Within the realm of possibilities Reflections on the workshop Diverse Infrastructures? Gender, Queer & the Foundations of Society Sophie Gerber

DOI 10.60531/INSIGHTOUT.2024.2.4| GERBER: IM RAHMEN DER MÖGLICHKEITEN_ INSIGHTOUT 2(2024) 13 Sophie Gerber Within the realm of possibilities Reflections on the workshop Diverse Infrastructures? Gender, Queer& the Foundations of Society ABSTRACT The second issue of the Journal on Gender and Sexuality in STEM Collections and Cultures brings together the contributions to the workshop Diverse Infrastructures? Gender, Queer& the Foundations of Society (6 to 8 September 2023) at Technisches Museum Wien. The synthesis of interdisciplinary perspectives from museums, research and art reveals the complexity and social relevance of infrastructures as well as the challenges and opportunities for museums. CV Sophie Gerber is a historian of technology and has been working at Technisches Museum Wien since 2019, where she is in charge of the domestic technology and food collections, their expansion and documentation. She also works on strategies for diversity-oriented, gender-informed collecting, exhibiting, educating, and research in science and technology museums. 2014 PhD in the project"Objects of Energy Consumption" of Deutsches Museum and TU Munich. Her research interests include gender and queer studies, material culture, and intersections between the history of technology, consumption, and everyday life. KEYWORDS Museum, Gender, Infrastructures, Workshop Sophie Gerber,“Within the realm of possibilities. Reflections on the workshop Diverse Infrastructures? Gender, Queer& the Foundations of Society “, insightOut. Journal on Gender and Sexuality in STEM Collections and Cultures , 2(2024), 12–17, DOI: 10.60531/insightout.2024.2.4 DOI: 10.60531/insightout.2024.2.4 Published under license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

DOI 10.60531/INSIGHTOUT.2024.2.4| GERBER: IM RAHMEN DER MÖGLICHKEITEN_ INSIGHTOUT 2(2024) 14 Social concepts of order and orientation are rendered materially in infrastructures while structuring our everyday lives, permeated as they are by gender and sex. ment.‘Diverse Infrastructures? Gender, Queer& the Foundations of Society’ was the topic of lectures, workshops and guided tours from 6 to 8 September 2023. The programme reflected the many different aspects from which research into infrastructure is conducted, including(technological) history, science and technology studies(STS), cultural and social anthropology, media theory, postcolonial theory, architecture and urban planning. The focus was on infrastructures as socio-technological systems and immaterial networks linking people, materialities, places, institutions and services. As transport routes, water and energy supply systems or communication networks, they create durable structures, but also path dependencies. In many instances, they provide the basis for social functionalities(e.g. mobility, exchanges, communications), enabling or impeding them in others while ensuring that society, the economy and politics are able to operate. Embedded as they are in social structures, they replicate social realities. Infrastructures are something which, in a technical museum for example, are ever-present and yet invisible. They are present in exhibitions as featured topics such as mobility, energy, media or everyday life. As institutions, museums provide the infrastructure for knowledge and exchange as well as the preservation, documentation and mediation of exhibits and narratives. But they also determine the way visitors are able to access such resources – e.g. through onsite or digital mediation – and to what extent they do so – keyword: accessibility. As such, they have the power to enable or impede social involvement and representation. As an active link within a network of society, culture, education and science, the Technisches Museum Wien organised its Vienna Workshop on Gender and Sexuality in STEM Collections, the third such instalSocial concepts of order and orientation are rendered materially in infrastructures while structuring our everyday lives, permeated as they are by gender and sex. Gender determination therefore entails access of a different kind to those infrastructures. Not everyone benefits equally from investments in transport and supply networks, and not everyone has the same needs or makes use of these networks in the same way. While the conceptual formulation of new infrastructures is tantamount to sounding out future possibilities, the processes themselves are shaped by power relations and inequality. This is evident in, among others, the fact that gender and sexual diversity rarely play a role in the development of infrastructure. This second edition of insightOut serves to make accessible a large and diverse portion of the contribu-

