This event is a virtual celebration for J. Logan Smilges’s firstborn book, Queer Silence: On Disability and Rhetorical Absence.
Your favorite trans, disabled professor is having their first book baby, and you’re invited! While Queer Silence is a rather melancholy book about the ableism that is trafficked through silence in the field of queer studies, this event is designed with joyful noise and accessibility in mind. At this book shower/launch, attendants can expect to learn and laugh with a reading from Queer Silence, a discussion between Smilges and Cy and Professor Jillian Weise, a moderated Q&A, and a party game with the winner taking home a signed copy of Queer Silence.
American Sign Language and Communication Access Realtime Translation services will be provided.
About the Book
Cover of the book Queer Silence: On Disability and Rhetorical Absence” by J. Logan Smilges. There is a partial image of a purple, shirtless, bearded person with one hand over their chest. The title of the book and name of the author are centered on the page in white lettering.
Queer Silence: On Disability and Rhetorical Absence
While silence is often linked to voicelessness, complicity, and even death in queer culture, Queer Silence insists 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.
Author Bio
J. Logan Smilges. Headshot of Logan, a white person with a shaved head, seated and reclining to the right while looking toward the camera. They are wearing a purple top with a large bow in the center.
J. Logan Smilges is an assistant professor of English Language & Literatures at the University of British Columbia. Led by commitments to transfeminism and disability justice, they are a trans and disabled scholar whose research triangulates queer & trans disability studies, rhetorical studies, and the history of medicine. In addition to their book, Smilges’s writing can be found or is forthcoming in Transgender Studies Quarterly, Disability Studies Quarterly, College Composition & Communication, Porn Studies, Rhetoric Review, Peitho, and elsewhere.
Moderator Bio
The Cyborg Jillian Weise. Credit to The Workmans.
The Cyborg Jillian Weise is a poet and disability rights activist. Cy’s essays on cyborg identity appear in the NYT, Granta and WIRED. Her books include The Amputee’s Guide to Sex (2007), The Colony (2010), The Book of Goodbyes (2013), Cyborg Detective (2019) and Give It to Alfie Tonight (2020). Cy directed and produced A Kim Deal Party, a twenty-minute video play, which was screened at Public Space One in Iowa City. Cy has two books with Ecco coming out soon: Common Cyborg (memoir) and Pills & Jacksonvilles (poems). This is her first and last attendance at a baby shower.
