What drag taught me about being a UX designer
An interesting intersection between the empathic and the fabulous.
Pride season comes every year, that one season where rainbow flags fly proud and tech companies try their best to show their LGBT friendly with rainbow-colored versions of their logos. As a gay man working in a very heteronormative and masculine industry, finding a space for my queerness has always been a struggle. Little did I know that putting on that wig and foundation would be the most UX thing I could ever do.
Drag queens, the keepers of queer history
It was RuPaul’s drag race winner Sasha Velour who said drag queens are the keepers of queer history. It’s through the magic and performance of these artists that we keep certain icons, struggles, and cultures alive. Every layer of makeup these people put on in a way is almost like reading from the diaries and the struggles of the characters they represent.
Though not all drag is an impersonation, it is still in a way, a representation of culture, behaviour, and attitudes. Quite a lot of queens today are known for characters beyond the celebrity impersonations. Trixie Mattel’s identity has been an homage to Barbie dolls and country music. Having grown up on a farm and being told to stop acting so feminine, he used this experience to explore uncharted territory as a drag queen. Sharon Needles’ identity as a “spooky queen” is partially informed from her experiences as an outcast growing up in the MidWest and moving out on her own.
It wasn’t until I was sitting in my friend’s room, preparing my Princess Mia drag that I realized how familiar this all was. These queens we’re all creating and living out Personas. They were living Personas, informed by real experiences of people, places, and cultures that we may never hear from or see from. More than just art, seeing a drag queen is essentially being in the presence of another person and experience than the person performing drag themselves.
Drag, empathy and UX
A big chunk of our lives as UX designers is about finding, telling and creating stories for our teams to empathize with. It’s through these stories that we weave Personas that allow us to represent our users to the rest of our organizations. It was never more so apparent to me than when I cinched my waist for the first time and took the name “Ms. Yuta Nasia”. As Yuta, I’ve represented a well-criticized millennial poet, an angsty goth girl representation of death, a dead german bisexual actress and a reluctant princess of a fictional country. Drag has taught me not just to look at the world and the things I create from my own perspective as Mark Lacsamana, but to look at the world through the eyes of women far from my own experiences.
More than just being an embodiment of another person, drag taught me my responsibility as a designer, that the things we’ve created have a substantial impact on the intersectional identities I take on when I become Ms. Yuta Nasia. From the design decisions that lead to the rise of social media poet Lang Leav to the pressures that Marlene Dietrich had to stay beautiful in front of the cameras. All of these were at its core a reaction to someone’s design decision.
Where does this lead
The things we create as designers whether we like it or not, impact the greater society as a whole. Things like asking someone’s gender in a website sign-up form and the choices we give affect heavily in the politics of people’s gender and identity. Even the simple surveys we create can have a largely negative impact on a person’s psyche. I remember there was this one time I sent out a survey where I asked for a person’s “biological sex”. I thought I was being extra careful as it is but a transgender friend messaged me right away upon receiving the survey saying how triggered she was seeing that question.
My choice of going in drag to understand what it was like to be someone other than my gender or identity can be likened back to how sociologists use ethnography to understand their subjects. Sociologists would sometimes live amongst people and part take of their rituals to gain deeper knowledge and understand what’s best for different cultures. My mentors in UX have always told me that if it’s one thing you should do as a UX professional it’s to represent and be the main advocate for the user and the only way that is to actually understand and live amongst them.
Never in my life as a closeted gay kid in the 90s did I think I would end up putting on drag. Much less did I ever think that this unusual hobby would actually help me become better at my job. Drag has allowed me to empathize better with the people around me, and drag has shown me the responsibility my decisions carry. It may seem stretchier than the panty-hose I stole from my mother, but drag has made me a better designer than I ever thought I could be.
