Bodies in Dialogue: Arriving at Thresholds of Dialogic Connections

Stumbling to the Threshold: The Dialogic Perspective

As part of my daily morning ritual, I don a number of artifacts: jewelry with particular significance in terms of my queer identity. One is a silver bracelet, made up of rectangular linked blocks in red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and purple—a rainbow, emblematic of the queer community. I find it tasteful; understated and unassuming in that it seems to accent my wrist perfectly. The size is just right, and it feels comfortable, like a watch band with the perfect amount of looseness to avoid restricting my movement. My other token is a simple silver ring with five fake gemstones in red, orange, yellow, green, and blue embedded into the top, with a divot where a purple gem used to rest—I lost the tiny purple bead when it became dislodged after I dropped the ring on an unforgivingly hard floor. Every day, I slide the ring onto my left ring finger, and it takes its place in the space traditionally reserved for the sign of my belonging to someone else. The ring was meant to symbolize my inability to marry someone of the same sex, a small act of resistance on my part. Today, it might signify something else entirely—perhaps the very ability to join myself with another in a state-sanctioned legal union. ¹ I always wonder whether this same meaning is generated for others; do people with an eye for these details connect the signifier and signified together the same way I do? I purchased both of these artifacts—the ring and the bracelet—some time ago in an attempt to make my sexuality more “visible.” I affectionately refer to them as my stigma symbols, as they were bought with the intent of “drawing attention to a debasing identity discrepancy” (Goffman, 1986, p. 44). Put simply, I wanted a way to represent my queerness so as to avoid being mistaken as straight. For a while, I was uncertain as to whether they were effective in accomplishing my goals, until one day, I found myself in precisely the kind of situation I had hoped my stigma symbols would invite.

On an ordinary afternoon—a Wednesday, likely, as ordinary as they come—I find myself reviewing notes for an upcoming lecture I was invited to give, a brief overview of queer theory for a gender and communication class. As the last few latecomers trickle in and take their seats, the instructor introduces me to the class and I assume my position on the stage—in this case, a literal platform in the front of the room raised about four inches. I usually avoid positioning myself on such a pedestal with my own students, but in this moment, I feel confined to the space. As a group of unfamiliar faces take me in, I proceed to discuss the historical progression of the homophile movement(s) in the United States and the evolution of the modern-day gay rights movement. My lecture concludes smoothly enough, and I brazenly praise myself for a job done passably. As I move to exit the room, one of the students makes eye contact with me and I see her lips mouth something. I assume she has addressed me, but in my preoccupation with my recent performance, I failed to comprehend her message. I pause my departure and ask her to repeat what she just said with a hushed “Sorry?” after which she points to my ring—my parody of a wedding band—and asks me “Are you married?”

The question puzzles me, as I hoped the answer was self-evident. I consider how she must have seen me as I addressed her class from the front of the room. Is my teacher persona more masculine than I thought? Do I comply with the cultural expectations of masculinity enough for her to assume my ability to marry a woman? In my attempt to perform credibly, had I subconsciously accessed scripts of masculinity such that she presumed I was straight? It was not legal for gay persons to marry where I live, and she must have known this. But why would she, if she is unaffected by the legal restrictions on same-sex marriage? And as soon as I think this thought, I berate myself for making the same assumption about her identity that I assume she has made of mine. Perhaps I am mistaken, and she inquired into my marital status out of bewilderment—perhaps my queerness was apparent, and the ring caught her by surprise. But what meaning do I make of this bewilderment? Much as I wish to challenge the notion of compulsory heterosexuality, I am offended by her surprise at my presumed married state. ² Yet once again, I have attributed to her a standpoint she might not have.

