Dialogue/ is about loving: opening remarks from premiere at Lewis and Clark College 2026 Gender Studies Symposium

I want to start by thanking Lewis and Clark, not only for hosting me here at this conference, but also for the work everyone - student organizers, staff, presenters, and the university has put into ensuring that the sharing of gender scholarship continues.

I want to thank you all for being here. It really does mean a lot to me that you took the time out of your day to share this intimate moment with me.

Thank you to the University of Washington Gender Studies department for always supporting my interests, to the Mellon Foundation, whose funding transformed the scope of this project,

Thank you to my project mentor, Kemi Adeyemi, to my collaborators, Daniella and Kamari,

And last, thank you to all of the people captured in this piece,

who may be unaware of the effect their looks have had on my thinking,

all of the people who have shared the looks, fleeting and fixed,

that have been compiled into the piece we are about to watch.

Dialogue/ comes out of a year of reflection.

A year, where, for the first time, I gave myself permission to explore my body as both an archive of research and a site that provokes and engages looking.

By digging through the looks I have shared, I attempt here to present a visual theory that artistically envisions new ways of understanding looking as an element of queer adolescence.

I meaningfully came out to my parents for the first time last month.

For me, this decision was logistical - my family couldn't see pictures of me from the past year because, in most of them, I am wearing fake breasts.

It was not a grand reveal of queerness, no novel information provided; in opposition, growing up in a metronormative progressive city, my queerness has always been an expected development.

Instead of acting as a reveal, this act was my first attempt to participate meaningfully in a taxonomical process that scares me,

a process that has given so many queer sisters solace,

a process that I always feared would somehow strip my autonomy as a queer subject to self-define.

Dialogue/ is about those who fail to situate themselves within LGBT taxonomies.

Dialogue/ is about the girl faggots, the trannies, the gender troublemakers, the gender fucked girls:

those who have to revert to more traditional visual modes to understand their bodies at all,

and armor them,

because their queernesses are incapable of being revealed, and in that, incapable of being protected by the concealment/visualization strategies of neoliberal LGBTism.

Dialogue/ is about those who are trapped in a femininity often derided as unnatural or additive,

those who must find invision rituals to protect their queer traditions beyond prescribed strategies.

I want to call this screening a premiere, but for me, this is the second screening.

The first was for one person, and their reaction has fueled a need to steer how people watch this work. Watching the film made them sad.

I know their more intimate knowledge of my life and body informed this sadness, but still, its residue bothered me, and I turned to them and said something along the lines of:

‘How the hell is this film sad? This film is not supposed to be sad! There are so many films about being trans and being sad, and this can't be another one.’

This film is not about being sad or, as Malitino may put it, feeling bad.

This film is about transness, so, of course, it contains bad feelings.

To exclude these feelings entirely would be dishonest.

More radically than feeling bad, however,

this film aims to capture a relationship that gives the body the capacity to feel at all,

and within that capacity, the capacity to feel good.

Because when transness feels good, feels right, it feels really fucking good.

(I am stealing from Kemi Adeyemi's book “Feels Right” here)

It is this capacity to feel, that capacity to feel together within yourself, to touch yourself,

that I am coming to understand as loving.

Dialogue/ is a product of loving,

a love of the self so queer that it becomes a love of someone else,

someone who does not exist, never will, never should, someone who can only be somebody else,

an intimate stranger, between someplaces, someones,

dreams, and their dreamers.

With love, this is Dialogue/