Queer Silence by J. Logan Smilges

Author:J. Logan Smilges [Smilges, J. Logan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC029000 SOCIAL SCIENCE / People with Disabilities, SOC064020 SOCIAL SCIENCE / LGBTQ+ Studies / Transgender Studies, SOC032000 SOCIAL SCIENCE / Gender Studies
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Published: 2022-10-25T00:00:00+00:00

Identifying Silence

To combat this erasure, I offer a theory of trans onto-phenomenology that seeks to excavate forms of gender nonconformance that do not reach the level of “the authentic” or “whole.” That is, I offer a counterresponse to transnaturalism that draws on the model of queer silence I describe throughout this book. Silence here is not to be taken as emptiness but as a signifying absence that often coexists with other forms of meaning-making. In the context of trans experience, silence refers not only to the absences of trans people and experiences from archives and public memory but also to the subtleties of gender variance, the ways that nonconforming gender expressions can fly under or around the radar of gender identification.48 While transnaturalism is organized around a confessional logic, where subjects must align themselves with a particular category (i.e., “I am transgender”), trans silence directs us to alternative modes of being and strategies of relating. Trans silence is a way to conceive of, dig up, unpack, and celebrate gender nonconformance without relying on neoliberal identity politics. For trans elders, silence is particularly important as it makes space for models of gender development that are neither linear nor predictable. Silence, as opposed to identitarian disclosure, remains open to the unbidden, resisting stasis in favor of motion.

What I mean by motion is something similar to how Hil Malatino describes “trans lives in interregnum,” as “a kind of nowness that shuttles transversally between different imaginaries of pasts and futures and remains malleable and differentially molded by these imaginaries.”49 For Malatino, the interregnum widens the scope of trans temporality to include not only the measured benchmarks of a biomedicalized transition but also those moments in between, outside of, and even in tension with those benchmarks. Even though biomedical markers are incredibly important to some trans people, including many trans elders, transnaturalism stages these markers linearly, as a trajectory from a person’s “wrong” body at birth to their “correct” biomedicalized one. Malatino warns that this kind of “teleological account of transition . . . is radically inadequate” because “it doesn’t begin to dignify the complexities of trans experiences.”50 These complexities include the circumstances faced by many trans elders, such as those who do not want to medically transition, who choose to medically transition after their plasticity has presumedly expired, or who may have attempted to transition earlier in life but were never perceived as plastic enough to warrant biomedicalized intervention. Each of these groups reveal the racialized exclusivity of “trans” as a liberal subject category, especially as it is defined and cemented by transnaturalism.

The elders who do not or cannot medically transition undergo a process of racialization that exposes a transnormative hierarchy of whiteness. Even among those elders who are white, who may have once been ideal trans children brimming with white plasticity, their advanced age pushes them into an ageist fungibility. Much like how Mia Fischer argues that Chelsea Manning’s “inability to ‘properly’ embody and perform hetero- and homonormativity rendered her as the alien

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