DOI 10.60531/INSIGHTOUT.2024.2.4| GERBER: IM RAHMEN DER MÖGLICHKEITEN_ INSIGHTOUT 2(2024) 15 Fig. 1.: Joint discussion of the presentations,© Technisches Museum Wien tions to the workshop. While the introduction aims to convey the initial ideas, Pamela Heilig and Rosalie Lorenz discuss the issue proper and share their experiences as, respectively, project assistant and mediator at the Technisches Museum Wien. On the basis of their personal experiences and a number of case studies, they identify challenges and approaches to communicating intersectional content in exhibitions dedicated to the history of technology, against the background of museum infrastructures. Michaela Frauwallner discusses the findings within the scope of the Colonial Infrastructures project at the TMW 1 research institute. Frauwallner’s research focuses particularly on the multifaceted and long-overlooked role of Herero women as forced labourers and prisoners-of-war in the construction of the Otavi railway during the genocide of the Herero and Nama between 1904 and 1908. Her sources are picture-based: photographs of the women taken by colonialists and German soldiers. These images were used by the Germans as part of their colonialist and wartime propaganda. Shusha Niederberger (Zurich University of the Arts) for her part looks at the research conducted as part of the project‘Latent Spaces. Performing Ambiguous Data’, the data-centred present and the question of how data infrastructures utilise users and co-construct them, based on the example of Mastodon and feminist servers. How do infrastructures create subjects; what roles do users assume; and what is their relationship to technology? Calvin Lai ’s PhD project(Darmstadt Technical University) also focuses on the role of digital infrastructures. Lai studied the smartphone use of marginalised residents of Hong Kong to look at how infrastructures restricted and/or enabled personal mobility, for example during the Covid-19 pandemic. Through interviews, Lai was able to show that there are differences depending on the user’s gender and that women are more often beset by difficulties, for example in terms of mobility. With regard to disability and age, Lai comes to the conclusion that neither the government nor businesses take into account the needs of these particular user groups. Swati Guha (ILSR Calcutta) took a closer look at the infrastructure of another metropolis, i.e. Kolkata in India. She noted that, with regard to the city’s queer inhabitants in particular, Kolkata provides mainly 1 https://www.technischesmuseum.at/museum/forschungsinstitut/das_museum_im_kolonialen_kontext(accessed 20 Aug. 2024)

DOI 10.60531/INSIGHTOUT.2024.2.4| GERBER: IM RAHMEN DER MÖGLICHKEITEN_ INSIGHTOUT 2(2024) 16 Fig. 2.: Exploring the infrastructures around the museum, © Technisches Museum Wien exclusionary infrastructures, with examples ranging from caste- and religion-based discrimination to homophobia and transphobia. The latter can be traced back not least to the city’s British colonial past. While trans* persons were visible in pre-colonial India as well as its mythology and literature, they have been criminalised and discriminated against ever since. Numerous projects are now up and running in an effort to‘queer’ Kolkata. Libor Den k ’s contribution(Palacký University Olomouc) takes us to a small town in Czechoslovakia during the interwar period. In Nové Mesto na Morave, the town chosen for the case study, urbanisation and industrialisation went hand in hand with the expansion of the infrastructure from the mid-19th century onwards. Even though women’s suffrage had been introduced in 1918, with a few exceptions men remained the sole decision-makers, even at the municipal level. Nations and particularly border regions are the subject of the research undertaken by Aswathy Chandragiri and Madhurima Das (BITS Pilani). How does the infrastructure change when a region is divided by a border – as in the case of the newly drawn state border separating India and Pakistan in Punjab? For the inhabitants of the region, this poses a challenge in terms of both time and space. The authors show that particularly women and people on low incomes are affected by infrastructural violence and have limited agency, for example with regard to public transport. The article by Yaman Kouli (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf) also considers the nation concept, but on a completely different level. Kouli aims to pinpoint historical explanations for national characteristics when it comes to the marketing of women’s underwear. To this end, Kouli focuses on the marketing strategies and the images of femininity they convey. The extent to which the underwear is visible or invisible in these images appears to differ from one nation to the next. Can conclusions then be drawn with regard to gender roles and the social status of women? Alexandra Corodan (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna) studied Ion Grigorescu’s film Masculin-Feminin (1976), which was shown as part of the workshop. Corodan considers how gender is conveyed and(de-) constructed in this‘collage’, which revolves around the filmmaker’s relationship with his body and its masculine and feminine aspects. Grigorescu is acutely aware of the(infra-)structures – both technical and political – within which the film was made.

DOI 10.60531/INSIGHTOUT.2024.2.4| GERBER: IM RAHMEN DER MÖGLICHKEITEN_ INSIGHTOUT 2(2024) 17 Lia Quirina and Val Holfeld chose to address our topic in a performative and playful way. In their‘Hidden in Structure’ workshop, they drew the participants’ attention to the infrastructures within the Museum, inviting them to question them. In their contribution they reflect on this approach. The overview illustrates the fact that the contributions not only show what the invisible power of infrastructures means for everyday life, society and the individual and what possibilities and restrictions are derived from it. They posit numerous suggestions across the disciplines on how to make supposedly rigid structures visible, to question them, and to explore future options. These approaches can then be brought to fruition for research, mediation and exhibition projects and the‘framework of possibilities’ perhaps broken open as a result.