“Self-Assembly Required” is a thesis project negotiating gender plasticity in every sense of the word as it constructs our world. Roland Barthes describes plastics as alchemy for its ubiquity and transmutation. As a new medium of paradoxical mobility for the middle class and its material doppelgangers, to be plastic is to be a pliable and imitable product, thus a queer object. The body as a product is explored in this collection through the alchemic sublimes of reproduction, embodiment, and the intimacies to “being.”
