Counter-Legibility: Rethinking How We’re Asked to Appear

Conversations about legibility often drift toward theory, but for queer people it begins somewhere far more ordinary. It begins in the small, daily adjustments we make before we step out the door. Recently I was talking with my spouse about clothes we wanted to wear—ties, sharper lines, bolder queer jewellery—and the hesitation appeared almost immediately. Not because we questioned our choices, but because we worried the world wouldn’t know how to read us. That hesitation, that tiny pause, is where legibility lives.

Legibility sounds simple: be understandable, be clear, be coherent. But in practice it’s a cultural demand shaped by institutions. Allan Sekula captured this when he wrote that “the portrait guarantees that the individual is both a social fact and a biological one.” Some people are granted that status without question. Others are forced to earn it, justify it, or shrink themselves until they fit a format designed by someone else.

Counter-legibility is the term I developed when I realised the problem wasn’t my complexity. The problem was the system that insisted on simplicity. It became a way of naming what happens when you refuse to perform readability on someone else’s terms—when you stop smoothing out the rough edges of your experience just to avoid misinterpretation. Counter-legibility marks the shift from adjusting yourself to be understood to noticing the pressure behind that expectation in the first place.

My work sits inside that tension. I’m not trying to obscure the sitter. I’m trying to expose the forces that shape how they are allowed to appear. Legibility is more than social behaviour; it’s administrative, medical, legal. It’s embedded in forms, diagnostic language, immigration policy, religious doctrine, and the “neutral” tone of bureaucracy. It teaches people how to present themselves in order to avoid friction. It asks us to pre-empt misunderstanding by making ourselves smaller.

In At the Table, this shows up quietly but deliberately. The white clothing refuses easy classification. The table functions as an administrative surface reclaimed by the sitter. And the background typography borrows the visual authority of bureaucracy but uses the sitter’s own words. Their language interrupts a format historically used to define them. That’s counter-legibility at work: the appearance of bureaucracy, but authored by the person who has lived through its consequences.

Saidiya Hartman writes that “what is required is a new way of telling,” and that’s the impulse behind this framework. Counter-legibility is not the creation of obscurity; it’s the creation of space for stories that don’t fit the tidy, approved narrative structures that institutions recognize. It refuses the demand that a life must be simplified before it can be acknowledged.

Counter-legibility also asks something of the viewer. It slows you down. It disrupts the instinct to decode. Tina Campt reminds us that some images “demand that we listen closely to what is seen.” Counter-legible portraiture works the same way. It makes clarity feel too easy and invites a different kind of attention—one that accepts complexity instead of resolving it.

This is the direction my work continues to move. Section 149 the next series I will be moving into once At the Table is completed in early Spring 2026, will take counter-legibility deeper, not by illustrating theory, but by working more directly with the pressures queer people navigate in real time. The focus is shifting from the administrative surface of At the Table to the deeper structures that shape how bodies are read, managed, or resisted across different regions and histories. Counter-legibility provides the framework, and the new series builds the visual vocabulary.

What I want these portraits to hold is not explanation, but presence. Not correctness, but truthfulness. A refusal to shrink for legibility’s sake. A willingness to let the viewer encounter the sitter without the comfort of a ready-made category.

Counter-legibility is ultimately a shift in who gets to define the terms of appearance. It redirects attention from the body being read to the systems doing the reading. And once you see that shift clearly, the portrait stops being an image to decode and becomes something else entirely: a place where the limits of interpretation finally show themselves.

References

Campt, Tina. Listening to Images. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.

Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1–14.

Sekula, Allan. “The Body and the Archive.” October 39 (Winter 1986): 3–64.

Sirois, Jeannette. Friction Portraiture. (2025) Reference and Definition. www.jeannettesirois.com

Sirois, Jeannette. Counter-Legibility. (2025) Reference and Definition. www.jeannettesirois.com