Drowning in the Weight of Your Expectations is an audiovisual work exploring the journey from girlhood to womanhood and the contradictory expectations of how girls and women are socialised (Määttä & Uusiautti, 2020). This work uses sample banks donated by four female or non-binary artists for a collaborative album project (Rose, 2021) and self-generated speech. Audio was constructed using GLVD (Rose, 2020) and Wave (Genki Instruments, 2019), two hand-based gestural control systems. Gestural interaction was central to manipulating audio samples in real-time, creating a soundscape that interrogates societal issues related to gender representation. The video component features an impassive woman painting her face white, symbolising the societal expectations of feminine presentation. This paper discusses the use of gestural interaction in mixed-media composition, emphasising the importance of agency, empowerment, and the performer’s active role in shaping the narrative. Through integrating bespoke and commercial technologies, the piece embodies radical vulnerability, challenging traditional gender narratives and offering a nuanced exploration of the impact of everyday misogyny. The piece contributes to electroacoustic music and serves as a critical commentary on the broader socio-political landscape. It invites further exploration into the ways technology can be leveraged to interrogate and express issues of identity, power, and resistance through a fluid relationship between body, voice and semantic utterance.