My inner monologue ceases after a few seconds that seem more like hours. I feel hot and notice the tingle in my cheeks that tells me my face is flushed, my body’s characteristic betrayal of my confidence in stressful situations. I wish I could inquire as to why this student—now staring up at me wide-eyed anticipating my response—asked the question she did. As my consciousness projects outward once again, I sense the instructor’s voice in the background and the shuffling of papers and technology, and I become aware of my role in distracting this student from the goings-on in her class. Wishing for more time and recognizing the futility of that wish, all I manage to offer her in way of an explanation is a cumbersome “no, no . . . I wear this for, uh, the gay stuff.” With one last flourish of the rainbow-studded ring and the flash of an apologetic smile, I slump out of the room to mull over what just happened.

* * *

As a place where identities are constructed and shared, dialogue is one such interpersonal context ripe with potential to transform our understandings of self and other (Laing, 1969). Based on Buber’s (1958) notion of the I–Thou relationship, dialogic meetings call us to present ourselves wholly and honestly—and they demand that we receive the Other on the same terms. Dialogue represents more than a call to witness the Other; it is a genuine experience, a meeting that holds us accountable to be engaged, committed, and to reciprocate the moments of vulnerability that Others share with us (Burbules, 1993). According to J. Stewart and Zediker (2000), dialogue involves moments of “holding my own ground” while “letting the Other to happen to me” (p. 231). In those moments, we are called upon to answer for ourselves and attest to Others. Dialogism therefore posits that any capacity to have consciousness about ourselves necessitates Otherness, as our identities have meaning only in relation to Others (Holquist, 1990). As Kaplan (1969) notes, quite simply, “through the Thou a man [sic] becomes an I” (p. 99). Therefore, dialogue cannot be created as one would orchestrate a symphony. Instead, we must position ourselves in constant states of anticipation, attuned to our atmospheres, moving about our social worlds ever vigilant of what K. Stewart (2007) calls the “varied, surging capacities to affect and to be affected that give everyday life the quality of a continual motion of relations” (p. 2).

Academic approaches to the practices of dialogue are many and varied. Pearce and Pearce (2000), for instance, offer a six-pronged approach to understanding dialogue:

Like many scholars, Pearce and Pearce favor a perceptual and discursive approach to dialogue, one that involves an open mind and open communication. Their invitational approach to dialogue—manifested in the ability to respond and extend invitations to engage in dialogue—is echoed by others. Gurevitch (1990), for instance, argues that dialogue inherently involves an ethical obligation to speak, listen, and respond. These ethical obligations are, for Gurevitch, key to achieving successful and edifying dialogue, a sentiment that emerges in critical approaches to dialogue as well. The agonistic approach to dialogue articulated by Ganesh and Zoller (2012) focuses on “the potential for subverting power relations” that might reside within dialogic communication (p. 77). Such critical considerations of dialogue enable a recognition of “the synchronicity of conflict and dialogue,” thereby interrogating the ways that dialogic communication might be as much of a risk as it is a reward (p. 86).

Many of these perspectives seem to favor an almost procedural approach to dialogue, an intentionality that directs our actions while engaging with an Other. To follow Pearce and Pearce (2000), for example, one might suspect that the conditions for dialogue can be fostered purposefully, and the dialogic tension maintained through practice and skill. Surely, these situations occur with some frequency—scholars and practitioners of dialogue and deliberation strive to create such moments by teaching and reinforcing those skills (see Beauvais & Baechtiger, 2016; Diaz & Gilchrist, 2010). Without undermining the importance of such work, I want to suggest that there are innumerable times when everyday life “throws together” a moment of sorts, where we get caught up in the happening and find ourselves faced with a call to respond to an Other (see K. Stewart, 2007). In those situations, preparing for dialogue is nearly impossible. Instead, when dialogic thresholds present themselves haphazardly, perhaps the best we can do is stumble up to them.

