Led by commitments to transfeminism and disability justice, J. Logan Smilges writes and teaches at the nexus of queer/trans disability studies, the history of medicine, and rhetorical studies. Their first book, Queer Silence: On Disability and Rhetorical Absence (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), attends to the interanimating absences of disability and silence from the field of queer studies. It theorizes the resistance efforts of minoritarian queer subjects who draw on silence to build community, navigate hostile environments, and resistant institutional and state-sponsored violence. Their second book, Crip Negativity (University of Minnesota Press, 2023), levels a critique of the category of disability and liberal disability politics, asking what horizons might exist for the liberation of disabled people beyond access and inclusion. Currently, they are working on a third book-length project that maps a cultural and rhetorical history of mental disability and transgender as contingent medical and social categories in the United States.

Peer-Reviewed Articles:

“Neurotrans: Thorazine, HIV, and Marsha P.” Transgender Studies Quarterly. Vol. 10, no. 1, 2022. (Forthcoming)

“Choosing Disability: Bug Chasing and Gift Giving in Gay Pornography.” with Ryan Thorneycroft, Porn Studies, 2022.

“Neuroqueer Literacy; or, Against Able-Reading.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 73, no. 1, 2021.

“Bad Listeners.” Peitho, vol. 23, no. 1, 2020.

“Trauma Sex: A Queercrip Erotic.” Disability Studies Quarterly, vol. 41, no. 2, 2020.

“White Squares to Black Boxes: Grindr, Queerness, Rhetorical Silence.” Rhetoric Review, vol. 38, no. 1, 2019.

“‘It’s not gay, nor bad, it’s SSAD:’ Queerness and Masquerade.” Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, vol. 7, no. 3, 2018. \

Book Chapters:

“The Trans Depressive.” A Mad Turn: Anti-methods of Mad Studies. Autonomous Press, 2022. (Forthcoming)

“Pathological Desire, Perverse Erotics, and Paraphiliac Entelechies.” Routledge Handbook of Queer Rhetoric. Routledge, 2022.

Public Scholarship:

“Web Access.” Curve Magazine, Oct. 2021.

“Pride Feelings.” Disability Visibility Project, Jul. 5, 2021.

“Without Mercy There is Only Mourning.” Answering the Call: Exploring Scholar-Activism at TWU and Beyond, 2021. Podcast.

“On Being a Remarkable Trans.” TSQ*Now, Dec. 17, 2020.