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On #ComingOutDay, a reminder that science also has closets. Some fields hide uncomfortable parts of their past: from colonial histories to narrow ideas of who “belongs” in science. Tyler Kibbey argues that opening those closets means rethinking how knowledge is built and who gets to build it.

Introduction: a queer science of language When I speak of doing linguistics “out of the closet”, I am referencing a combination of two idioms that is useful for thinking about a queer science of language – and, in its own turn, a queer language science. The first “closet” idiom is fairly obvious: to come out of the closet, to tell someone that you are queer; the second is less so: a skeleton in the closet, a discreditable or embarrassing fact that a person wishes to keep secret.

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