My own stumbling to this particular threshold was anything but skillful. Reflecting on that moment, I remember no preparation. I was sporting my “stigma symbols,” but they seemed almost mandatory when delivering a lesson on queer theory. Any purpose I might have had in trying to embody my queer identity was forgotten as I exited the room. So when a student chose to engage with me in a conversation about the very identity I was (albeit unconsciously) trying to project, I approached that threshold for dialogue rather clumsily—and stumbled right back from it. Her question might have been a simple inquiry, but it could also be understood as an invitation to dialogue, an opportunity for us to engage in a “meeting of the souls,” to work at mutual understanding. And that invitation, though extended discursively, was (I suspect) inspired by the embodiment of my identity. Assisted by material signifiers, my body performed my queerness and facilitated her inquiry. We failed to fully realize our dialogic potential. Yet we arrived at a threshold, a moment of dialogic possibility, through a meeting of our bodies. My body issued a call, and hers responded.

Dialogue has been richly theorized and studied in the social sciences. Underrepresented in the ongoing conversation about dialogue, however, is the way in which we place ourselves in states of dialogic anticipation through our bodies. Within commonly agreed upon frameworks of dialogue that call for commitments to speak and listen, the execution of those obligations privileges verbal discourse at the expense of acknowledging the ways in which our bodies literally and figuratively “orientate” us toward others. “To be orientated,” notes Ahmed (2006) notes, “is also to be turned toward certain objects, those that help us find our way” (p. 1). Such orientations refer to how “bodies take shape through tending toward objects that are reachable, that are available within the bodily horizon” (p. 2). Bodies talk, but they also carry us through the world communicating in deeply embodied ways. Bodies in concert with one another become sites of meaning-making, performative renditions of identities portrayed and re-made in that portrayal. Our bodies also reflect the materialization of identities within highly regulatory systems of norms that produce the very identities they regulate and constrain (Butler, 1993). Much is at stake in placing bodies in dialogue with one another, for as Holquist (1990) notes, “one body’s motion . . . has meaning only in dialogue with another body” (pp. 20-21). This sense of embodied dialogue is what I wish to evoke in the remainder of this essay. I hope to illustrate the potential for bodies to orientate us toward one another in anticipation of genuine dialogical meetings.

Taken by Surprise: Dialogic Failures

Agreeing to participate in a reading group sounded like a good idea when it was pitched to me, but as I sit in a circle with a group of strangers—save for my friends Michelle and Lee—I remind myself to politely decline future invitations such as this. Slouched in a chair that looks deceivingly comfortable, shivering from a chill that seems to permeate the building, I take a sip of my once-hot coffee wishing I could excuse myself for a few seconds to microwave it. A scan of the room indicates the absence of a microwave, and I place my cup of coffee on the ground admitting defeat. I pull my jacket tight and cross my arms around my chest in an attempt to keep some of the warmth in, silently wishing for the university to turn on the blessed heat.

There is a debate going on between a few people I do not know. I only vaguely perceive the upright postures and animated voices of the participants; the conversation has devolved from the reading, and I did not have the energy or interest to attempt to redirect our trajectory. I glance at Lee, who is typing furiously on her keyboard—she is clearly working on something with a pending deadline, and I wonder when she exited the conversation. Michelle sits across the circle from me, eyes glazed over with a mist that suggests her mind is elsewhere. I mentally note the need to ask them how we got roped into this, and begin to pick at the nail polish on my fingernails to pass the remaining time.

I occasionally paint my fingernails as a way of representing my sexuality more vividly than my stigma symbols allow. There is something about the (often) bright pink polish that signifies to others that I am of the “homo” sexuality. This signifier of femininity on my otherwise male-appearing body resists the “given regime of sexuality that seeks to regulate sexual experience” through the “production of the discrete and binary categorization of sex” (Butler, 1990, p. 32). A cross of the feminine and the masculine, painting my nails is a kind of subversive repetition of gender norms that questions the regulatory practices of sexual identity, and perhaps more than anything else embodies an easy way to represent my counter-heterosexuality. Today, my nails also provide me with a distraction, and I proceed to pick away at the flamingo-pink lacquer that covers them.

