Representations of gender categorizations : examining the ways that young people re-curate gender in an urban science art gallery

Emerging research points to the increasingly expansive ontologies of gender that young people engage with in contemporary society. This paper examines the representations of gender that emerged in one urban site: a science gallery exhibition in London that sought to de-centre fixed binary gender categories–a site where gender is explicitly being ‘redone’ (West & Zimmerman, 2009). Drawing on research work on curation (Acord, 2010) we examine data (drawings and text) produced by 516 young people who attended the exhibition, exploring the ways gender is narrativised and re-curated within the physical and discursive space(s) of the gallery. Our findings show the ways that gender was felt and represented in these recurations, as fixed and unfixed, and productive and unproductive. The participants reassembled the ideas of gender presented within the gallery through representations imbued with affect. This included representations that conflated sex and gender and privileged bio-essentialist narratives, as well as representations that drew on binary models and logics. These re-curations, we argue, point to the ways that young people are making sense of gender (im)possibilities. We argue that these narratives highlight the ways young people are grappling with discourses of gender as they transition into adulthood in contemporary society.