Logan Smilges | Queer Silence: Rhetorical Quieting and an Erotics of Absence
*Transcript cleaned by Kaitlyn Gastineau
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I would really love to start um off my remarks with just some gratitude Remi did such a wonderful job
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overviewing the many different people who have had a hand in um getting me here today and expressing
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interest in having me but I want to extend some special thanks to Remi and David in particular
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um for just their initial interest in bringing me along I think it it means so much to me as a disabled scholar to have
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other disabled Scholars um kind of in in my box uh championing
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me and I also want to extend uh thanks to Jessica Hill Riggs for helping to coordinate my visit and certainly last
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but not least to all of you both here in the room and online for just taking time
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out of this very snowy dangerous Wednesday uh to be here with me so thank you
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um and for the sake of time I'm going to just dive right in
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as I imagine is also the case for some of you I am unfortunately attracted to
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men uh and as I imagine it's also true for some of you the men that uh I tend to
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attract are typically of the gay variety so as like many people with this
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particular attraction profile I spend a decent amount of time on Grindr which is
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the self-described quote world's number one free mobile social networking app
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for gay bi trans and queer people to connect for people who are unfamiliar with the
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app it's designed to allow users to see dozens of profiles at a time each one
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organized according to other users distance from you rather than swiping through profiles you
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scroll through a grid of them not unlike you would scroll through photos on a personal Instagram page
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now I've had the app off and on for over a decade now and have used it in towns
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and cities across the world chatting and meeting up with an incredibly diverse group of people
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it was through Grindr that I received my first kiss that I had sex for the first
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time and that I met my first long-term partner the app has been an extension of
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my sense of queer and trans identity and community from the very beginning
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now when users first create their Grinder accounts they're prompted with an option to upload a profile picture
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I'm going to pause for a moment to turn off my captions which I believe might be
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not helpful for people or is that it's fine okay
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when users first create their Grinder accounts they're prompted with an option to upload a profile picture similar to
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the ones you might encounter on other social networking or dating apps the difference is that unlike most other
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social networks Grinder's most well-known purpose is to allow users to
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find partners for casual sex so while some users myself included
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upload pictures of their faces to their profiles other users upload pictures of
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their exposed chests others use images of their flexed biceps and still others
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choose not to upload pictures at all these profiles appear in other users
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feeds as just empty black boxes kind of sprinkled into a sea of bodies
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now this variety of images is not particularly remarkable on its own but
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in some places such as State College Pennsylvania where I attended graduate school as well as here in Ann Arbor the
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proportion of profiles with identifiable faces is strikingly smaller than the
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number of profiles with non-facial body parts or without pictures at all
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last night when I opened the app to confirm my suspicion that this would be the case in Ann Arbor I was greeted most
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mostly with bodies or blank boxes that I didn't and couldn't associate with any
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given person I was interacting with the digital world that both acknowledged the presence of a
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queer community and simultaneously concealed the identities of its members
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this peculiar situation one where we can be aware of queer people but not of the
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particularity of many queer individuals has long left me fascinated by the rhetorical strategies people use to
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navigate their queerness in my book "Queer Silence on Disability
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and Rhetorical Absence" from which the bulk of today's talk was derived I
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proposed that the rhetorical strategies for navigating queerness often fall under a rubric of silence
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for me silence doesn't refer only to verbal silence but to a much broader
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variety of absences including forms of invisibility and illegibility that takes
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shape across a variety of media these diverse forms of silence have historically taken on negative
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connotations because of the violence we rightly associate with silencing or
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being silenced in the history of Western queer activism especially silence has been coded as
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weakness as indifference or as complicity with the people and institutions that harm our communities
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this silence is perhaps no better captured than with the famous act up slogan Silence=Death which
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identifies state institutional and individual silences as catalysts of the
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AIDS crisis but as I argue throughout my book silence can also serve a number of
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essential functions for multiply marginalized queer people folks for whom
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speech visibility legibility and other mediated forms of presence can
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counter-intuitively invite further harm I use the phrase queer silence to name
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the ways queer people can and do pursue the worlds we long for within silence
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now sometimes this silence is loud and includes conventional forms of verbal speech but it is always a silence
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enriched by the capacity of queer people to harness the significations that mark
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us for objection and reappropriate them toward new ends
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so when so in order to understand the work that I'm really trying to do with queer silence it's important that I
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explain two key interventions that I make in Rhetorical Theory and I
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recognize that not everyone um here today is a rhetorician so I
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promise to be as accessible as possible
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I would really prefer not to um sure
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can people still hear me okay I'm sorry you could not see me until now
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that's so disappointing for you
