Dust Gathers in Boils
On D.M. Closet’s “Offal Opacities” (Cloak, 2022)

Phil Spotswood

Overview

Presented as a series of three lyric essays “violently stirred together,” D.M. Closet’s Offal Opacities is invested in the serious play of virtual character creation as a means of interrogating  and complicating social norms surrounding gender and sexuality. Throughout, they insist on the  disruptive and liberatory potentials of experimenting with gender and sexual identifications via  virtual avatars, both for self and the social systems that self exists within and derives meaning  from. Each essay is formally distinguished by the use of game mechanics or digital technologies  which offer different approaches to Closet’s core conceit of the “glitch.” Building from the work  of Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism (Penguin Random House, 2020), Closet understands the  glitch as an empowering “slippage or disruption within a system of dominating rules, a difficulty,  or as a way of keeping encrypted aspects of the self within a system that seeks to surveil.” Each  essay enacts the glitch differently, according to the game mechanics or technologies it sets itself  within. While there are aesthetic and rhetorical differences between each essay, the bounds  between each aren’t always clear to me, and sometimes it seems that one essay briefly  interrupts another, which creates a compelling and challenging sense that I’m both witnessing  and experiencing a glitch. That is, I feel I’m both witnessing the speaker’s identity glitching in  and out of legibility, and experiencing some disruption between my identity and expectations as  a reader and the system(s) of the text. As a queer role-playing gamer myself, I was keyed into  the arguments Closet lays out for the normatively disruptive potentials of avatar creation, and  understand how they emerge from texts like Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (referenced in their  “Sources” list), but what most excites me about this chapbook is its adventurous commitment  to language and how it might permutate within digital technologies and gaming praxes, in turn  permutating the self (selves) which language emerges from and encounters in readers. The  diction of this collection ranges from academic to conversational to surreally lyric, sometimes  within the same essay or sentence. Coupled with the use of fragmented and pixelated images of body parts, architectures, and video game screenshots, Closet’s language enacts the glitching  self and pulls the reader into the warp of the text: “this coming-of-age story scuttles, sweatsags  and stings in contact with the eyes, together at points where certain words intersect and ideas  collect: glitch/litch/crypt/encrypt”. I found myself reading this chapbook sequentially only in  short bursts, before circling back to reconsider a previous image or line, recontextualized. I felt  encouraged to do so, and this organically non-linear reading practice felt akin to the playful,  composite practice of exploring identity queerly in virtual spaces. Too, this reading practice  seemed to thicken meaning, rather than distill or clarify, and led me, always, back to the title, how it points to a generative – but not always clear – process of becoming. Closet’s project  leads me to ask: what is (queer?) identity but an ongoing process of generative subject formation moving in and out of legibility, according to its environment, needs, and desires?

Crypt of the Glitch

Structured as a procedural dungeon-crawling game, “Crypt of the Glitch” lays out  Closet’s understanding of Russel’s glitch and their application of it via virtual avatar creation. Splicing personal narratives of sexual exploration with academic arguments for glitching-as praxis, they encounter and identify with another core concept of this project – the undead lich.  Drawing from the roleplaying game Dungeons and Dragons, they understand the figurative lich  as a being who resists binaries (i.e. gender, life/death, online/offline) and who is “the result of a  long process of intentional transition” (3). In its liminal existence of molting identities, the figure  of the lich is itself a glitch, and one who Closet resonates with to make sense of their own fluid  identities: “To your left is a body you recognize as one you discarded yourself, when your  feelings changed. It was awkward; it grew too quick. The skin is taut behind the knees” (4). The  endless, virtual permutations the lich offers is not without its hazards though, and I’m reminded  of this by a hulking visual near the end of the essay, in which a mechanized mass (tank?  industrial machine? robot?) is collaged over a Dungeons and Dragons character creation sheet (fig 1:)

I’m drawn to the various scope-like segments of the mass, overseeing and pointing out from the  character creation sheet like a search engine over so much data. In the accompanying text,  Closet pulls from Russell’s work to contend that the act of creating and reading identities in  virtual space enables “hyperscrutiny.” This calling-out the hazards of surveillance technology  seems to resonate with editors Andrea Abi-Karam’s and Kay Gabriel’s 2020 anthology We Want  It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat Books) in which they seek to push  against the cultural “trap of representation” that both makes legible and threatens to narrow  the lived experiences of trans people in the eyes of a cisgender consuming public. For Closet,  the potential trap in this essay seems to be one of intrapersonal misreading or unfulfilling connection, rather than one between self and its wider, signifying culture. Describing the lich’s  virtual “first real relationship”, they find that they “did not live in the present tense, and the lich  grew bodiless and thin. Their spirits became tired of projection, of this bodiless future living”  (5). I’m left considering, here and throughout the text, a rich range of problematics and liberatory potentials that virtual encounters enable, and I’m struck by how deftly Closet raises  these considerations via collage techniques. Russell: “We recognize that the care-full reading of  others is an exercise of trust, intimacy, belonging homecoming” (5). Though system failure can  be the grounds for personal liberation, there is always the risk of its force being lost when  shared with and read by others. 

