Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, 2024
Cavar and Bougie aren't a couple, but as far as scholarship goes, you could say they've been gett... more Cavar and Bougie aren't a couple, but as far as scholarship goes, you could say they've been getting it on. In this dialogue, we (Cavar and Bougie) will consider the titillating constraints and radical possibilities in scholarship across space and time zones, for work that is not only cripistemological in framework but also aromantic and asexual in method and manifestation. Exploring the unspeakable and unthinkable language of academic crushes, scholarly kink, and cybersex(uality studies), we will unpack our relationship as trans, neurodivergent queers and nascent scholars to each other and the critically queer, severely disabled digital spaces in which our relationship emerged. Ultimately, we ask: What does a queer, crip, and aro/ace approach to collaboration look like? What might it mean to explore scholarly "coupledom"? And what might be learned—what vital and visceral knowledges might be shared—with and through an erotics of virtual cowriting, uniquely available to us as scholarly homemakers in an increasingly digitized landscape? Fusing the queer quotidian with messy, spontaneous crip collaboration, and through both text and texts, we will explore the boundaries of our collaboratory experiment and the (crip)istemic possibilities it offers.
Public scholar, poet, and activist Mel Baggs (sie/hir pronouns) died on April 11, 2020 in the thi... more Public scholar, poet, and activist Mel Baggs (sie/hir pronouns) died on April 11, 2020 in the thick of a catastrophic pandemic responsible for spotlighting long-held ableist, eugenic rhetorics that literally and figuratively structure disabled life. Since hir passing, however, Baggs's "emblogged" archive-remains powerfully relevant to anti-ableist discourse in an age of COVID-19, laying bare the invisible institutional contours, material and linguistic, undergirding disabled existence. In this article, I will engage with critical texts from Baggs's" online oeuvre, what I call an emblogged activist archive, written both from within and in the wake of pre-COVID institutional violence, asking what it means to survive/archive against a medical industry built to hasten disabled death. I will explore the ways in which Baggs reveals the discursive architecture of institutionalization, which follows and constitutes disabled subjects-including and especially Baggs hirself-both within and outside of hospital walls. Reading renewed interest in the euphemistic language of !triage," "quality-of-life," and "congregate care" through what I call hir "Baggsian Experiential Framework," I will argue that Baggs remixes the language of hir oppression, using new and renewed terminology including the "Nice Lady Therapist," "Snake Words," and the "Burrito Test." At the same time, sie remaps the institution as a discursive condition of disabled life rather than only a discrete(/discreet) location in which certain lives are led. Baggs uses emblogged, queercrip digital space to advance a formidable counter-discourse that has saved hir life and now preserves hir legacy.
Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 2023
Larissa Lai's (2002) visionary novel, Salt Fish Girl, is teeming with sensations beneath and beyo... more Larissa Lai's (2002) visionary novel, Salt Fish Girl, is teeming with sensations beneath and beyond capitalist control. An atemporal narrative follows Miranda, a near-future young woman conceived by a durian and afflicted by a "memory disease" that produces distinctive body odor and flashbacks to episodes of colonial violence that the powerful would prefer to forget. While subjected to treatment for this "disease," Miranda falls in love with Evie, erstwhile sweatshop laborer with carp DNA and body odor to match. In a story of anti-state, anticapitalist rebellion, Miranda and Evie defect from straight, sane, and abled sterility. Aided by human/carp comrades called The Sonias, they realize spaces Elsewhere and Otherwise at the edges of the collective imagination. Using a queercrip conceptual framework, the article attends to the alienated, nonhuman body as a site of erotic play through Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Ellery Russian's (2010) concept of the "crip lust of recognition," arguing that it is within that space of affirmation and lust that criptopias beyond the "rational" might be found(ed). Finally, Salt Fish Girl is read alongside recent works of speculative activistscholarship to theorize queercrip, multispecies resistance and imagination toward criptopian possibilities.
T4t is a history, a marker, and a signal –– but is it praxis? Amid longstanding discourses of que... more T4t is a history, a marker, and a signal –– but is it praxis? Amid longstanding discourses of queer and trans contagion, which both facilitated the close of craigslist’s “t4t” personals and spur claims of “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” today, I present t4t pollination as an alternative way of conceptualizing how trans bodyminds take shape through myriad relational, pollinatory networks, networks that pose radical and literally trans-formative alternatives to individualized, pathological transness. Specifically, pollination constitutes an intra-active (Barad 2007) “praxis of love” (Malatino 2019) wherein t4t does not only unite pre-existing trans subjects, but facilitates trans emergence through shared desire. First, I historicize craigslist and other digital trans counterpublics: in these anonymous sexual spaces, subjects became trans 4 each other. Then, drawing from queercrip, transfeminist, and New Materialist frameworks, I trace t4t desire as methodology and epistemology in the process of becoming-trans, a process which refuses medico-legal constructions of “legitimate” trans identity. This article makes two primary interventions: it is a queercrip expansion of existing New Materialist approaches to trans subjectivity, and also provides an anti-ableist approach to transphobic “social contagion” discourse by reclaiming social pollination. I argue that trans is “loved into possible” via intra-active recognition of desire, possibility, and similar-difference, that is, when awareness of trans possibility is pollinated. Such pollination –– the making of new trans subjects where trans was once deemed impossible –– is critical to a radical anti-ableist, anti-cissexist project.