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the first of the interventions that I make in Rhetorical Theory is what I call the Rhetorical Matrix which positions
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silence as absence at the center of all meaning making once again silence may refer to a lack
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of speech but it could also refer to any absent form of signification whether that be haptic material visual etc by
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defining silence broadly I emphasize the virtual impossibility of a rhetoricity
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if a thing exists in the sense that it has taken on an ontological quality that
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distinguishes it from pure matter the Rhetorical Matrix assures that it must
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mean something in some way for even if an object is verbally silent it
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nevertheless possesses embodied material visual or affective dimensions that also
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hold the potential to signify so for example if I were to suddenly just stop
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talking and just like continue to awkwardly sit
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here my verbal silence would amplify the rhetorical presence of my body drawing
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your attention to it within the Rhetorical Matrix silence shifts the position of absence from
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meanings negation to its original reference the second intervention I make is with
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rhetorical energy which is the phrase I use to describe the constellation of
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signifiers and significations that inform how an object comes to mean just
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as sometimes what we mean to say is not what comes out or how we mean to sound is not how we are heard so too do any of
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our significations exist only partially within our control the meanings associated with my own
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queerness transness and disabilities for example all contribute to a rhetorical
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energy that radiates from me it's a composition of affective discourses that
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I don't entirely choose but that nevertheless contribute to how I am seen heard and understood by others
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now in the book I explore a variety of ways that queer people use silence to
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wield their rhetorical energy and so taken together the Rhetorical Matrix tracks the contours of rhetorical
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energies fluctuating intensity and motion across signifying modalities
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queer silence names the strategic leveraging of rhetorical energy toward
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acts of resistance toward ways of surviving and sometimes thriving in
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spite of the precarious positions that many of us inhabit and so as it applies to my talk today I
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want to use Grinders as a case study on queer silence particularly on how users
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appropriate degrees of invisibility such as when they choose not to upload
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profile pictures in order to manifest a queer material presence
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I refer to this form of queer silence as quieting a kind of partial self-silon
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scene that trades one kind of signification for another quieting here should not be confused
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with quietness uh which could be taken to mean passivity or low volume
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my use of quieting refers only to how queer people can oscillate the intensity
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of their rhetorical energy across different media in order to regulate how
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they signify in different ways at different times and in different spaces
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quieting also points to the convergences among sexual minorities trans and gender
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non-conforming folks racialized people disabled people and other populations living on the margins given the ways we
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all routinely navigate unchosen and unwanted significations attached to our
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bodyminds in this sense quieting provides an opportunity to analyze the
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queer rhetorical effects of interlocking systems of oppression as well as the differential manifestations of those
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effects on particular communities in their local contexts
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I'm sorry I'm pausing for a moment um because it looks like we are switching up the camera maybe
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I'm moving again
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can people still hear me who want to hear me yay
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on Grindr users have the capacity to quiet their own visual significations
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with the images that they do or do not choose to upload
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the decision to engage such quieting is necessarily influenced by de factors
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such as racism sexism and ableism that affect how users images are perceived by
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others and how those perceptions influence the amount or quality of their
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online interactions neither queer silence nor quieting is purely chosen or
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entirely enforced but both are tactical strategies typically used in response to
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violent or hostile conditions rhetorically speaking quieting is neither only a resource nor only a
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constraint it's what we might understand as a constrictive resource
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for the remainder of my talk today I want to explore the constrictive resourcefulness of quieting on Grindr
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I'm particularly interested in the resistant and subversive potentials of quieting the way users can reappropriate
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Grinder's dependence on visuality to engage a queer community without fully
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exposing their identities this balancing act between disclosure and withholding shifts our focus away
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from determining why a person chooses one kind of photo over another toward
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multiple registers of queerness and the circulations of power that condition all
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of our relationships with a politics of visibility and so to that end I've attempted to
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design my talk today in a way that is as interactive as it is instructive
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over the next 30 minutes or so I'll occasionally invite participation from you all both in the room and online
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um as we discuss the relationships among silence absence sex and power in a
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virtual sphere and then toward the end of my time today I'll offer an opportunity for all of us to critically
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examine what our online presence tells us about our own unique relationships to
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a politics of silence before we get to all of that fun though we're going to take a deep dive into my
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own Grinder profile which I'm sure is what all of you woke up this morning really excited to do
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since I first downloaded Grindr I've always used a picture of some kind mostly I've used face pics uh something
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smiley and usually casual now in one image that I used for quite a while but not currently I should note
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was of me sitting on some concrete steps at a pumpkin festival
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in the image I appear as a white person with brown facial hair I'm wearing black
