The Gender Project is a collection of four short documentaries about gender, gender identity, and sexuality. As a collection, the documentaries offer broad representations of queer identities as they intersect with race, class, education, geography, sex, and more. Each documentary was made in collaboration with participants, meaning their ideas, feedback, and time were required for completion. The purpose of working collaboratively is to bring more balance in the research relationship, with participants having agency over their involvement and representations. The methodological framework for theorizing the critical making of this project includes critical praxis, queer techne, a lesbian collective aesthetic, and researching from friendship, which structure a set of queer critical research and editing practices – consent, collaboration, and multimodality. These practices are a response to a fundamental understanding of research as inequitable, that participants bear more risk than researchers, and are left out of their own authoring. Practiced together, the contextualized and situated queer critical research practices of The Gender Project work toward a critical theory of making with implications in how we do research, specifically how researchers position participants, and what more robust participation can contribute to research projects.
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