Addendum: Dirty words

This is Part One in a three-part exploration of (en/de-)coding “dirty words”: sex (work), queerness, promisquity, transgression, the intersection thereof—and a way of processing and laying bare the contradictions of attempting to live a transparent life, particularly within the cadre of the digital. Initiated as an inquiry into the codes queer people use to make themselves il/legible (depending on who’s listening), it grew into an interrogation of the very systems that demand visibility and a call for us to write our own poem codes^[1] in response.

In The Queer Art of Failure, Jack Halberstam wonders: “Can we find feminist frameworks capable of recognizing the political project articulated in the form of refusal?”^[2] This is not a dissertation. This is not a manifesto. This is a radical gesture^[3], arising from a politics of this very refusal.

Primarily, this is a radical gesture against transparency. For queer people, visibility and inclusion has long been exalted as political ends—as the ultimate goal toward which to strive. In other words, “[t]o publicly count as something, it must first be possible to be understood and seen as such.”^[4] This visibility often entails a capitulation to the mores and norms of a prevailing status quo, the implicit sedimentation of a set of values enshrined in a politics of respectability. Or, conversely, this visibility comes as a mockery and a punishment at the expense of those who cannot pass, who do not conform, who transgress, who refuse. Here, I want to I argue in favour of untranslatability, unknowability.

I first encountered the notion of refusal in the Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang text “R Words: Refusing Research”, in which the postcolonial scholars argue for “a refusal to do research, or a refusal within research”^[5], as a process by which to makes legible and impairs the processes of settler colonial knowledge. This brought me to the Feminist Data Manifest-no, “a declaration of refusal and commitment” that “refuses harmful data regimes and commits to new data futures”^[6].

After Édouard Glissand, this is a call for a “right to opacity”^[7], imagined here as the urgency to engage with (my) data on my own terms, rather than on those of the state, or a platform. Transparency is often part and parcel of the platformised condition, ergo life under platform capitalism. Our lives are mediated by frictionless interfaces, often the only means through which we engage with technologies. The interface is a deliberate icontologising metaphor, implying clarity and immediacy, reducing “digital and social praxis to visual representations on a transparent plane”^[8]. Yet it is this precise affordance of the interface that serves as an obfuscation of its underpinning mechanisms and complex geological, material, social, political, cultural histories—and this is done by design. Who is compelled to be transparent? Who is allowed to be inscrutable?

Beyond opacity, I call for promiscuous ways of knowing and of being in/with the world. Promiscuity, not just concerning sex, but “new ideas and new ways of doing things”.^[9] Promiscuity as a synonym for creativity, as a radical gesture towards adventurousness.