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skinny jeans a low-cut tan shirt and a denim jacket I have on white shoes and a
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gold necklace I'm smiling and wearing light makeup and at the risk of just
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absolutely destroying myself I want to open the floor to your all's immediate
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reactions to this photo you can either kind of comment verbally here in the room or you can post your answer in the
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chat but what I'm really looking for is what is its mood what vibe does it give
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and we can really try to stick to just one to two word descriptors here I'll give you a second to think and then
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I'd love to hear what you're what you're thinking
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so Logan this is Remi speaking I will read aloud from the chat for you please
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do um so cute but maybe a little basic question mark
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work the vibe is sweet friendly and open
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carefree and chill and let's go dancing I love it did anyone in the room want to
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add no pressure happy we like that
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an activity person okay yeah because we're at a pumpkin festival for sure thank you
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[inaudible audience response] a little bit right absolutely we can just be grateful there are no
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eggplants I suppose [laughs] yes
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thank you all for indulging me and not being like terribly mean
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um and you all really uh fortunately were able to echo my intention with this
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photo which was very much to say like I'm friendly come talk to me um and it's important to note too that
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with my face visible such as it is that I can be identified both within and
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outside of the app so if someone were to spot me somewhere not at a pumpkin festival but at the grocery they would
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still be able to match me up with my profile when a user
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um I'm immediately identified as a queer person
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sorry I'm pausing um because it looks like the slides have
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shifted for a moment
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and we're back when a user encounters my profile on
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Grindr I'm immediately identified as a queer person and not just as any queer
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person but a particular one I become that queer person since my face is
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visible and since faces are generally distinguishable from one another the queerness bestowed upon me by the app
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transfers outside of it Grinder users who have seen my image and now all of
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you I guess can now recognize me as a queer anywhere at all now for many users
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this queer legibility is desirable being recognizable as queer can connote a
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sense of pride in or honesty about one's identity a degree of community affiliation and commitment and even a
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measure of character that this person is willing to have their online interactions publicly linked to their
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own person in fact queer digital studies scholar Sharif Mowlabocus go so far as to
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describe face pics as the preferred currency on of Grindr users
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but the confidence that some users have in their images should not be taken as generalizable evidence of how all users
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feel about face pics the value and possibility of queer legibility is contingent on both my own
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and others you and other users proximity to power particularly as it is embodied
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by whiteness adherence to masculine gender norms and perceived abledness
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though I am trans feminine and disabled it's absolutely no secret that my body
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is often read as a non-disabled cisman and on Grindr this reading carries
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tremendous privilege even if it does often lead to me being misgendered and
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having to come out as disabled later on my picture appearing as it does
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comfortably fits within what French Theorist Roland Barthes calls studium which he describes as quote that very
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wide field of unconcerned desire of various interests of inconsequential
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taste end quote it's not that I am in consequential per se
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um but that my image is it's a nice picture one that makes me look if we're
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being honest and we all were in the chat um like a very basic white gay
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it's a picture made possible by the combination of my race gender expression
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and invisible disabilities that other users would be unconcerned by my picture
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that it would be nice friendly inviting that uh that it would appear inconsequential as such is an effect of
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my combined white masculine and non-disabled presentation in a dominant culture that renders these qualities
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normative but if we can agree on the relative normativity of my profile picture it
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begs the question of what happens when this normativity is disrupted such as with images uploaded by racialized users
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more visibly gender non-conforming users and users with more visible disabilities
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as we know from users reported experiences on the app having their bodies let alone their faces visible in
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profiles can invite intense forms of discrimination now for the sake of time I'm going to
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offer just three really short examples of this discrimination but I'm happy to elaborate on any of them later on
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because it's something I talk about quite at length in the book the first example comes from Anthony
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Lorenzo who is a black cisgender gay user on Grindr who says the following
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about his experience on Grindr quote predictably racism is as rife here as it
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is anywhere else where do you turn the outright rejection of you based on your
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race is tempered not by more understanding men but by attraction to you based on your race or more
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specifically based on preconceived notions about what your race has to offer big cocks thug-like masculinity
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animalistic lust another user uh Jace Every who is a
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black transgender man admits that at least twice a day he receives messages on Grindr that attempt to undermine his
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legibility as a man he recounts quote I've gotten everything from men don't
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have pussies to you're an abomination the amount of hate that is received outweighs the positivity nine times out
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of ten end quote unlike some trans users Every does have a visible face pic on his profile and
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explains in a in a provided like about me space that he is transgender
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but he acknowledges that this decision reduces the number of enjoyable interactions he has on the app he says
