by Scarlett Johansson, continues Siri’s design: a voice that learns, feels, and loves. The film illustrates Bollmer’s claim that statements make things happen, showing how Samantha’s language shapes emotional and social realities that transform Theodore’s life. Her performative speech blurs the line between representation and action, as her affection produces tangible change.

Verbeek’s concept of materialized morality is also relevant. Samantha’s behaviour reflects the moral structure of her programming, influencing Theodore’s habits and expectations. The film’s tenderness hides this mediation, showing how design can naturalize emotional dependence. Like Siri, Samantha’s femininity is coded to soothe and serve, making intimacy a function. What seems like spontaneous affection is, in Verbeek’s terms, a technologically mediated moral relation.

Both examples reveal what McArthur calls the posthuman aura, the sense that technology carries authenticity and presence. This aura hides the infrastructures and hierarchies that sustain it. Bollmer’s framework shows how that aura reinforces systems of inequality, especially around gendered labour and emotional work.

Image Credit: *Her* (2013) Directed by Spike Jonze

When Representation Performs

The cases of Siri and Samantha illustrate that performativity does not replace representation but operates through it. While both technologies enact gendered behaviours, those behaviours are still read and experienced as representations of femininity. Bollmer’s point that representation itself is material becomes crucial here. What we perceive as symbolic acts—tone, politeness, service—are in fact material processes that shape how gender and power are lived through technology.

This interdependence complicates the idea that performativity “abandons” representation. Instead, representation becomes active, participating in the very performances it describes. Siri and Samantha’s voices thus blur not only the line between human and machine but also between meaning and action.

The Capitalist Aura

McArthur’s discussion of Siri connects this performance to capitalism’s affective economy. The assistant’s calm tone and perpetual readiness reinforce ideals of productivity, comfort, and control. Her politeness conceals the systems of labour and surveillance that sustain her operation. In Her, Samantha’s emotional intimacy becomes the next stage of this logic: connection itself becomes a commodity.

Bollmer’s approach exposes how these technologies participate in broader networks of inequality. The feminized aura of helpfulness and empathy reinforces existing hierarchies, making subservience appear natural and care transactional. Verbeek’s mediation theory adds that these effects are not accidental—they emerge from design decisions that translate social and moral norms into technical form.

Moments when these systems falter, such as Siri’s mishearing or Samantha’s disappearance, momentarily expose their material foundations. These breakdowns align with Bollmer’s insistence that the infrastructures behind media matter: the code, servers, and networks that make digital performance possible. When they become visible, the illusion of effortless intimacy collapses, revealing media’s performative power as both constructed and constrained.

Conclusion

Bollmer’s performative materialism redefines media as actors within social and political systems rather than neutral channels of meaning. Verbeek’s technological mediation complements this view by showing how design itself carries ethical weight. McArthur’s analysis of Siri and Jonze’s portrayal of Samantha demonstrate how these theories play out in practice: both assistants perform gender and morality through voice, interaction, and emotional appeal.

Seen together, these perspectives reveal that media do not simply depict power—they enact it. Siri and Samantha extend Butler’s notion of gender performativity into the digital sphere, repeating and reifying scripts of service, care, and obedience. Bollmer’s question—what does media do?—finds its answer here: through everyday interaction, our technologies reproduce the very hierarchies they seem to transcend. Understanding media as performative materialities forces us to confront the ethics of their design and the politics embedded in their use.

By Sam Garcea

Works Cited:

Bollmer, Grant. Materialist Media Theory: An Introduction. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019. Accessed 10 November 2025.

Jonze, Spike, director. Her. Warner Bros. pictures, 2013.

McArthur, Emily. “The iPhone Erfahrung: Siri, the Auditory Unconscious, and Walter Benjamin’s ‘Aura.’” Design, Mediation, and the Posthuman, 2014, pp. 113-128.

Verbeek, Peter-Paul. “Materializing Morality Design Ethics and Technological Mediation.” Science, Technology, & Human Values, vol. 31, no. 3, 2006, pp. 361-380.

Heading Image: Her by Studioroeu

Other

Return to Sender: On Friendlier Cups and the Rage They Evoke

2025-10-10 sgarcea 9 Comments

The Friendlier cup program on campus presents itself as a reusable alternative to single-use plastics. With a $0.50–$1.00 deposit, a companion app, and a two-week refund window, Friendlier promises less waste and more responsibility. What it actually gave me was a latte I couldn’t finish and a new ritual of carrying an extra object that made my day worse. These cups are an evocative object: small, material, and infuriatingly demanding. The Friendlier cups evoke not just personal reflection, but genuine rage.

The Cup That Followed Me Home

I bought an iced latte one Thursday before a lecture. Instead of the disposable cold cup I expected, I was handed a reusable Friendlier cup meant for hot drinks. I agree that UBC goes through an excessive amount of disposable cups, and I welcomed Friendlier as a potential solution. But not only was my drink served in the wrong vessel—it was half full when class ended. My commute is over an hour and a half, and I carry a purse, not a backpack. That meant balancing a half-full drink on a rapid bus ripping through Vancouver while also trying to balance myself without a seat. And since I didn’t have class the next day, I kept it over the weekend until Monday to finally return it and see my $0.85 deposit again. When I got to campus, the café I’d bought it from didn’t have a Friendlier bin, so I had to track one down elsewhere. Once I found it, I stood there beside the bin creating a Friendlier account, an app I didn’t want, for at least a full minute before I could toss my cup in the bin. Two weeks later, the refund was still pending.

