Disability Studies

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert McRuer
Keyword(s):  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
Disability Studies ◽  
Medical Model ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Queer Of Color Critique ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Queer Of Color ◽  
Crip Theory ◽  
Viable Approach

Disability studies is an interdisciplinary mode of inquiry that flourished beginning in the late 20th century. Disability studies challenges the singularity of dominant models of disability, particularly the medical model that would reduce disability to diagnosis, loss, or lack, and that would insist on cure as the only viable approach to apprehending disability. Disability studies pluralizes ways of thinking about disability, and bodily, mental, or behavioral atypicality in general; it simultaneously questions the ways in which able-bodiedness has been made to appear natural and universal. Disability studies is an analytic that attends to how disability and ability are represented in language and in a wide range of cultural texts, and it is particularly attuned to the ways in which power relations in a culture of normalization have generally subordinated disabled people, particularly in capitalist systems that demand productive and efficient laborers. Disability studies is actively intersectional, drawing on feminist theory, critical race theory, queer theory, and other analytics to consider how gender, race, sexuality, and disability are co-constitutive, always implicated in each other. Crip theory has emerged as a particular mode of doing disability studies that draws on the pride and defiance of crip culture, art, and activism, with crip itself marking both a reclamation of a term designed to wound or demean and as a marker of the fact that bodies and minds do not fit neatly within or beneath a historical able-bodied/disabled binary. “To crip,” as a critical process, entails recognizing how certain bodily and mental experiences have been made pathological, deviant, or perverse and how such experiences have subsequently been marginalized or invisibilized. Queer of color critique, which is arguably at the absolute center of the project of queer theory, shares a great deal with crip theory, as it consistently points outward to the relations of power that constitute and reconstitute the social. Queer of color critique focuses on processes of racialization and gendering that make certain groups perverse or pathological. Although the ways in which this queer of color project overlaps significantly with disability studies and crip theory have not always been acknowledged, vibrant modes of crip of color critique have emerged in the 21st century, making explicit the connections.

Crip Theory

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Disability Studies ◽  
Medical Model ◽  
Queer Of Color Critique ◽  
Queer Culture ◽  
Queer Of Color ◽  
Embodied Experiences ◽  
Crip Theory ◽  
Disability Identification ◽  
Sexuality And Disability

Crip theory began to flourish in the interdisciplinary fields of disability studies and queer theory in the early decades of the 21st century. These fields attend to the complex workings of power and normalization in contemporary cultures, particularly to how institutions of modernity have materialized and sedimented a distinction between “normal” and “abnormal” and to how subjects deemed “abnormal” have contested such ideas. Disability studies pluralizes models for thinking about disability: if a culture of normalization reduces disability to lack or loss and positions disability as always in need of cure, disability studies challenges the singularity of this medical model. Disability studies scholars examine how able-bodied ideologies emerge in and through representation, and how such representations result in a culture of ableism that invalidates disabled experiences. Crip theory, in turn, emerged as a particular mode of doing disability studies, deeply in conversation with queer theory. The pride and defiance of queer culture, with its active reclamation or reinvention of language meant to wound, are matched by the pride and defiance of crip culture. Crip theory, however, is generatively paradoxical, working with and against identity and identification simultaneously. Crip theory affirms lived, embodied experiences of disability and the knowledges (or cripistemologies) that emerge from such experiences; at the same time, it is critical of the ways in which certain identities materialize and become representative to the exclusion of others that may not fit neatly within dominant vocabularies of disability. Many works in crip theory focus on the supposed margins of disability identification as well as on the intersections where gender, race, sexuality, and disability come together. Crip theory, additionally, offers an analytic that can be used for thinking about contexts or historical periods that do not seem on the surface to be about disability at all. Cripping offers a critical process, considering how certain bodily or mental experiences, in whatever location or period, have been marginalized or invisibilized, made pathological or deviant. Within queer theory, crip theory thus perhaps has its deepest affinity with queer of color critique, with its attention not just to substantive identities but also to processes of racialization and gendering that pathologize or make aberrant particular groups. Queer theory, queer of color critique, and crip theory, moreover, often combine studies that focus on a macrolevel recognition of the complex workings of political economy (neoliberal capitalism, in particular) and the seemingly microlevel vicissitudes of identity, embodiment, or desire.