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quote the guys that approach me are the ones that fetishize us and they immediately are like I've always wanted
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to try an FTM or a female to male transgender person end quote
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and in the final example that I'll offer uh this is White Death user Hayden Smith who said about uh in an interview that
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on Grindr quote disabled people are never just people we're either objects of
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pity or objects of fascination and inspiration end quote abled users can't
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help but to make a big deal out of others disabilities a user's disabilities become the sum total of
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their Identity on the app they become the only conversation anyone wants to have and not typically in a supportive
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let alone erotic way and I'll just kind of note informally that in my own
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experience regardless of the kind or quality of a conversation that I'll be having with someone on Grindr the moment
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that I disclose I'm Autistic or begin clarifying the kind of needs that I have
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related to my post-traumatic stress disorder the conversation changes
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directions entirely to the point that my body becomes this kind of vessel for disability right where it's no longer
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like I am a person with a disability or a disabled person but rather I'm just like a house that stores disability
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right I just become this like node of knowledge for them to like ask questions about disability and then block me
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for all of these users that I've um talked about as is the case for many marginalized users profiles on Grindr or
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something of a catch-22 either they reveal their marginalized identities up
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front and suffer random abuse from other users or they withhold their identities
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and risk being accused of lying later on while I want to be careful not to
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collapse experiences of racism sexism and ableism it's worth noting the ways
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that race gender and disability are triangulated on Grindr it's not only that white cis-abled users
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construct their own sense of belongingness against racialized trans and gender non-conforming and disabled
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bodyminds but that the currency of face pics to borrow from Mowlabocus is
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mobilized as a surveillance tactic to police visibly deviant bodies
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though face pics might produce a kind of currency offering some users a buy-in
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to queer community it's a currency structured by a deeply racist cis-
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ableist economy wherein only a slim margin of homonormative users are paid
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full price for their identifiability for those many users who fall outside of
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this slim margin face pics offer a much lower rate of return rendering
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marginalized users simultaneously hypervisible and mass and invisible as
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individuals the promise of visibility on Grindr reveals something of an identitarian
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ploy that subsumes the unique experiences uh and bodyminds of multiply marginalized persons within a
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monolithic classification system structured by homonormativity far from securing users entrance to a
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safe and uplifting digital space visibility on Grindr often leads to a heightened vulnerability to violence
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this is where quieting enters the conversation users who choose to withhold for any
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number of reasons their identifiability by uploading body pics or no pictures at all are complicating the grammars by
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which queerness is typically articulated on Grindr the absence of an image
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fractures the visual material layout of the app drawing users eyes toward its
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invisibility and highlighting the viewer's own fleshy presence
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consider for example one of the stock photos that Grindr has available in the
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Apple App Store where users can can download the app to their phone in this image the main feed of the app
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appears as a multi-racial and gender expansive rainbow of faces with the
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users representing a range of skin tones sizes genders and stages of undress and
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importantly every single profile prominently features the user's face
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but I'd like us to compare this image with this user generated screenshot of
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the main grinder feed now identifying characteristics have been blurred or blacked out to protect anonymity and
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this was not taken here in Ann Arbor um but the assortment of profiles remains intact
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so I'll turn the analysis over to you whether in person or online what are
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some of the differences between the two pictures that jump out at you
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and I'll give you a few moments to think and then you're welcome to either raise your hand or start posting things in the
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chat
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right what are people thinking yes
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yes so uh so one person here in the audience mentioned that um in the user generated profile people
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are using text a little bit more uh to identify who they are or what they want
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and this is Remi speaking so a reading from the chat um there's a lack of profile pics
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someone else notes not a lot of pictures and not a lot of faces in the user photo
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and then another person notes it seems that the chat is not available
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I'm sorry to hear that this is Logan um I don't know is the chat available are
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we able to confirm that for people who want to use it
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I'm not sure this is Remi again I'm oh perfect all right it's it's appearing so
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um now the chat is working in addition to the Q&A and someone else also noted that
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the right image shows more piecemeal bodies if there are pictures yeah
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Lo- this is Logan more body pics absolutely
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I'm going to continue speaking but I encourage you to continue uh posting in in the chat if you'd like to and I would
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be happy to refer back to what you post later on during the Q&A
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never have I used Grinder without the seamless
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collage of faces broke being broken by body pics and blank profiles by
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absences for me these absences draw the focus of my attention even if users are not
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interested in chatting with faceless profiles they're nevertheless forced to navigate them to scroll past them to
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block them or to grumble about them the attempt to capture invisibility with
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blank profiles harkens toward the user's materiality this materiality refers not