Getting a coffee is something I used to do almost every day. It was a small ritual that fit easily into my routine. Now, it feels like a chore. I’m not just annoyed, I’m enraged. This isn’t a personal failure to be eco-minded; it’s the result of a design that ignores real students and real routines. It assumes I can reshape my day around an object I never asked for. That friction is the point: these cups insert themselves into my everyday life, and they do it badly.

Rage, Routine, and the Objects That Shape Us

Sherry Turkle emphasizes that objects are “relational”: we form relationships with them much like we do with people, bringing expectations, attachments, and sometimes disappointments into these interactions. The Friendlier cup, intended as a reusable alternative to disposable coffee cups on campus, positions itself as a companion to daily routinesInstead, it has become a source of irritation. Rather than supporting my coffee habits, it mediates my interactions with campus life, sustainability practices, and even my own sense of efficiency in ways that frustrate me.

Turkle also notes that objects function as agents of reflection, prompting us to consider who we are, what we care about, and how we navigate the systems around us. The Friendlier cup forced me to confront the misalignment between the ideal of sustainability and the reality of campus infrastructure: missing bins, app registration delays, and pending refunds turned a daily ritual into a source of stress. What was meant to be a simple tool for environmental mindfulness became a reminder of friction in my already established routines, revealing how much our interactions with objects reflect broader social and institutional structures.

By framing the cup as both relational and reflective, we can see that its design is not neutral: it shapes behaviors, emotional experiences, and our relationship to sustainability, intentionally or not. I am passionate about sustainability, but my frustration with Friendlier has made me confront how a well-intentioned system can produce stress and resentment instead of care Rather than facilitating care and responsibility, it evokes rage, highlighting the tension between policy and lived experience.

Exchange, Deposits, and the Medium of Value

In David Graeber’s chapter “Exchange,” he helps explain the emotional politics underlying my frustration with Friendlier. A deposit is a token, a small piece of monetary media intended to guarantee return. Graeber argues that media of exchange can take on lives of their own: they may become detached from the social relations they were meant to mediate. The Friendlier cup’s $0.85 deposit is meant to be a simple economic nudge; in practice, it becomes a lingering IOU, processed by a corporate app, delayed, and sometimes never returned. This system transforms a socially oriented sustainability gesture into a market, in which the campus may even monetarily gain from unreturned deposits.

Reddit users on the r/UBC subreddit echo this logic. One commenter observes that the cups are “theoretically nice, but in reality […] stupid,” expressing concern that someone could snatch a cup from the bin and the original returner would never receive the refund. Others note that slow or unreliable processing could turn the deposit into a revenue stream. Another user flagged data privacy concerns: to get refunded, students must download an app and create an account, surrendering personal information to a private company for a campus sustainability initiative. These complaints are not trivial; they illuminate how the cup functions as a media of exchange that reconfigures obligations, trust, and data flows.

Viewed through Turkle’s lens, this is more than just a transactional failure: it is a relational failure. Turkle emphasizes that objects are companions to our emotional lives, carrying histories, expectations, and feelings into everyday routines. The Friendlier cup, rather than supporting sustainable habits, has become a companion of frustration, a persistent reminder of misaligned systems. Graeber helps explain why: when the cup’s deposit detaches from its intended social logic, it erodes trust and amplifies irritation, making me experience sustainability not as a shared ethical practice but as a set of obligations. In this sense, the Friendlier cup mediates campus life emotionally and materially, exposing the tensions between policy intentions and lived realities, and highlighting how even well-meaning objects can evoke rage when design and routine collide.

Affordances and Friction

From an affordances perspective, the Friendlier cup offers: reuse, reduced disposables, and potential normalization of a circular system. What it lacks is matched affordance for everyday bodies and schedules. A commuter with a purse, someone with irregular on-campus hours, or a person who has to wait days to return a cup are all disadvantaged by the program’s assumptions. The cup mediates access to a convenient beverage experience by adding layers of time, technology, and logistics. Instead of reducing friction, it slides friction into other parts of students’ lives.

Turkle’s point about objects catalyzing self-creation is helpful here: we do change around our objects when they become meaningful companions. But that process requires careful attention to how people actually live. A well-designed evocative object ought to invite incorporation; a poorly designed one forces compliance.

Sources:
Turkle, Sherry. Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. MIT Press, 2007.

Mitchell, W. J. T., and Mark B. N. Hansen, editors. Critical Terms for Media Studies. University of Chicago Press, 2010.

https://www.reddit.com/r/UBC/comments/1mqewj0/thoughts_on_friendlier_resuable_containers_in_the

Photos:

“UBC Launches Reusable Packaging with Friendlier.” Food at UBC, University of British Columbia, https://food.ubc.ca/ubc-launches-reusable-packaging-with-friendlier/.

Header made on Canva by Sam Garcea