Through my clouded thoughts, I recognize someone invoking the work of W. E. B. du Bois as his notion of the double consciousness is bandied about. I am pulled from my reverie to see that a woman sitting three chairs to my left is apparently frustrated; she is leaning forward and gesturing emphatically toward a man across the circle from her who looks resolute in his stubbornness. His brows are furrowed and his arms are crossed, and he sits rigidly in his chair as she berates him for apparently misunderstanding some collective experience of marginalization. This is perhaps the most interesting the reading group has been today, so I straighten up in my chair some more to watch the ensuing conversation.

Without warning, the woman turns to me, her eyes darting from my eyes to my hands and back again. She extends a hand to me, palm up, singling me out from the rest of our circle, and says “I mean, you get it, right? Double consciousness? People who are not stigmatized just don’t get it, but you do.” I feel my face flush as blood rushes to my cheeks. The cold I had previously tried to shake off is replaced by a quickly growing warmth, a hotness that causes me to sweat. Have I just been called on to answer for my marginalized position? I am astonished, in no small part because I am hesitant to claim a standpoint of marginality akin to that occupied by racial minorities. Yes, I understand—but do I understand this? My white male body enables me to move about the world largely uncontested, and I actively mark myself—Other myself—to eschew what ascribed privilege I can. I queered my body and put it on display to prove a point, but now that I am being called to answer for that performance, I feel both hesitant and resistant. My hands are clammy as I struggle and fail to muster an appropriate response, ultimately offering a meager nod of approval.

My eyes flutter to Lee and Michelle, both of whom are staring at me with wide, disbelieving eyes. My interrogator, sensing the palpable discomfort that has permeated the circle, scans the group as well. As she takes in the bewildered faces of our peers, she seems to shrink in her chair a little, collapsing like a deflated balloon. Then, in an attempt to justify her brazen inquisition, she glances at my fingernails—their pink paint having betrayed her certitude—and says “I’m sorry. I mean, you’re clearly out. I just assumed you would be willing to talk about it.” I am hit by a wave of guilt as her words pummel me with their implications. I should be willing; had I not painted my nails to facilitate moments like this? And yet I sat idle, astounded, unable to articulate through words what I wanted my body to so clearly convey. A sense of remorse takes root in my chest as I ponder what harm I have done to my peer, who took a leap of faith in counting on my support only to plummet when I did not catch her. I was taken aback, caught off-guard by her bold call to arms, but I wonder what new hesitancy I have inspired in my failure to respond.

* * *

Our bodies are often the instigators—and targets—of questions of cultural intelligibility. Although cultural discourses create the social frames that render persons understandable, knowable, or not, bodies bear the burdens of navigating social interactions where we are cast as discernible or abject. Schechner (2013) notes that “performances mark identities, bend time, reshape and adorn the body, and tell stories” (p. 28). Through the lens of dialogue, one might strive for a genuine or consummatory relation with an Other. Our bodies, however, often signal to Others whether we are invested in that dialogic engagement—and our bodies are “read” by Others to gauge whether they wish to engage with us in return. In a sense, the bodying-forth of our identities constitutes a kind of prediscursive message that serves as an interactional catalyst or barrier to engaging in dialogue with an Other. When marginalized, subjugated, or otherwise abject persons arrive at the threshold of dialogic engagement, it is often their embodied identities that inspire Others to reject that invitation, or to impose cultural frameworks that at best misunderstand those identities, and at worst incite violence.

Given these constraints, it might seem like dialogic failure is a near inevitability. Butler (2015) argues that often, “the ‘matrix of relations’ that forms the subject is not an integrated and harmonious network, but a field of potential disharmony” (p. 9). Such disharmony should be expected considering our relations with Others are always radically situated, contextual, and open to influence from innumerable factors. As a result, our meetings with Others are perhaps ill-fated and more often characterized by disorientation, what Ahmed (2006) describes as “bodily experiences that throw the world up, or throw the body from its ground” (p. 157). Any number of social forces can throw us into such disarray. In the interest of fostering dialogic connection, one disorienting experience is being faced with a call to answer for ourselves under terms we are unable—or refuse—to accept.

