Between the folds

In The Epistemology of the Closet, Sedgwick writes: “the fact that silence is rendered as pointed and performative as speech, in relations around the closet, depends on and highlights more broadly the fact that ignorance is as potent and as multiple a thing there as is knowledge” (Sedgwick 4). She describes the very state of “closetedness” as “a performance initiated as such by the speech act of silence […]” (Sedgwick 3). Our silence had never been hollow, an absence of words: instead, it was theatrical, conciliatory, convincing in what it disguised, affirming of people’s assumptions, loud and provocative, a word play. Our existence was subtextual, we found shelter in the crevices of interpretation, we blossomed in the fields of others’ guesswork.

I am non-binary. You, a trans woman. We live in Athens, hiding in our closets. We navigate queer family-making, traditional values, precarity and violence in hostile Greek society, from the safety of our room. Our relationship blossomed in quarantine and everyday subverses what it means to stay hidden, to create places where survival is possible between the folds of normality.