This project focused on diversity and representation in visual communication with a focus on aromantic asexuality, a lesser-known sexual identity that has only been gaining wider recognition and acknowledgment within the last two decades. Because of this “newbie-status” in the queer landscape, it can be considered somewhat of a visual blind spot. While this invisibilzation has a significant negative impact, I decided to look at it as a creative oasis for design: How do we represent an identity without relying on the physical body or recognizable visual traits? How can we “introduce” this identity in a humanizing way, instead of singling it out as “Other”?
Using Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, I establish the parallel between subjectification* as an oppressive practice, how visual communication follows the same principle of focusing on the body for representation in the name of ‘empowerment’, and how that parallel probably shouldn’t exist.
Instead of conforming to the –at its core– oppressive norm of representing identity through the depiction of bodies, my Delabeling approach centers experience: Not what it looks like to be aro-ace, but what it feels like. Sex and romance are everywhere, to the point where it by no means only makes aro-aces feel a type of way, but most people. That uncalled-for for sex-scene that makes you discreetly look at the wall until it’s over; when somebody is just a bit too close for comfort … But also those moments of bliss, being surrounded by friends, not missing a single thing. – Labels separate into “us” and “them”, aro-ace or not, whereas experience unites.
While labels are currently an essential tool for marginalized communities to take up any space in public discourse at all, over time, the goal should be rendering them meaningless. For that, we have to deconstruct the power systems that charged them with meaning in the first place. Designers are too comfortable conforming to industry standards of representation –diversity being a “stylistic choice”, not political action– and have allowed the profit-driven design industry to limit their vision of what the future could be, and what they, as designers, can contribute to reaching it. Delabeling therefore not only acts as another (not alternative) way of approaching representation but also explicitly considers design as (a tool for) political action and wishes to remind and encourage other designers to reclaim their creative and political agency.
