num_pages: 296
description: Championing the liberatory potential of silence to address the fraught disability politics of queerness In queer culture silence has been equated with voicelessness complicity and even death. Queer Silence insists however that silence can be a generative and empowering mode of survival. Triangulating insights from queer studies disability studies and rhetorical studies J. Logan Smilges explores what silence can mean for people whose bodyminds signify more powerfully than their words. Queer Silence begins by historicizing silences negative reputation beginning with the ways homophile activists rejected medical models pathologizing homosexuality as a disability resulting in the silencing of disability itself. This silencing was redoubled by HIV/AIDS activisms demand for out loud and proud rhetorical activities that saw silence as capitulation. Reading a range of cultural artifacts whose relative silence has failed to attract queer attachment from anonymous profiles on Grindr to ex-gays to belated gender transitions to disability performance art Smilges argues for silences critical role in serving the needs of queers who are never named as such. Queer Silence urges queer activists and queer studies scholars to reconcile with their own ableism by acknowledging the liberatory potential of silence a mode of engagement that disattached queers use every day for resistance sociality and survival. Cover alt Background detail of a painting on canvas shows a partial view of the upper body and face of a figure bearded and naked; title in painted script.
language: English
title: Queer Silence: On Disability and Rhetorical Absence
publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press