What is queer typography? (2021)
“What is queer typography?” was written as a talk that I was invited to deliver at the Type Drives Communities Conference, hosted by the Type Directors Club. I researched and wrote the talk as an investigation into the roles of illegibility, agitation, and failure in typography, with the title’s alluring question guiding an inquiry into larger practices of “unlearning” in art and design education. I later published the text in a zine that I designed and printed at Queer.Archive.Work, in Providence, RI. I distributed the edition through the mail during the COVID-19 pandemic, and made scans of the zine available online. This piece of writing and the ideas explored here are one of my most referenced works. The entire zine was translated into Korean and re-published by In-ah Shin. The essay has been re-published by GenderFail Press in Anthology of Queer Typography Vol. 1 and also appears in Pouya Ahmadi’s Amalgam 4. An interview with me about the zine was published in PRINT Magazine in August 2021.
“If this talk answers anything about the question “what is queer typography?” I hope it’s this—that we need to stay with queer as an action, actively engaging with the past and the future as a verb, as Nat says. As in: queer acts of disrupting, interrupting, agitating, and surviving against normative logics of success. I propose that we turn away from rainbow style and gender metaphors, towards queer acts of doing. From queer type to queer typing. Queer acts of reading and writing. Performative, non-conforming acts that deviate from the expected; acts that focus on the people and the communities where good trouble emerges. Acts that center stories about performing deviant acts of design in the face of conformity.
Let’s search the archives and all of the spaces in-between the superhighways of capital, to find the activism in the queer lives of Octavia St. Laurent and Marsha P. Johnson and Angie Xtravaganza and David Wojnarowicz, as well as the countless forgotten artists and activists and others whose names we don’t know. Let’s search for the queer acts that lead to very specific kinds of decisions, whether it be how to sign your name, or how to start a movement.”
“What is queer typography?” (2021 version) →