Navigating the ethical precipices of dialogic communication can be quite arduous. Butler (2015) notes the difficulty of those forms of relationality that make (un)ethical demands of us, when an “obligation impinges upon me, and the response relies on my capacity to affirm this having been acted on, formed into one who can respond to this or that call” (p. 11). Being called upon to stand in for a “token” representative of a marginalized community, for example, creates a particular ethical dilemma that circumvents the commitments of dialogue. Although one might wish to believe such addresses are made in the spirit of advocacy, understanding, or fostering empathy, they nonetheless make an object of the Other, subjecting them to the kind of scrutiny and “utilization” of the subject Buber (1958) discourages. In effect, some relational engagements invoke those cultural frames of intelligibility that render bodies abject and refuse the very terms of dialogic engagement they purport to uphold.

Teasing out my own dialogic failure is messy work. My lack of engagement leading up to the moment I was called upon illustrates a noncommittal approach on my part. So many factors impeded my willingness to maintain a state of anticipation for dialogic encounters, and when presented with one, I sat dumbfounded. More than anything, I embodied an absence of the kind of dialogic readiness Buber calls for us to maintain. Given that relational context, how could the interaction with my peer have possibly blossomed into dialogic connection?

Yet there is more to this failure than my own unreadiness. An element of objectification lurked beneath her inquiry, an attempt to “make use” of my identity to accomplish an argumentative win. Just as I was not committed to seeing the “Thou” within her, she readily made an “It” of me. Buber (1958) explains this tendency toward objectification as a relational impulse to “reduce the world to specialised ‘utilisation,’ [sic]” wherein one makes an object of Others for some kind of gain. In such moments, we fail to recognize the Other in unflinchingly holistic and confirmatory ways. Marginalized or “Othered” persons are no strangers to these situations, particularly within the academy where we are frequently called upon to speak for our communities about our assumed shared oppression. Our growing response is to resist this tokenism and the unequitable educational burden that accompanies it. In a similar fashion, I like to think my own dialogic failure here was an act of defiance and resistance. More likely, however, it was a clumsy response to a surprise instance of relational objectification.

Upon first consideration, this failure to inspire or achieve dialogue might be understood in the negative. But should we be compelled to engage with an Other in an attempt at relational consummation when they address us in terms that diminish or reduce our subjecthood to components they can use in some fashion? Should a failure to engage with the Other in such moments, whether deliberately or unintentionally, be understood as a shameful disappointment? On the contrary, failure can be a wildly productive and critically queer endeavor. Halberstam (2011) argues, “Under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world” (pp. 2-3). What I perceived to be my own failure to give an account of myself might well have opened new, more critically constructive social possibilities. Who can know what kind of reflection my questioner might have engaged in following our botched relational meeting? I might have failed her call, but that moment of dialogic failure might have been a site of resistive possibility. What else did I accomplish in refusing (admittedly by accident) to respond and thereby affirm her objectification of my identity? Dialogue is an ephemeral phenomenon, incredibly difficult to foster and even more demanding to maintain. But rather than viewing our moments of dialogic failures as inherent shortcomings, we ought to look for the ways in which they also foster the potential for bodies to resist, reject, or otherwise redefine the terms of their intelligibility.

