Trans-tacular Thinking: Sex, Species and Evolution in Agnes Questionmark’s Performance Art

Abstract

This article analyses the speculative aesthetics and biomedical imaginaries of Agnes Questionmark’s durational performance works, Transgenesis (2021) and CHM13hTERT (2023). Against the backdrop of contemporary queer-ecological and technoscientific anxieties, these performances challenge the evolutionary and biological principles through which human and non-human life has become both scientifically understood and biopolitically regulated. Questionmark, whose name itself oscillates between the nominative (Agnes) and the interrogative (Questionmark), engages directly with technoscientific developments such as genomic sequencing and genetic engineering, reframing the ‘natural’ not as a stable biological category but as a politically calibrated fiction. Reading Questionmark’s work alongside Donna Haraway’s concept of tentacular thinking and Paul B. Preciado’s notion of molecular becoming, the article develops a ‘trans-tacular’ mode of thought that unsettles naturalised regimes of sex, species and biological legitimacy. Questionmark’s performances insist on a set of critical contradictions: If genomic revision and molecular plasticity are increasingly legitimised as technoscientific practices, why are other forms of transformation framed as unnatural? Why is transition valorised at the level of the genome yet condemned at the level of the body? Ultimately, the article argues that Questionmark disrupts the biopolitical regulation of naturalness by staging transition not as a clinical corrective to an essential biological code, but as an organic, iterative and agential process of molecular becoming.