Alternatives to Coming Out Discourses

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shuzhen Huang
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Coming Out ◽  
The United States ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Queer Of Color Critique ◽  
Queer People ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
Queer Of Color

The discourse of coming out has historically served as an effective vehicle to build and sustain the LGBTQ movement in the United States. It has also been utilized as an empowering resource that enables queer people to establish a queer identity organized around self-awareness and self-expression. However, queer of color critique and transnational queer theory argue that the prevalent discourse of coming out is built on a particular kind of queer experience and geography, which is usually from the standpoint of White, middle-class men of urban U.S. citizenship and is rarely derived from the experience of queer people of color and non-Western queer subjects. Taking an intersectional perspective, Snorton interrogates the racialization of the closet and proposes a sexual politics of ignorance—opposed to the disclosure imperative in coming out discourse—as a tactic of ungovernability. Centering the experience of Russian American immigrants who are queer-identified, Fisher proposes a fluid and productive relationship between the “closeted” and the “out” sexuality that resists any fixed categorization. Focusing on the masking tactic deployed by local queer activists, Martin theorizes the model of xianshen, a local identity politics in Taiwan that questions the very conditions of visibility in dominant coming out discourse. As a decolonial response to the transnational circulation of coming out discourse, Chou delineates a “coming home” approach that emphasizes familial piety and harmony by reining in and concealing queer desires. Being cautious against the nationalist impulse in Chou’s works, Huang and Brouwer propose a “coming with” model to capture the struggles among Chinese queers to disidentify with the family institution. These alternative paradigms serve as epistemic tools that aim to revise understanding of queer resistance and queer relationality and help people to go beyond the imagination of coming out for a livable queer future.

Sex under Necropolitics: Waldo Frank, Jean Toomer, and Black Enfleshment

2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (5) ◽  
pp. 926-950
Author(s):  
BENJAMIN KAHAN ◽  
MADOKA KISHI
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Jean Toomer ◽  
Color Line ◽  
Queer Of Color Critique ◽  
Queer Of Color ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

Though Jean Toomer's Cane (1923) is one of the best-known texts of the Harlem Renaissance, it has rarely been discussed with the text alongside which it was initially imagined: Waldo Frank's Holiday (1923). These works were inspired by a joint trip to Spartanburg, South Carolina and were conceptualized as a shared project, what the authors termed “Holiday + Cane.” This essay tracks their coproduction with particular attention to their parallax vision of lynching to theorize what we call, building on Achille Mbembe's work, “sex under necropolitics.” This dispensation does not take shape within a privatized notion of sexuality, but instead is “ungendered” and unindividuated in the ways that Hortense Spillers has described through the notion of the flesh. We take up her work to suggest that black bodily practices and corporeal intimacies are governed by a regime other than sexuality. In this essay, we map the contours of this regime and its effects on both sides of the color line. Our new cartography promises to reconfigure understandings of the sexuality of Toomer and Frank and of the Harlem Renaissance, and to clarify the relationship between (white) queer theory and queer-of-color critique.

Race and Sexuality

Sociology ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ghassan Moussawi ◽  
Vrushali Patil
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Women Of Color ◽  
Central Feature ◽  
Race And Racism ◽  
Sexuality Studies ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Racial Formations ◽  
Queer Of Color Critique ◽  
Queer Of Color ◽  
Race And Sexuality