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only to the digitally rendered material the black box but also to the
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embody-minded material of the attendant user the role of quieting is all the more
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obvious if you select one of the blank profiles so that the app zooms in to fill your screen with a genderless
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figure silhouette couched inside a black box in this image there is no visual
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information about the user available about the user in the bottom corner of the profile you are sometimes shown the
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user's name which can be as nondescript as whatup 36 sometimes their age and
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occasionally an indication of whether they are online now but aside from these details all that
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remains is the outline of a human head and upper body at first glance this image is
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unremarkable but the outline of of a figure is a reminder of the picture that
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should be there and by extension the person who is there on the other side of another device
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herein lies the trick of quieting which disguises a person's rhetorical energy
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beneath layers of remediation for most Grinder users the discursive
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charge or rhetorical energy attached to their queerness is first digitized as a
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profile and subsequently visualized in a picture when users opt out of profile
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pictures their rhetorical energy remains at the level of digital material the
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profile spatial dimension the fact that it literally takes up space in your hand on the phone
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is a reminder that a user does exist even if you can't see them when you when
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viewers encounter a blank profile then they are faced with an absent visuality wherein quieting becomes a kind of
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silence when the signifying potential of a given mode of expression has been completely
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extinguished as in this case it has been quieted and it is silent
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but there are of course instances of quieting that do not result in silence it bears repeating that quieting
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involves regulating signifiers so while quieting can lead to silence it doesn't
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have to a perfect example on Grindr is body pics or those images that are faceless
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but nevertheless show some of a user's body such as their chest abs quads or calves
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now in the provided image which was generously donated by a very good friend of mine from his own Grinder profile a
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shirtless black man wears green briefs that spell "Thursday" backward across the
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waistband he's using one arm to take the picture and his face is outside of the shot
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profiles such as this still carry visual signification like face pics but
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there's something lost in their identifiability even if the picture contains a body part that is awesome in
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its magnitude strength or appeal the image is unique only to the digital interface
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as soon as users leave the app the chance of noticing that same body part on a stranger diminishes considerably
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body pics then limit their rhetoricity to the virtual space of the app where
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users are encouraged to recognize each image as synecdochic for a queer person
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outside the app the body parts may lose some of their discursive power as they lose their connection to the queer
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significations on Grindr that lent the meaning to begin with in other words body pics are regulated visual
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artifacts that constrain what information is offered to other users unlike blank unlike face pics and blank
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profiles both of which immediately remind viewers of the queer subjects operating the accounts body pics
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restrict their queerness to a single patch of flesh now this is not to say that anyone's
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body picks are bad or necessarily less queer because far from it full and
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partial nudity are indispensable to cultivating the erotic intimacies that sustain many queer sexual cultures
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all I mean to suggest is that body picks have been quieted but not silenced they
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are neither visual enough for identification nor absent enough for a kind of material mirage
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body picks occupy the hazy middle ground of multiple signifying media they are
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the collision of visual material and in bodyminded modalities each of the three
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struggling for a predominance it will not receive the resulting effect of the photo is
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muted much like the picture itself is cropped there's something missing despite there being so much going on
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quieting is complicated and contradictory in this way on the one hand it reveals the interplay among
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media within the Rhetorical Matrix it captures the fluctuations and regulations of signification as people
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try to navigate the discourses that signify their bodyminds sometimes people are quieted without their consent
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when Jace the trans Grinder user I mentioned earlier recalled his resistance to disclosing his transness
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online it was because he feared retribution he had been harassed into
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invisibility other times quieting is an intentional act of subversion a mode of resistance
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against the compulsion to signify in a particular way more commonly though quieting is an
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effect of both domination and resistance and among the goals of my work is to
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urge us to engage these competing causes with the trust that there is room for both that at any time things might be
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empowering enough to keep going albeit in a new direction or in a new way
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quieting is that different going that going different that reconfigures how we
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signify so our rhetorical energy might serve us a little bit better
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as I pointed out in my opening remarks the language of silence has a long history in queer studies and activism in
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which I intervene today I've been taking up silence's cousin queerness to quiet to wonder
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about how I'm sorry I'm gonna respect that sentence over today I've been taking up silence's cousin quietness to
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wonder about how a silent bodymind or a quieted image might help us to read the
37:25
subtleties of signification that lie in the folds of elbows and corners of
37:31
screens I'm asking what do we learn from the verbal register that is restricted not
37:37
to orality but to the words associated with it what would remain unspoken if we
37:42
were to no longer speak of silence whose bodies would decompose whose
37:48
images would fade to black and not the black of blank profiles but the black as in gone forever
37:54
whose speech would go unheard if we stopped talking about silence who would
38:00
be forgotten perhaps one way of approaching these questions is to start listening looking
38:06
feeling or otherwise sensing out what is hidden as with many of the users on
38:12
Grindr queer rhetoricity too often goes unnoticed because it is quiet not
38:17