An Unexpected Meeting: Bodies in Dialogue

Cassie and I stumble into the pub, snaking our ways around the many bodies occupying the space between the door and the scarce seating opportunities. From my vantage point at the front of the pub, I can see two people, a duet, situated on a stage in the back singing along to a song unfamiliar to me. Karaoke was a favorite pass-time for me in a previous life, and the gentle buzzing in my head brought on by the few drinks I consumed over dinner inspire a brief moment of nostalgia. As Cassie and I make our way to the bar, I begin to take in the sights and sounds. The blaring music and singing, the loud hum of many conversations, and the prevalence of well-groomed men embodying the “thin and toned ideal” among gay men remind me that I have left the comfort of my quaint Appalachian town (Hutson, 2010, p. 226). The pub feels alive, the disparate beats somehow drumming to the same rhythm. The atmosphere is charged and feels familiar, comfortable.

Tonight is a night of celebration, though we are celebrating nothing more than our freedom to leave the confines of our small town and spend a night in the city. In preparation for the evening, I dabbled in some cosmetics normally outside of my comfort zone. My eyelids are painted in a bold, dramatic smoky-eye, starting with a midnight black along the lashes and blending to a (white-skinned) nude below my brows. The cosmetic consultant who sold me the products and equipment necessary to pull this off tutored me well; my eyelids are a replica of her handiwork. All night long, I have found myself catching glimpses of my face reflected back at me, and have been repeatedly captivated by my appearance. Occasionally I forget, only to have the reflection of my painted face surprise me. Other times, I deliberately seek that reflection to marvel at the way my eyes are accented, the femininity of my painted face in contrast with the masculinity of my close-cropped facial hair. I underestimate the ways makeup can transform a face.

Cassie and I manage to find seats at a high-top table close to the karaoke stage. There are bottles and glasses abandoned by their previous patrons who I hope have no intentions of reclaiming their perch. As the pub continues to thrive, I take in our surroundings. Occasionally, I lock eyes with someone, sparking a kind of recognition—an identification process at once identifying with and as a gay person (Hutson, 2010). There is a familiarity in these faces, a similarity in the ways we have sculpted, primped, and painted ourselves to be “seen” by our own people. The frames of intelligibility here are different than other places. Here, I sense a recognition of the queerness I so desperately want to convey, instead of a presumed straightness I want to eschew.

Cassie excuses herself to freshen up, and I am shortly joined at the high-top by a man I do not know. He is shorter than me, attractive in the absence of striking features. He appears to me to be very “Midwest,” the way the corn-fed, farm-raised men of my hometown appear. We must seem an interesting pair to the observer: situated across the table from one another, me in a tight-fitting low-cut V-neck sweater and he in a red and white sports jersey and baseball cap. My femininity is exaggerated in the absence of his, his masculinity inflated in the absence of mine. We strike up a casual conversation filled with all the expected small-talk of strangers, lacking any substantive depth. By the way he is slurring his words and swaying in his seat, I assume he has had more to drink than I have. His tipsy demeanor makes me laugh, and I look forward to Cassie’s return and the hilarity their meeting will bring. After a few minutes of our less-than-witty banter, I see his eyes take in the details of my face in finer detail than before. We lock eyes—or at least, I think we do—and I am surprised to hear him ask me if I do drag.

I chuckle out loud, tossing my head back and placing my hand over my heart. It is my characteristic mannerism when laughing and it comes easily to me, though in the context of this unexpected conversational turn I become acutely conscious of how it must appear: feminine, serving as evidence of his supposition. I crack a smile to indicate my genuine bemusement, and respond, “No, I never have. Why would you think that?”

My table-mate looks at me with furrowed brows, a trace of disbelief on his face. “You’re wearing makeup; the only people who wear makeup are drag queens.” In this moment, I recall the many men like him whom I grew up with in my small town of 1,600—simple, not in a stupid way but a linear one, who make causal inferences easily and live in worlds of black and white instead of gray. I am amused at the irony of bumping into someone reminiscent of my past in this city located over thirteen hours away from home. I sit back in my chair and look at my table-mate, really look at him, and notice what appear to be sculpted eyebrows: my opportunity to cross this threshold we have arrived at.

I pose a question to him: “Do you clean your eyebrows? Like, pluck or wax them?” He responds in the affirmative, so I continue.