Pioneering work on the relationship between race and sexuality can be dated from the late 1970s. Early academic, political, and artistic work by women of color in particular gave voice to women’s simultaneous experiences of heterosexism, racism, sexism, and so on. Queer of color work broadly theorized the role of race and racism in knowledge, politics, and concepts of sexualities. Historical work on empire, slavery, and colonialism further demonstrated this fact, while contemporarily focused transnational work does the same for early-21st-century processes. Given the importance of intersectional and transnational analysis, research on race and sexuality has become a growing and central feature of sexuality studies. Such research does not treat “whiteness” as a taken-for-granted category of analysis, but instead unpacks how sex, sexuality, and race are always co-constituted. With emerging theoretical lenses such as Queer of Color Critique, the study of racialized sexualities has become crucial to any exploration of sexuality. In addition, studies of race and sexuality look at how they have historically informed and continue to inform one another, in ways that include thinking about empire, Racisms, carcerality, surveillance, criminology, deviance, desire, and changing understanding of the erotic. Both intersectional and transnational work consider multiple racial formations and take into account the multiple genealogies of sexuality studies, centralizing work that is informed by women of color feminisms, transnational feminisms, queer theory, and black feminist thought. To best understand racial and sexual formations, race and sexuality studies allow us to think of the two as always informing one another. Thus it shifts our attention from primarily thinking about stable identity categories and culture to centralizing people’s relations to power.

scholarly journals Troubled Times: Disability, Sexuality and Futurity in Mozambican, Ugandan and Zimbabwean Political Cultures

2019 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-38
Author(s):  
Eleanor K Jones
Keyword(s):  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
Disability Studies ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Critical Value ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Critical Race ◽  
Race Theory ◽  
Political Cultures ◽  
The Future

Abstract Since the earliest days of European expansionism, Africa has held a dual place in the Western imaginary, cast as a space of futurelessness even as white futurities were predicated on its exploitation. Appropriations of the future have persisted post-liberation, revealed in the divestment of futurity from bodies marked as queer or disabled. Drawing on historical moments and literary texts from Mozambique, Uganda and Zimbabwe, and on insights from queer theory, critical race theory and disability studies, I seek to demonstrate that the logics of white supremacy can be seen at work in these mechanisms of exclusion, even where whiteness itself is displaced – but that literary invocation of queerness and disability can thus be used to mobilize critique of this continuity. In centring the circumscription of futurity at the heart of colonialism, heteronormativity and ableism, then, I underscore the critical value of reading these as reciprocal and inextricable systems of power.

scholarly journals Book Review: Organization Theory for Equity and Diversity: Leading Integrated, Socially Just Education

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 54-56
Author(s):  
Cara Costelnock
Keyword(s):  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Learning Environment ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
Disability Studies ◽  
Organization Theory ◽  
Critical Race ◽  
Race Theory ◽  
Feminist Theories

Throughout the text, Capper explores critically oriented epistemologies such as Critical Race Theory; LatCrit, Asian, TribalCrit, and Black Crit; Disability Studies theories; feminist theories; Queer Theory, and theories of intersectionality. In each chapter she presents teaching suggestions and discussion questions to use within the classroom as well as discussion questions aimed to help aspiring leaders critically analyze their leadership strengths and limitations in order to integrate these epistemologies into practice. This review examines the suggestions for creating a learning environment that honors the diversities and strengths students bring to the classroom.

Queering Protest

2020 ◽  
pp. 165-189
Author(s):  
Jodi Rios
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
Physical Space ◽  
Women And Gender ◽  
Gender Nonconforming ◽  
Queer Of Color Critique ◽  
Queer Of Color ◽  
Black Life ◽  
And Gender ◽  
A Site

This chapter uses a framework of queer theory to argue that the particular aesthetic and affect of resistance in North St. Louis County made visible the extreme violence of the state in addition to exposing the inherent contradictions within masculine and heteronormative spaces of Black struggle. This is a critical component of queer of color critique. Similar to an Afro-pessimistic perspective of blackness, which locates Black life as a site of ontological death, the chapter argues that “the problem posed by blackness” is an antagonism rooted in the historically naturalized logics of society, including physical space, and is not a conflict that can be rectified through legal means. Through a more optimistic lens, it also highlights the various ways Black women and gender nonconforming individuals practiced a choreopolitics—of bodies in space—that demanded the terms of visibility be set by those “in view.” This particular practice of visibility and an insistence on simply living as an act of protest illustrate the capacity and power that Black lives and life hold in revealing the truth and thus reconfiguring the metrics of living as fully human.

