Intersectional Crip Theory: (Re)presenting Intersections of Illness, Disability, and Madness with Gender and Sexuality
Virtual Session
Description
Crip theory emerged in the twenty-first century primarily from two interdisciplinary fields: queer theory and disability studies. From Gutter and Killacky’s 2004 collection Queer Crips and McRuer and Sandahl’s interventions in 2006 and 2003 respectively (which reclaimed the intersection of disabilities and sexuality) to Kafer’s Feminist, Queer, Crip in 2018, Puar’s The Right to Maim, and Schalk’s 2022 Black Disability Politics, intersectional approaches to disability, chronic illnesses, and mental health within expressive culture have comprised urgent fields of exploration, engagement, and activism. Critiques of selfhood, embodiment, and performativity have centered on the ways in which systemic oppressions and constructions of normalcy can be interrupted and resisted by unruly subjects and their imaginings of other worlds and possibilities. From crip temporalities to crip spacialities, crip theory fundamentally interrogates and expands norms. It “bends” clocks and brick and mortar to makes possible inclusive expressivity (Samuels 2017). We seek papers reflecting the diverse experiences and narratives of marginalized groups, especially those from 2SLGBTQI+ and BIPOC communities, to inform new directions in critical disability studies. We invite scholars, writers, and activists to submit papers that investigate these themes within expressive texts (fictional and non-) and/or other forms of cultural representation, examining how expressive artists represent, challenge, and reflect the lived experiences of those with disabilities, chronic illnesses, and/or mental health conditions when considered in relation to gender and sexuality. We welcome both contributions that focus on the content of cultural representation and those that focus on the conditions of its production (i.e. institutional supports and/or barriers; dis/enabling material conditions of production and/or reception ethical considerations of production and dissemination of work by “able-bodied” artists that represent dis/abled subjects and/or involve such subjects in their process of production).
At their intersection with gender and/or sexuality, we welcome explorations of disabilities visible and invisible, physical and mental/cognitive (including mental illness, learning disabilities, and neurodivergence, among others).
Foci of inquiry within our broader area of exploration might include, but are not limited to: intersectionality and identity politics; ableism and embodiment studies (including fat studies)
HIV/AIDS studies/discourse
the effects of capitalism/neo-liberalism; global geopolitics and inequalities
epi/pandemics and epidemiological policies, practices, and outcomes
migration and global mobility
technologies of the self
trauma and care studies
and non-realist/speculative fiction and/or auto-fiction (including genres such as afrofuturism; the gothic; cyberpunk; apocalyptic fiction; and technoutopianism, among others).
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Zoë Burgard is a sixth-year PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature at Yale. Her research interests are in Early Modern and Modern German, Italian, English, and French literature. Her research focuses on trauma theory, self-fashioning, disability studies, nation building and collapse, and translation studies. Her dissertation project, “Witness to National Collapse: Early Modern and Modernist Fictions,” explores reactions to political and religious schisms in Italy, Germany, and Austria.
Speaker Bio
Drew Danielle Belsky is an interdisciplinary researcher and scholar working at the intersections of feminist science studies, histories of medicine, critical disability studies, and visual culture. Her dissertation, Making bodies, making kin: Story-telling and the professionalization of medical illustrators in North America combines ethnographic and archival research to explore the social and material contexts that inform the creation of biomedical visualizations and visual communications. Drew has published on topics related to contemporary medical illustrators as well as disability and artistic practice.
Speaker Bio
Elizabeth Richmond-Garza is UT Regents’ and Distinguished Teaching Associate Professor of English at UT Austin. She was the Director of Comparative Literature and CAO of the ACLA. She holds degrees from UC Berkeley, Oxford U and Columbia U and has held both Mellon and Fulbright Fellowships. She writes on Oscar Wilde, theatre, the gothic, detective stories, and literary theory. She teaches strategic thinking and leadership through expressive culture and works actively in eight world languages. Her multimedia teaching has been honored by a dozen teaching awards both at UT Austin and across the state of Texas.
Speaker Bio
Jordana Greenblatt teaches at York University and the University of Toronto. They research sexuality in contemporary literature and culture, including circus arts. Their publications include the collection Querying Consent (Rutgers UP 2018), an article on circus and sadomasochism, and two collections of circus public intellectual writing with Cirkus Syd’s Circus Thinker’s Platform. They are a professional circus performer, specializing in trapeze and aerial rope. The first Research and Creation process for their Canada Council for the Arts grant-funded circus project, “Lifting Belly,” took place July and August of 2023.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Corinna Wolters (any pronouns) holds a dual bachelor’s degree in German and English Studies and is currently nearing the competition of two master’s degrees in Kulturpoetik der Literatur und Medien and British, American and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Münster in Germany. Their research focus is on speculative fiction, disability studies, crip theory, queer theory as well as intersectional gender studies.
Speaker Bio
Kaliane Ung is an assistant professor of French and Health Humanities at the University of Pittsburgh. Under the auspices of an ACLS Fellowship, she is currently working on her monograph Wounded Writings: Disability in France. She is on the spectrum and has Ehlers-Danlos syndrom. She publishes creative writing in French in Québec and has found community in the practice of dance and aerial arts.
Speaker Bio
Irene Pagano is a Research Master’s student in the Literary Studies programme at the University of Amsterdam. Their research centres on queer theory, psychoanalysis, illness and non-normative sexuality explored through European literature and interactive fiction. They obtained their Bachelor’s Degree in Foreign Languages and Literatures at the Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna, with a focus on English and German literary history.
Speaker Bio
Weston Leo Richey is a PhD student in English at The University of Texas at Austin. Before UT, they earned an MFA in creative writing from Rutgers University--Newark. Their dissertation focuses on the interplay between love, loneliness, and intimacy in contemporary speculative fiction.