As if in response to this risk of disembodied (disconnected) living, Closet insists in “Pink  Smear” on the very physicality of our virtual interfaces. Structured as a series of magnifications,  Closet leads the reader through the grimy surface of their phone screen, each zoom-in leading  us closer to moments of introspection in which they reflect on memories of genderfuckery in  online spaces. In describing “traces of the meatbod” (10) on the digital screen, they insist that  this, too, is a glitching space – hypervisible in its materiality but enabling fluid exploration within  its surface. That is, it is via the grimy surface of the screen which the body clings to that more  liquid navigations of identity might occur, both informed by and uncoupled from the “limits” of  the meatbod and its signifying cultures. In one magnification, scales collapse in “a spot of spit  wiped meteorite” (9) and I’m sucked into an accompanying image (fig. 2), left floating in tangled  questions of subject-formation: Where  does my offline identity end and online  identity begin? Where might I find  virtual traces of my embodiment? How  do my physical/social realities inform  my virtual selves, and vice versa? I’m intrigued by Closet’s movement  between complexly resonant images  and lines like these, mixed with  moments of more direct (but no less  complex) argument, because of the way these rhetorical shifts seem to enact the glitching of legibility so central to the project.  Spliced through this essay, for instance, is a page-length quote from a TOR.com article “The  Power of Queer Play in Dungeons and Dragons” by Linda H. Codega, set in conversation with Closet’s argument that the physical/social realities of the player’s body can be more freely explored in virtual spaces: “In D&D there is absolutely no rules-as-written, mechanical  difference between any gender, sexuality, or ability. It’s all treated the same. The rules become  an equalizer” (11). These moments of interruption (of other voices, other selves, other  rhetorical angles) add to the thickening membrane of this collection, made even thicker by the  encouraged organic reading process. While I’m left wanting a somewhat more nuanced exploration of the tense relationship between one’s physical/social realities and how they  inform in-game experience, I appreciate that Closet does point to some argued limits of virtual  avatar creation as liberatory praxis – namely, an argument that something like virtual gender swapping can’t trouble larger systems of gender in any culturally impactful way; however, they  insist that the personal potential remains intact, and that smaller ripples might “topple larger  structures that might not be so stable” (12). However brief, these moments of engagement with  problematics add depth and complexity to this compact text.  

It's somewhere in the pages of “Pink Smear” that I realize how slippery the boundaries between  one essay and the others are, as the dungeon-crawling structure and academic rhetoric of the  first essay reemerges, and the following pages become increasingly image-heavy, fragmented,  the language more frequently shifting registers. As Closet suggests, glitches reveal the very  system of rules that structure “the apparatus of our communication” (13). Though the system of  rules they seek to interrogate are those of gender, I can’t help but also think about the “rules”  of linear reading practice and engaging with texts (i.e. sequentially building  knowledge/understanding from one sentence to the next, one page to the next, towards a  unified whole). There is a recursiveness to the form and content of Closet’s glitching project that  simultaneously reveals and conceals itself, and implicates me as a reader-player, forced to  consider my own assumptions and expectations of the game. And while I’m reckoning with my self as a reader, the (final?) page of (“Pink Smear”?) narrates  an encounter between “you” and the lich, the morphing embodiment of glitching identity who has been flickering in and out of the whole collection. I’m taken aback by the sudden intimacy the pronoun engenders, and feel like I’ve fallen into some interior chamber after spending most of my time examining only its theoretical surface. It’s a welcome shift for me, as it brings me closer to an understanding of Closet’s glitch-as-praxis within gendered bodies, “404ing forever towards that beautiful moment of becoming that lasts forever” (16). Only so close, though. Maybe my thwarted desire to see/know the lich (as self, or self-proxy) is a  point of glitching, sidestepping a reader/other who might try and define them according to rules  they refuse.

Karaoke Versions

And this close encounter sets me up for another surprising shift, into the chapbook’s third essay, “Karaoke Versions.” Structured as annotated lyrics to Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will  Go On”, I’m left considering karaoke as a kind of identity glitch – a momentariy slip into another  character in order to express something about one’s own, or move towards some truth made  easier by the musician-as-avatar, lyric-as-code. I’m surprised and compelled to consider karaoke  – the momentary complication of self within a song – as a sort of game. Here, I fall back into an  argument from the first essay, in which Closet seeks to expand the notion of gaming, as they  understand it entrenched in notions of mastery. Rather, they call for a certain kind of playful, fecund failure in story-telling and subject-formation; and in recalling that earlier argument, I’m left thinking about karaoke as a sort of failed (generative) identity graft. 

Closet’s speaker seems to use the song’s “You” to communicate with another “you,” and while it  could be that the pronoun references another real-world person, I’m drawn to simultaneously reading the “you” as some version of the speaker’s self that they are using the Celine-avatar to  help connect with: “A slow dolly zoom separates Your head from the space. It pushes in as I  continue to sing, and at this moment, You and I are intertwined, because I’m singing only to You and You’ve realised it now, and the details and warbles of my performance are suddenly  toppling down into Your glorious mush” (23). I love thinking about Russell’s “digital skins” with  this particular performance, and my adjoining questions of the blurred boundaries between on and offline identities, permutations of self. This performance, situated as the “final” essay,  reminds me that the tools with which we might glitch through social systems are wide-ranging,  and that there is certain joy and pleasure in making a mess of things.