It’s similar to me wearing mascara, or putting on eye shadow. They’re both ways to modify the face, make it more attractive, or just adjust it to our liking. I like the way I look tonight, and I bet you like the way your eyebrows are done. This makeup stuff is considered feminine, but it doesn’t have to be just for women.

He remains unconvinced, asking me if I truly have never dressed in drag—because the only men who wear makeup must be drag queens. And so we proceed, I by probing him with questions about his own forms of body modification, he by pressing the differences between his sculpting and mine. We dance around the subject for a few minutes as I try to discern the source of disconnect in our perspectives. Why does he struggle to recognize my position, and I his? In the process, he makes increasingly compelling and fervent claims—to the extent that his intoxication allows—and I try to respond in kind, all the while holding what I am sure is a goofy grin on my face at this game we are playing.

Cassie returns from the restroom as my table-mate is discovered by someone I assume to be his friend. He vanishes into the crowd as Cassie takes his place, an inquisitive look on her face that I dismiss with a casual wave of my hand and a look that says “I’ll tell you later.” As I watch my former table-mate weave his way through the crowd, I ponder this encounter we shared. I am unsure what to make of it, but certain of one thing: some kind of meeting occurred.

* * *

The presumption of heterosexuality in today’s culture, manifested in a kind of straight-until-proven-gay mentality, makes it difficult for some queer persons to avoid being misidentified in their daily interactions. This compulsory heterosexuality leads many queer persons to unwittingly “pass” as straight merely by virtue of their moving through a heteronormative world (Butler, 1990). In response to this assumed heterosexuality, many queer persons choose to embody their gender and sexuality so as to disrupt that presumed heterosexual identity. As a queer/gay male subject, I experience the frustration inherent in inadvertently passing as heterosexual. Such passing is inadvertent to the extent that I do not wish to be read as such. Instead, cultural discourses render me intelligible—make me readable and relatable—as a straight, cis-gender male unless I challenge those assumptions. And so I mark my body, enact a kind of counter-gender, embody a male femininity to render myself as queer in a world that wishes to see anything but my queerness (Halberstam, 2013).

How I wish identities were so simple. Instead, the recognition and affirmation of identity is performative. It is not enough for me to simply mark my body as queer. To experience the confirmation I desire, my identity performances require an attuned and responsive interlocutor, an Other sensitized to my identity and its performance. Interacting with such relational partners is a treat indeed—the quick and easy recognition of my queer identity by likeminded or similarly attuned persons always brings a smile to my face and a pleasant warmth to my chest. Far more frequent, however, are situations like the one I recount above, where the intricacies of sex, gender, and sexuality are confused and assumptions are made about my identity contrary to what I wish to present.

I encountered an intricate manifestation of compulsory heterosexuality that night in the pub. Yes, my queer sexuality was indeed seen by this man who brazenly engaged with me about my makeup. But rather than ascribe heterosexuality to me, he insisted on a different cultural script—the assumption that my particular embodiment of gay male femininity necessitated a drag queen identity. His assumption was not harmful (at least I did not perceive it to be), but it was restrictive. His easy interpretation drew upon a cultural myth of sex, gender, and sexuality convergence, an expectation that, in this case, his perception of my nonnormative sexuality meant I also held a rigidly conceived gender identity. This kind of gender policing, rooted in perceptions of my sexuality, illustrates how sex, gender, and sexuality become entangled, confused, enabled, and constrained in everyday interactions.

