Queer Typographies (2026)
Queer Typographies is a forthcoming book that explores these crucial questions—how do queer acts of reading and writing transform language? How can ongoing, intersectional movements towards liberation change how we teach, learn, and unlearn design? And, as we prepare to become future queer ancestors, how do we shape language now for our future kin on the horizon?
The book contains a three-part thesis—
1—Typography and power are intimately entangled;
2—Queer typographies emerge from liberated language;
3—The future of typography is liberated, plural, and queer.
I am currently researching, writing, and editing Queer Typographies, to be published by Bikini Books in Fall 2026.
I’m posting early drafts of some of the writing here.
The guiding principle of the book’s thesis originates in the essay What is queer typography?
(2021): that different politics, contexts, and conditions under oppression produce a spectrum of needs and logics for shaping language and understanding. These are expressed through queer acts of reading and writing that provide varying degrees of access, visibility, and meaning through their designs. LGBTQIA+ archives are crucial for understanding these queer typographies, because they expose us to rich evidence of different legibilities in particular political contexts, through non-linear time travel.
Archival research is being used throughout the project to directly challenge traditional paradigms in design, including: that design history should only be taught according to dominant logics of success, through the celebration of exceptional individuals along a linear timeline of heteropatriarchal genius and talent, and that idealized legibility and perfect, refined typography is possible.
Rather, by engaging with intersectional queer histories in non-linear ways, we can hold specific moments in movements towards Black, brown, indigenous, SWANA, trans, immigrant, and disability justices together in time and space, and see how queer design and multiple typographies and legibilities emerge from liberated language. What was being said? What did that language look like? How and why was it produced in that way? We can learn from these approaches to messy reading
by considering specific examples of speaking up, speaking out, resistance, refusal, mutation, and experimentation with wayward language; that is, through the formal shaping of language that is disregarded, prohibited, disparaged, or illegitimate, and the logics of the accompanying design decisions that are used to spread the word.
We can use these other approaches to make direct connections between the early queer typographies of the gay and trans liberation movements to the work of queer artists and designers today. This work is a trajectory of intention and meaning that moves with great energy and urgency across time and space to connect authorship (language) »» to action (design) »» to publishing (circulation) »» to survival (liberation).
Queer typographies emerge from liberated language because liberated language spreads urgently under crisis conditions when survival networks are needed most. And as we think about what it means to become future queer ancestors, we must consider our future kin. What messages are we sending out now, to reach them on the horizon? Other legibilities—queer acts of reading, writing, typing, drawing, and speaking sent into the future—show us how. They show us that the future of typography is liberated, plural, and queer.
