Gender, sexuality, and technology in male pregnancy: An analysis of Lee Mingwei and Virgil Wong’s installation, POP! The First Human Male Pregnancy

Abstract

In this article, I examine performance artists Lee Mingwei and Virgil Wong’s long-running online art installation project, POP! The First Human Male Pregnancy, as a liminal science fiction-like space in which the relationships between gender, sexuality, technology, and pregnancy, are illuminated and, at times, rearranged. Secondly, I look at user-generated content on YouTube left in response to one part of Lee and Wong’s installation as a further site for meaning-making about male pregnancy. In both these sites, I argue that the meaning-making of male pregnancy is transgressive in its queering of pregnancy while remaining normative in its reflection of male/female binary gender categories.