Queer

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Octavio González ◽  
Todd G. Nordgren
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
Queer Of Color Critique ◽  
Queer Of Color ◽  
Aids Crisis ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Coalitional Politics

The definitional limits of the term queer have been under conceptual, political, and ethical dispute since its reclamation from its pejorative meaning during the early AIDS crisis of the 1980s and early 1990s. Reflecting activist recuperation, queer became a means to inspire and propel a coalitional politics oriented toward nonconformity and anti-normativity among diverse sexualities and across divisions of gender. Concomitantly, queer theory arose in academia as a way to expand upon and break what some scholars saw as the restrictive disciplinary boundaries of gay and lesbian studies, which were explicitly grounded in post–Stonewall identity politics. The term’s radical potential derives in part from its grammatical fluidity, as it operates as noun, adjective, and verb—combining action, identification, and effect into a single word. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, queer of color critique drew upon a different genealogy, beyond the postmodern rupture inaugurated by Michel Foucault’s work on sexuality and “biopower,” by foregrounding black and women of color feminisms, critical race studies, and postcolonial studies in order to analyze the intersections of race, nationality, coloniality, class, sex, and gender with a Foucauldian understanding of sexuality as a privileged mode of modern power– knowledge. Queer of color critique inspired and was mirrored in investigations of the analytic boundaries of the term, often defined as a binary distinction between a minoritizing and universalizing definition of queer.

scholarly journals A Queer and Foreign State

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 29-53
Author(s):  
Maxine Savage
Keyword(s):  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Coming Out ◽  
Race And Ethnicity ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Nation State ◽  
First Generation Immigrants ◽  
Queer Cinema ◽  
Queer Of Color Critique ◽  
Queer Of Color ◽  
Year 2000

Since the year 2000, twenty Icelandic films have been produced which could be aptly grouped as LGBTQ+ or queer Icelandic cinema. This “queer turn” in Icelandic cinema emerges as the nation makes strides in advancing LGBTQ+ rights and as its demographics markedly shift, first-generation immigrants now comprising 12.6 per cent of the population. These changes have not occurred in a vacuum, and the films discussed in this article complicate the boundary between native and foreign, Icelandic and non-Icelandic, alongside their centering of queer characters and stories. In addition to narrative focus on coming-out and sexuality, many of the films within “Icelandic queer cinema” thematize race and ethnicity, often through the inclusion of foreign characters living and traveling in Iceland.This collection of films is thus well suited to exploring the interlocking national and sexual regulations which produce the Icelandic nation state. This article explores conceptions of the Icelandic nation state in two films that span Icelandic cinema’s “queer turn,” Baltasar Kormákur’s 101 Reykjavík (2000) and Ísold Uggadóttir’s Andið eðlilega (And Breathe Normally, 2018). In tracing representations of racialized otherness within these films and taking theoretical cues from critical race theory and queer of color critique, this article considers the ways in which race and ethnicity co-constitute categories of sex, gender, and sexual orientation. Ultimately, this article poses “Icelandic queer cinema” as a key site for the contemporary negotiation of the meaning of national and sexual belonging in Iceland.

scholarly journals Coming to Claim Crip: Disidentification with/in Disability Studies

2013 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sami Schalk
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Disability Studies ◽  
Personal Experience ◽  
Potential Space ◽  
Sexuality Studies ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Creative Non Fiction ◽  
Crip Theory ◽  
Black Queer

<p>This creative-critical paper combines creative non-fiction and theory to trace one non-disabled scholar&rsquo;s personal experience with disability studies as a field and a community. Using disidentification and crip theory, this paper theorizes the personal, political, and academic utility of identifying <em>with</em> crip as a nondisabled, fat, black, queer, female academic. This crip identification then undergirds and informs the researcher&rsquo;s scholarship in and relationship to disability studies as a field. Specifically referencing the Society for Disability Studies dance as a potential space of cross-identification, this paper suggests that disidentification among/across/between minoritarian subjects allows for coalitional theory and politics between disability studies and other fields, particularly race/ethnic and queer/sexuality studies.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Keywords:&nbsp;crip, identity, queer theory, race</p>

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