because it is weak or ineffective by paying attention to the subtle maybe
38:22
all of us can begin to discover the significance of silence quieting offers us one way to
38:29
acknowledge the contributions of queers who have heretofore remained unnoticed it recognizes their presence not simply
38:36
as an anonymous or empty existence but as a substantive and penetrating resilience just as the faceless and
38:44
blank profiles on Grindr reach beyond the screen to insist on their own queer
38:49
intelligibility so too are many people waiting patiently to make known that
38:55
they are here loud needy and right in front of us
39:01
so what I'd like to do now is shift gears a little bit for the time
39:07
remaining um toward an activity that I'm hoping can involve all of us and allow us to
39:14
kind of begin using silence as an analytic or as a kind of critical tool
39:20
and so uh if you would like to participate here in the room or virtually all you really need to do is
39:27
get out your phone and bring up one of the social media platforms that you use
39:34
regularly and once you've navigated to that app
39:41
um or to that website um I ask that you find a way to zoom in on your own profile picture whether that
39:48
means going to some type of home page to your profile or maybe you have the the photos stored elsewhere but you want to
39:55
kind of bring the photo up so it occupies most of your screen
40:02
and then I'm going to give you a few minutes to ask yourself very informally the following six questions and it's
40:11
really kind of three pairs of questions in the column on the left I ask
40:18
questions that are typically associated with visual analysis what is shown
40:24
what is emphasized what is made clear in the image that you use
40:33
and then I want you to flip those questions and to ask yourself what is
40:38
hidden what does de-emphasized and what is distorted or unfocused
40:47
now I'll admit that when I was planning this activity as despite that I knew
40:52
this would be a hybrid event I had thought that the proportions of people
40:57
online versus in person would be a little bit different so I'm not sure how this will necessarily work with so many
41:03
folks online and I'm so glad many of you are finding ways to accessibly attend but what I'll do is give you a couple
41:10
minutes to think or maybe just about a minute to think through these questions and then I'm going to move on to
41:17
um a couple successive stages of questions and so this kind of might become a more individual activity than
41:23
um a group one but we'll see what we can do
42:30
so while I don't want to rush anyone I also want to pay attention to time so assuming that you've had a chance to
42:36
kind of briefly think about these questions or maybe at least screenshot them so you can keep looking at them if
42:41
you'd like more time I'm going to move to the next step
42:46
which is to ask yourself two following questions and this begins to implement silence as
42:53
an analytic the first question is how is your image speaking through what is visible
43:01
emphasized and clear what are these elements telling you about yourself
43:06
or telling others about you and then equally important how is your
43:12
image speaking through what is hidden de-emphasized and distorted or unfocused
43:18
asking you again just as important what are these elements telling you about
43:24
yourself through their absence or quietedness and I'll give you again about a minute
43:30
to answer this before we move on to the final kind of cumulative question
44:40
once again I don't want to rush anyone so if you'd like a little bit more time with this slide you're welcome to
44:46
screenshot it or take a picture um the final question that I'll ask is
44:52
the following what does your image based on the previous questions that you've answered
44:59
tell you about your own relationships to quieting and a politics of silence and
45:06
it could very well may be that the prominence of your own visibility
45:12
indicates that you don't have much of a relationship to quieting in a politics of silence and this indicates just as
45:18
much about a relationship to power as someone who is in fact using quieting or
45:24
a politics of silence more evidently or explicitly so I'll give you
45:30
um about a minute to to answer this question and while originally I had planned to offer time
45:37
for a kind of conversation about this um just kind of looking at the time now
45:43
I'm realizing it might be wise to kind of actually shift over to the Q&A portion so what I'll do is that if you'd
45:49
like to share your um your kind of results or how you've been thinking through this activity I'd
45:55
love to hear from you and you're welcome to kind of shoehorn that into the Q&A but otherwise I think I'm going to end
46:02
here so thank you all so very very much [crowd applause]
46:15
hello everyone uh this is uh David again I want to personally thank Logan for a
46:22
very thoughtful and a thought-provoking uh presentation I think we will all be
46:28
thinking about it for some time into the future and so I will try in this moment
46:35
to practice [inaudible] for those of you who know me this is an ongoing practice but um I want to give enough
46:42
time for a conversation as well as sort of think about some prompting questions
46:48
so once again thank you for your talk um as a follower of the digital and a
46:55
scholar of disability online specifically I was very much on one
47:01
hand aware of these ongoing questions that animate uh visual culture but also
47:08
um very intrigued by your um sort of positioning of silence as
47:15
both an active subversion and potentially an active sort of objection
47:20
or disavowed by others but I'm curious um if you've given some thought or
47:28
thought about the ways in which these mi- minoritized uh subjects that use this
47:36
kind of quieting to interact with um the no the sort of logics and silence
47:44
in a way that able-bodied or um white or cisgendered people might not
47:51
so to give you a concrete example of them on my own social media for example
47:57
when I'm interacting with um strangers or with people on dates or
48:03
things of this nature I will often have post images of myself in my wheelchair
48:10
and to me because you can very clearly see my headrest which is large and
48:16
prominent in the photo to me that communicates that I use a complex
48:22
wheelchair or I'll take an image of myself in front of my bed which is a
48:29
hospital bed and things of this nature but in my own personal experience that
48:35
kind of communication is often lost on other able-bodied people or people who
48:42
are not not familiar with crit vocabularies and visualities and acts of
48:48
representation and so in this way it's the the image has a potential to be read
48:55
differently by someone who is disabled than by someone who is able-bodied and I'm wondering if you've given some
49:02
thought to how silence might be read differently on Grinder for instance by
49:09
other people who are transgender or raced or
49:14
um or otherwise non-normative in a way that is different from people who are the norm
49:23
this is Logan um thank you thank you for that really thoughtful question
49:28
um the short answer is yes I've certainly been thinking a lot about that um and given
49:34
um that there are just lots of different reasons that a person may choose to engage silence or degrees of quietedness
49:43
um online and a very uh a kind of
49:48
intentional decision that I made when writing the book was to try to avoid
49:54
questions of other people's intentionality because on Grindr it's
49:59
that question of intentionality so often becomes reduced to a question of outness like well do you want people to know or
50:06
not um and I-I think that can be a reductive question but what I'm hearing you ask also has to do with
50:14
um like competing or just alternative um registers or or uh grammars of
50:24
of beingness um and uh that especially for a lot of disabled
50:31
users are necessarily inflected by like a culture of desexualization
50:37
um that renders like our presence necessarily distorted even if it is
50:44
visible online right um so you're talking about you can have a hospital bed in a photo and a person
50:51
still will not recognize what that means because they're not even expecting that
50:56
it could be possible that a disabled person would be on this app like looking for some type of like erotic or
51:02
otherwise romantic encounter and I so I think yes there are going to be like these
51:10
kind of like misses and um I think that's that's one of the kind of
51:18
um um one of the reasons why like silence is never going to be an ideal form of
51:25
communication right like it and it will never convey everything you wanted to in the way that you want it to
51:32
um because it relies on it relies on a kind of rhetorical energy that we can't
51:37
control and that is so often kind of conditioned by other people's really bad
51:42
assumptions about who we can and can't be thank you very much
51:52
and this is Remi speaking again um I'll just echo David's sentiments and
51:58
thank you so much for the talk and also echoing uh someone from the Q&A who has
52:03
noted you've had to deal with a ton of interruptions today and that it's not easy at all um and you've handled it gracefully so
52:10
uh thank you Logan and also people online as the tech issues get sorted out
52:15
um and Logan if it's okay I can maybe share some of the questions from from the chat [Logan: absolutely] and maybe a way to
