Queering Genetic Data: Biohacking à la Heather Dewey-Hagborg and Mary Maggic


The characters Mary and Mary from Mary Maggic’s ‘Housewives Making Drugs’


Artists that use biohacking, such as Heather Dewey-Hagborg and Mary Maggic, interrogate systems of power that regulate bodies, identities, and genetics. By critically engaging with tools and processes typically reserved for scientists, they expose the ways in which institutional control operates, from genetic surveillance to pharmaceutical monopolies.

Artificial intelligence (AI) plays a significant role in analyzing genetic data, using algorithms to classify, surveil, and commodify human biology in ways that raise ethical concerns about bias, privacy, and the reduction of identity to data points. Heather Dewey-Hagborg underlines this in Stranger Visions (2012–2013) where she collected DNA samples from discarded objects in public spaces — such as chewing gum, hair, and cigarette butts — and used this material to create speculative portraits of anonymous individuals. By visualizing these genetic traces, her work critiques the hidden ways in which bodies are surveilled and classified. AI is central to these processes, as algorithms are often employed to analyze genetic material and draw conclusions about identity, race, or even behavioral predispositions. Through this work, Dewey-Hagborg reveals the subjective nature of these interpretations, exposing the biases and assumptions encoded into both scientific methodologies and the AI systems that amplify them.

Stranger Visions(2012-2013) by Heather Dewey-Hagborg

In Probably Chelsea (2017), she deepens this critique by using a single DNA sample from whistleblower Chelsea Manning to create multiple speculative portraits. Each portrait reflects a different set of assumptions embedded in the process of genetic analysis, which highlights the fluidity of identity and the impossibility of reducing a person to their DNA. Her work resonates with Michel Foucault’s concept of biopower that examines how institutions regulate populations by controlling bodies and life itself. By queering the processes of genetic surveillance, Dewey-Hagborg reveals the limitations of AI systems and genetic science, questioning the ethics of their use and imagining alternative frameworks that prioritize complexity over control.
Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s Probably Chelsea (2017)

While Dewey-Hagborg’s work focuses on the technological processes underpinning genetic surveillance, Mary Maggic shifts the critique to biopolitical systems, exploring how pharmaceutical and institutional control restrict bodily autonomy. In their project Open Source Estrogen (see manifesto in video below), Maggic asks the speculative question: “What if it were possible to make estrogen in the kitchen?”. Maggic critiques the monopolization of hormone production by the pharmaceutical industry and its role in enforcing normative gender binaries. By turning hormone synthesis into an accessible, do-it-yourself process, they transform biohacking into a participatory act of resistance.This approach is expanded in Housewives Making Drugs, a fictional cooking show where two trans-femme characters, Maria and Maria, guide viewers through a “urine-hormone extraction recipe”. The show playfully reimagines the domestic kitchen as a site of political resistance, where conversations about gender, body politics, and institutional access to hormones are staged. With witty banter and sharp critiques of heteronormativity, the performance challenges patriarchal control over bodies while inviting audiences to envision a world with greater bodily sovereignty for all.

Maggic’s practice resonates with Paul B. Preciado’s Testo Junkie, which explores the ways in which the body is shaped by pharmaceutical and technological systems under capitalism. Like Preciado, Maggic critiques the regulation of gender and sexuality by these systems, adding a speculative and communal approach. By queering the processes that control bodies and identities, Maggic offers alternative futures where autonomy and fluidity disrupt systems of control.

Together, Dewey-Hagborg and Maggic use biohacking to interrogate the systems that regulate bodies, identities, and biology. Dewey-Hagborg’s work directly critiques the intersection of AI and genetic data, exposing the biases and limitations of these technologies. Maggic, meanwhile, focuses on the biopolitical regulation of bodies through pharmaceuticals, expanding the critique to include institutional gatekeeping and bodily autonomy. Both artists challenge normative frameworks, where identity is no longer reduced to data or binaries but reimagined as fluid, complex, and resistant to control.




Housewives Making Drugs by Mary Maggic


Mary Maggic’s Open Source Estrogen: a manifesto on hormone queering resistance.



Mary Maggic’s participatory performance Molecular Queering Agency.

BACK