And though he was resolutely wrong in assuming I do drag (though I have considered it), this person opened a door to engage in a conversation about why he made that assumption, how we embody gender and sexuality, and the differences between gay and straight male body sculpting. Perhaps the alcohol facilitated our meeting; perhaps it inhibited our understanding. But it felt as though we were—as J. Stewart and Zediker (2000) explain—holding our own ground while letting the Other happen to us. Did we achieve a dialogic connection? Maybe, though it was fleeting and fraught with problematic identity assumptions from both of us. Like all interactions, dialogue occurs within cultural constraints that make these assumptions ever-present. More important to my goals here, however, our meeting illustrates how we can come to embody—or rather, to body-forth—moments of dialogic possibility. Although we frequently fail to realize the full potential of these moments, occasionally our bodies act as catalysts to genuine dialogic meetings.

My experiences with queer performativity become attempts to place myself in a state of readiness for such moments of commensurable contact with another. In this sense, I come to embody the anticipation of dialogue. My queer identity, performed on and through my body and its adornments, leads me to thresholds of possibility. As the vignettes illustrate, those moments often catch me by surprise. At times, I feel unable to take the necessary step to see that dialogic potential to fruition. At other times, I simply feel unwilling. On occasion, however, that spark of recognition, that longing for understanding, propels me forward. When that happens, a genuine connection—dialogic, I would argue—sweeps us up, however briefly, in a moment of shared understanding. Regardless of the outcome of such thresholds of possibility, however, I wish to underscore the ways in which our bodies carry us to these tipping points. In ways that language often fails, it is our sensing body, attuned to the intensities generated by those around us, that leads us to those moments brimming with potential.

Kruks (2001) argues that by privileging the spoken word in the process of orientating ourselves to others, the ways in which “sentient, affective, and emotional experiences come to be a vital constituent of cognition, judgment, and speech” are overlooked (p. 147). Discourse alone is insufficient to represent the range of lived experiences and the performativity of identity. What is needed, according to Sekimoto (2011), is greater attention to the ways in which “the self is made present in one’s subjective awareness as a performative effect of both material and symbolic interaction” (p. 56). Such attunement to the embodiment of identity is critical to understanding how bodies propel us toward moments where we are confronted with the whole of an/Other’s identity. Bain and Nash (2006) argue that the body “can neither be ignored nor taken for granted” in communicative encounters (p. 105). Instead, it must be situated within those moments where we turn, literally and figuratively, to address the Other.

Conclusion

The commitment dialogue demands from both parties is often difficult to muster. However, such attempts to “rearticulate the very terms of symbolic legitimacy and intelligibility” with a given culture represent a moving about the world in a state of anticipation (Butler, 1993, p. 3). In these moments, we are brought to thresholds, “points of contact and crossing,” according to Holman Jones (2014), “that shift our selves and our relationships into new territories and meanings” (p. 89). Arriving at such thresholds, seeing the potential for a genuine meeting with the Other, is ripe with potential. Marking myself as “Other” opens possibilities for Others to see me as I see myself. It constructs the relational event as a stage that affords me “a glimpse into the consummating event” of dialogue (Buber, 1958, p. 81). The commitment to dialogue is no easy endeavor, for stepping into pure relation is to see everything in the Other. This taking-in of the Other and offering of the self in anticipation of dialogue is enabled by our embodied presence in moments bounded by space and time. Discourse may be the vehicle through which dialogue occurs, but bodies are the vehicles through which we join one another in those moments of genuine consummation.

My experiences, then, are meant to illustrate the limits of discourse in the exploration and representation of identity. Despite a substantial wealth of literature that attends to the embodiment of identity, the laboring of bodies through spaces is subjugated under presiding discursive accounts of the subject. As the stories I share here demonstrate, performances of my gender and sexuality fundamentally affect my relationships with others. They cause me to reorientate to those I encounter—and they to reorientate to me. These (re)orientations, as Ahmed (2006) notes, “shape not only how we inhabit space, but how we apprehend this world of shared inhabitance, as well as ‘who’ or ‘what’ we direct our energy and attention toward” (p. 2). How exactly persons orientate themselves to one another depends on a host of factors, but one thing remains constant: (Re)orientations are born from moments of possibility. They reflect the potential for dialogue to occur. And our bodies take us there.