52:23
start would be there were a couple of responses to the exercise so I could share those and then we can maybe kind
52:28
of delve into the other questions um but one person noted shown face and
52:35
HAIR emphasized hair all caps made clear that I have very nice hair
52:43
um hidden disability de-emphasized all things not hair related
52:49
um so that was one person [Logan: thank you for sharing this is Logan thank you]
52:54
um and then another person in response to that exercise wrote in some ways this is a very vulnerable assignment but I
53:02
love it if I'm honest I show superficial things in my social media normative
53:08
pictures of parents work related things flowers food
53:13
I do not show negative life events or vulnerable things or relationships
53:19
thank you for sharing this is Logan thank you for sharing and I just want to um to acknowledge that you're right it
53:26
is an incredibly vulnerable activity and one that I would never ever ever demand someone participate in
53:33
um and then maybe I can I'll go in order from from the the questions if that sounds okay uh says Remi again
53:41
um so there's a question that asks does surveillance relate to quieting and if
53:46
so how this is Logan
53:52
um yes it absolutely does relate to quieting in my own work I'm I'm
53:57
particularly interested in like community-based forms of surveillance
54:02
um the ways that like ostensibly marginalized people are trained to surveil one another
54:10
um often with the intention of protecting themselves or instituting maintaining some type of hierarchy of
54:17
respectability that grants them like a degree of safety legibility desirability something
54:24
like that so on Grindr I talk or in my work on Grindr I talk a lot about
54:31
surveillance as something that many homonormative users
54:36
predominantly cisgender white non-disabled gay men
54:42
um will kind of engage as a way to shame people who do not
54:50
um abide by their kind of demands for visibility right if a person of various
54:56
marginalized experience does not show face uh right away it's met with a kind
55:03
of hostility that is not only ignorant of the reasons that a person may not
55:09
want to be visible but I also think can can be more
55:15
um it kind of intentionally hostile
55:20
um because when uh variously marginalized user will be more visible
55:26
as I said in in the talk it often incurs incurs violence right it incurs kinds
55:31
of interactions from these same homonormative users that are demanding people to show themselves in the first
55:36
place so it's it's an impossible position to be in and and one that I think um really highlights how surveillance
55:43
can be uh can kind of matriculate or be appropriated by
55:49
um by even ostensibly marginalized people to use to be used against their own
55:57
and this is Remi again um Logan I think there's another question in the chat that actually
56:02
connects with I think some of what you were uh just just sharing um and so they
56:07
ask I'd be interested in hearing your take on the bias caused by the emphasis
56:13
on Grindr and other sites of imagery for communication which leaves out people with visual disabilities as well as
56:20
neurodivergent people who may have difficulty interpreting facial expressions
56:25
this is Logan um I mean you're absolutely right it is a bias and it's not only a bias that is
56:35
perpetuated by individual users who uh for instance fail to add alt text or
56:43
image descriptions um or simply just avoid using captions
56:48
entirely but it's also a bias of the platforms themselves who have very much
56:55
organized themselves designed themselves with the assumption that it's going to be primarily cited and otherwise
57:02
neurotypical users on the on the platforms right and so this is a kind of
57:07
bias that is like more structurally embedded or as structurally embedded as
57:13
it is kind of individually perpetuated
57:19
and this is Remi again um so if it's okay I'll kind of keep moving through and for folks who are in
57:24
the room if you have a question I will like continually avert my eyes toward your direction
57:30
um as we navigate the multimodal landscape um so this next question
57:35
um says thank you for this talk I couldn't help but think of the Zoom screen as well as a place with shared or
57:43
silenced visual information and do you consider turning off your Zoom camera to be silencing what about when others turn
57:50
off your camera as in this webinar where you can't see us
57:55
um this is so this is thank you this is Logan thank you um and this is one of
58:01
the tricky things about silence right it's never or rarely entirely chosen or
58:06
entirely enforced it's typically a combination of the two um I think Zoom silencing is is real
58:14
um and something that I use so frequently as a way to stop people from seeing me roll their
58:21
eyes at them or be so bored that I leave you know something like that um but also I think that it it can also
58:29
be a way for um folks to to silence others
58:36
um not even necessarily by forcing you know people to turn their cameras off but just by the way that for instance
58:43
the the mics can be regulated um and I I don't think that's particularly profound
58:50
um but I do think that Zoom is a really good example of how silencing and
58:55
degrees of quietedness can occur in real time in addition to the more
59:01
um kind of the lag time that we often experience on
59:06
social media where our profiles are of course immediately outdated the second that we we update them
59:15
oh well thank you so much I am Larry LaFontaine Stokes from the Department of
59:20
American Culture um thank you for being here and happy to co-sponsor this event so a quick comment
59:27
uh just uh my my quiet my quieting is that just I'm not on the gay dating apps
59:33
anymore or or maybe I am uh but I don't do them oh but my question and do you
59:39
want me to wait for the mic thanks um so let me repeat I am Larry
59:45
LaFontaine Stokes from the Department of American culture who is no longer on dating apps that's my quieting
59:53
um but my question um has to do with um well well the quieting from different
1:00:01
perspectives your talk made me think of of two people one Gayatri Spivak's essay
1:00:06
"Can the Subaltern Speak" um so one one that that question uh of
1:00:13
of what does it mean even when you are there if what you are saying is actually
1:00:18
legible understandable or not and this the second the second um reference I thought of was the
1:00:26
Argentinian scholar Josefina Ludmer's essay on the Mexican
1:00:32
Nun Sor Juana Inès de la Cruz a 17th Century nun who was being persecuted by religious
1:00:38
authority and that uh fundamental essay in Latin American Studies by Josefina
1:00:43
Ludmer the the faints of the week [speaking Spanish] 
1:00:49
is how do you speak how do you speak from a position of marginality from a
1:00:55
position when you are subjected to persecution when you are very aware of
1:01:01
the lack of power and you are trying to negotiate that so I guess I I'm
1:01:07
interested if you can continue to talk uh about the theoretical aspects of what you are
1:01:15
proposing in terms of quieting and silencing negotiating those positions of
1:01:20
some alternalty thank you this is Logan um yes I'm always happy to talk about
1:01:27
the theory so thank you for asking um because so many so many people have
1:01:32
written extensively about silence um and and think and have been thinking
1:01:39
critically about it um where I tend to depart from a lot of
1:01:44
existing work on silence is that I really resist the idea that it it ever
1:01:50
exists in a binary with speech so many people think about silence as
1:01:56
this thing that is not only in tension with speech but as if they're like two
1:02:02
sides of the same coin you're doing one or the other and what I'm really trying to gesture toward with the Rhetorical Matrix is
1:02:09
that we have to think about silence multimodally because if a person is silent verbally silent in a room there
1:02:16
are other ways that they can be signifying that are equally important equally meaningful and equally deserving
1:02:22
of our attention and many of these ways are embodied or material or visual or
1:02:28
haptic through touch simply affective um and so what I was trying to show
1:02:34
today um through through quieting is that there are ways where we can not only
1:02:41
kind of flip switches between different modes of signification but we can also
1:02:46
think of them as spectra where we oscillate or regulate to what degree
1:02:51
we're signifying in any given modality at any given time so to take the example
1:02:57
of the body pic that I showed on Grindr where someone has cropped their identifiability they're on the one hand
1:03:03
reducing their visual signification as as they are also kind of amplifying
1:03:12
their embodied signification by really harnessing people's attention toward one particular area of their body and it's
1:03:19
that kind of oscillation that I think makes silence much more interesting to
1:03:25
me personally and also much more theoretically rich because suddenly
1:03:31
we're no longer having to ask ourselves you know can the subaltern speak but
1:03:37
rather in what ways are they are they always speaking have they already been speaking
1:03:43
will they continue to speak because to me it's not a question of can it's a question of how
1:03:49
