Gender-Assemblages: The Scenographics of Sin Wai Kin

Image: Sin Wai Kin (2019) Narrative Reflections on Looking

Analyzing Gender in Performance (Palgrave, 2022)

This chapter investigates the artist Sin Wai Kin’s (單慧乾) speculative drag through the prism of ‘gender-assemblage’. Combining third wave feminist ideas on gender with new materialist readings of assemblage, the concept of gender-assemblage is proposed as a critical framework to identify, critique and negotiate the more-than-human processes of gendering. Sin’s drag draws upon their non-binary identity to speculate renewed discourses, actions and expectations for gendered practices. The scenographics of Sin’s drag, with reference to the overt use of breast forms and make up, are proposed as irritating the normative gender-assemblages that define the representational identity categories of ‘female’ and ‘male’. In approaching gender as assemblage, Sin’s drag is argued as revealing the assemblages of assemblages that underlines the potential of scenographics to study gender-assemblages more broadly.