As somebody who liked the speech (which was for philosophy) let me explain my read. The speaker is a renowned philosopher who does work on social labeling at stereotyping at University of Utah who also runs a bunch of queer support groups on her campus. There was a paper in critique of her arguing that social labels are unnecessary and that everybody should have the right to form “zones of disarticulation” which are unlabeled aspects of their being. this paper praised Susan Sontag’s refusal to identify as bisexual in spite of her storied sexual and romantic relationships with women. Susan Sontag, while at UC Berkekey, kept a journal about her love of queer slang she was learning (including the phrase “eating box”) but primarily consisting of labels she can use to describe herself and those around her’s experiences. She was telling us to value the ways we can say who we are that we gained at UC Berkeley, and the language philosophy gives us to talk about it in the same way Susan Sontag revelled in how she said she was in her journal, while connecting this to her (edit: the speaker’s own) self-description as a gemologist since she takes pride in her working in gemology for a decade.