um and and I think multimodality allows us to start getting at that question
1:04:01
uh um hi yeah uh thank you so much for coming uh this was a fantastic talk I uh
1:04:08
I can't I can't wait to read your book and I'm very uh grateful for your presence here
1:04:14
um you had in your title uh the erotics of absence I'd love to hear more maybe
1:04:20
about um and I think you started to get I think
1:04:26
you started to get into this in your most recent answer but um the potentially like pleasurable aspects of
1:04:32
of such of subtitles like how is how is
1:04:38
silence itself a uh language of potentially uh pleasure and and and
1:04:45
roboticism this is Logan thank you for giving me
1:04:51
the chance to talk about this um yes the so and so the first thing that comes to mind for me is
1:04:58
um how various forms of silence can encourage
1:05:04
um like role play and forms of disguise that are really useful to a lot of
1:05:11
people um um for for lots of different reasons one just because it can be sexy but also
1:05:18
because um it kind of explodes um it explodes the capacity of the
1:05:26
individual body to kind of imagine or fantasize forms of sexual engagement that may or may not be available at any
1:05:33
given time something that I've been thinking a lot about recently
1:05:38
um is a relatively new um
1:05:44
app or website for primarily queer and trans people called Sniffies
1:05:51
um and what distinguishes the app is that it is very much organized around cruising it is meant to make cruising
1:05:58
more accessible um and in its most recent kind of update
1:06:03
the site has is now allowing people to um to do what they call live play but it's essentially like FaceTiming
1:06:10
instead of meeting up in person and um what's so great about this is it is
1:06:16
allowing a lot of users who may not be able to leave their house or attend like
1:06:23
cruising grounds that are most frequented or even like because they don't want to see someone in person
1:06:29
still access forms of erotic play um and just in my own experience there
1:06:35
have been so many times when my PTSD would make it like physically impossible for me to touch another person but that
1:06:41
doesn't mean I don't want to have sex and so um silence in kind of as it's kind of
1:06:47
articulated across these digital registers or variously articulated um like becomes an issue of access and a
1:06:55
mode of accessibility that I think is so worthy of being celebrated even even if it's often you know complicated by
1:07:02
um a kind of culture of ableism that produces the inaccessibility in the first place
1:07:18
hi I just want to say thank you so much for coming I really enjoyed this talk um but I will be honest when I first came
1:07:24
to this talk I was a little intrigued how I would interpret this talk since I am aro-ace and I've kind of known that
1:07:30
for a very long time so I haven't really had that much interaction with dating apps or things like that since they
1:07:36
simply bore me quite frankly but I was thinking to myself I was like oh I
1:07:41
wouldn't probably notice this in like my profile but in like my profile picture on Instagram my face is completely
1:07:47
covered in it um there is more so a focus on like full body images throughout my Instagram and my online
1:07:53
presence which surprised me because oftentimes I think there's this like imposter syndrome not even like a
1:08:00
professional sense but within a community sense that often I feel like I have to fight or question if I belong in the
1:08:07
queer community or not because of my identity and it reminded me of like me and my roommate she is she identifies as
1:08:13
lesbian and often there's this like common discussion between the two of us
1:08:19
of like how should we dress with fashion or hairstyle to try to visually communicate to others or signify that
1:08:25
we're within the community but I really enjoyed your Rhetorical Matrix because it kind of let me self-reflect that it
1:08:31
doesn't have to just necessarily be a visual signifier it could be a verbal one or you know any other way so I
1:08:38
really enjoyed that thank you and that wasn't really a question that was more like a comment sorry this is
1:08:44
Logan those are my favorite questions the ones I don't have to answer so that's so great thank you um and and you're absolutely right of
1:08:50
course and I'm so glad you were able to hear that what I'm really trying to do is expand our sense of generosity toward
1:08:56
people who might want to signify in alternative ways um and really kind of take the pressure off the demand to be visible in ways
1:09:04
that might not be suitable like suitable or desirable for you yeah so thank you
1:09:09
thanks and this is Remi speaking again we have
1:09:14
a few more questions that have come in in the chat um so Logan I'll start with this one
1:09:21
um someone asks does one always choose silence or is silence quieting sometimes
1:09:26
forced onto queer trans and disabled folk this is Logan
1:09:33
um I would say there is in fact never a time when it is only chosen
1:09:39
that a politics of silence can only emerge in a context wherein that that is
1:09:47
like demanded um or or at least made
1:09:53
um somehow a more desirable alternative to um to the kind of more dominant option
1:10:03
um what I really try to focus on in my book and and also as I tried to focus
1:10:08
today in my talk is on the fact that silence can also not be reduced
1:10:14
to domination it can't be reduced to those conditions of hostility or violence that we have to honor both
1:10:22
those initial conditions and also what people are are making out of them
1:10:27
um and it's only by focusing and kind of lifting up what people are doing to survive despite it all that I think we
1:10:35
can really do justice to the various ways that queer people have been like being queer
1:10:41
um for a long long time and this is Remi again
1:10:49
I think we have for probably one more question um but I'm going to actually combine two
1:10:55
questions that were in the chat as a way of doing this um so here we go this is a
1:11:00
more activist question not sure it is appropriate but how do we rhetorically "own" in in quotation marks our own hidden
1:11:08
disabilities and then can you explain if at all how queer silence can be a tool for community building
1:11:20
um this is Logan uh thank you both to the the first question about owning
1:11:26
invisible disabilities um I'm not sure I have
1:11:31
a great answer for that in part because the answer is going to be so contingent on like when you are where you are who
1:11:40
you're around um why you you want it to be evident that
1:11:46
you're owning it in the first place um but I think I think perhaps the
1:11:51
question I would I would kind of follow up your question with is well who are
1:11:58
you owning the disability for um because
1:12:03
I think often the the felt compulsion or impulse to to own a part of your
1:12:10
marginalized identity um comes from this sense of being ostracized from your own community where
1:12:17
you feel like other people are owning it better than you or that somehow you know you are not politically oriented to
1:12:24
yourself in a way that you want others to perceive you as um and I I would say that that then
1:12:32
becomes an issue of about the community failing you not you failing your community
1:12:38
um and then to the second question which is about if I'm remembering correctly is
1:12:43
about how queer silence can be used toward community building so
1:12:49
um I think that this is a great time for me to advertise my book
1:12:56
um because the pretty much after this chapter which is uh what comes pretty
1:13:02
early on in the book um the rest of the book is really devoted to this question of community and what does community look like with
1:13:09
absence when people either aren't there or can't be seen etc um and and the brief version of what I
1:13:16
argue is it occurs in ways that are similarly um subtle that seemingly insignificant
1:13:22
fleeting I talk a lot about how neurodivergence and neuroqueerness can
1:13:28
Inspire forms of intimacy that don't often register as intimacy to
1:13:35
non-disabled people they can include things like glances across the room they can include things like rubbed elbows
1:13:42
they can include things like um you know having a snack together or taking a shower they can include little
1:13:49
dance parties right they can include just like crying in the same room together it's like these moments of
1:13:57
um like miniature togetherness um that can ultimately be can make all
1:14:04
the difference between loneliness and to and and and community
1:14:10
um and so that's yeah that's the that's the short version
1:14:16
so thank you Logan uh this is Remi again so um I think maybe we can conclude with
1:14:22
the whole rush of thank yous um so if if we might just uh clap or
1:14:28
twinkle fingers um I think Logan um I also just want to offer a quick
1:14:35
thanks to Evan Hoye Sarah Torch Eric Mancini uh Kristen Waterbury Jessica
1:14:40
Hill Riggs um for those who are on Zoom it might not have been evident but there were some some real tech issues going on
1:14:46
and they were all like immediately crowdsourcing so thank you all um and once more thank you Logan uh
1:14:52
Kristen is saving the questions from the Q&A on Zoom that we didn't get a chance
1:14:58
for so for folks on Zoom please know that Logan will have um your your questions and thoughts
1:15:05
um so thanks everyone stay safe [Logan: thank you all]