Refuse! is a toolkit for thin/non-fat disorderly eaters for confronting systemic anti-fatness in ... more Refuse! is a toolkit for thin/non-fat disorderly eaters for confronting systemic anti-fatness in our communities and selves. This piece illustrates points of similarity / solidarity between thin disorderly eaters and fat people across bodymind and (non)diagnosis. Fighting systemic anti-fatness is necessary for a robust, harm-reduction oriented response to systems of medico-psychiatric violence that steal our autonomy in the name of “health.”
Refuse! is grounded in a radical transMad fat politic and prioritizes bodily autonomy for all. Rather than predicating individual/collective “body positivity” on the idea of normative recovery (into an always-thin body), I offer tools for liberation that moves beyond the binary of individualized “illness” and “health.”
This theory poem-qua-checklist draws on micha cárdenas's multimodal project of transrealness, whi... more This theory poem-qua-checklist draws on micha cárdenas's multimodal project of transrealness, which allows us to think "trans" beyond normative understandings of subjectivity, truth, and collective/consensus reality. Ironically responding to the internal contradictions of the cisheteropatriarchal demands of gender, this piece seeks to exploit those contradictions, not toward resolution, but abolition/escape.
I, a Mad, autistic, multiply-disabled person, began my PhD in Cultural Studies in September of 20... more I, a Mad, autistic, multiply-disabled person, began my PhD in Cultural Studies in September of 2020. I started to make my home in graduate school during the COVID-19 pandemic, fully online, and I've excelled, calling into question normative assumptions of in-person socialization, education, and collaboration as superior to their virtual counterparts. In this article, I reflect on the cripistemic pedagogies of failure that facilitated a neuroqueered and transMaddened transition to Zoom-based graduate life. I will also consider email, text messages, and video calls as equalizing mediums in which both formal and fugitive spaces can open for queercrip collaboration across borders, timezones, and access needs. Lastly, I will tell the stories of technological 'failures' that I have experienced—miscommunications, failing internet, time delays—as generative possibilities rather than indictments of a non-normative learning. Necessarily imperfect and rife with humorous, intriguing...
Experimental autie-biography –– autistic autobio/ethnography –– addressing the nexus of cishetero... more Experimental autie-biography –– autistic autobio/ethnography –– addressing the nexus of cisheteronormative and neuronormative social conditions. Ultimately, this text illuminates a neuroqueer framework for understanding lives shaped by queer, trans, and neurodivergent/disabled experiences, not as siloed identities to be mutually disavowed, but as interlocking forms of experience fertile for solidarity.
This review engages with two queer approaches to archival knowledge and critical literacy, repres... more This review engages with two queer approaches to archival knowledge and critical literacy, represented, respectively, in Cait McKinney’s Information Activism and Eric Darnell Pritchard’s Fashioning Lives. In Information Activism, McKinney explores the physical and digital contents of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, considering the implications of late twentieth-century lesbian activism on contemporary queer publics, and on their own identity. In Fashioning Lives, Pritchard fuses his own Black queer literacy narrative with a collage of interviews to form a capacious definition of “reading” and resisting racist, reductionist literacy norms. Blending autobiographical, ethnographic, and archival methods, both compellingly excavate racialized, gendered, and queer literacy practices, and present queerness as a text to be read, passed-on, and made- kin with via intergenerational engagement. They also bring to light the epistemic violence underpinning both literacy norms and archives, while simultaneously identifying their ambiguity and partiality as possible points of queer transformation.
As part of a larger research project on the intersections between transness, disability, cisgende... more As part of a larger research project on the intersections between transness, disability, cisgenderism (also called transphobia), and ableism/sanism, this article presents the results of a three-month netnography of blog posts made between 2013 and 2019 by selected Tumblr and off-Tumblr blogs authored by people identifying as both trans and disabled. Mobilizing a theoretical framework that combines trans and disability/crip/Mad theory and the notion of epistemic injustice, we highlight the unique possibilities of community building, connection, identity formation, and micro-practices of resistance in trans disabled digital communities. Trans disabled bloggers counter epistemic injustice by speaking back, reclaiming space, and responding to the cisgenderist and ableist/sanist micro-aggressions they experience in their daily lives. This exploration of trans disabled bloggers' micro-activism is divided into four parts. After reviewing the literature in the emerging field of trans di...
What, how, and who is transbutch? In this thesis, I examine memoirs and personal essays that defi... more What, how, and who is transbutch? In this thesis, I examine memoirs and personal essays that define and defy boundaries between “butch" and “transmasculine" subjectivity –– and investigate my own queer experience in the process –– in order to counter the myth of an irreparable trans/ butch divide. Deemed by some to be “border wars,” conflicts between transness and butchness are emblematic of the contested (hi)stories on which the identities are founded: namely, white supremacy, colonialism, transmedicalism, and lesbian separatism/trans-exclusionary radical feminism. Ensuing identity-battles –– which have increased with increased access to biomedical transition –– rely on a teleological approach to identity, and, I argue, may only be ameliorated by prioritizing experiential multiplicity and political affinity over fixed, essential truth. Through engagement with a variety of personal narratives by authors such as S. Bear Bergman, Ivan Coyote, Rae Spoon, and blogger MainelyBu...
As part of a larger research project on the intersections between transness, disability, cisgende... more As part of a larger research project on the intersections between transness, disability, cisgenderism (also called transphobia), and ableism/sanism, this article presents the results of a three-month netnography of blog posts made between 2013 and 2019 by selected Tumblr and off-Tumblr blogs authored by people identifying as both trans and disabled. Mobilizing a theoretical framework that combines trans and disability/crip/Mad theory and the notion of epistemic injustice, we highlight the unique possibilities of community building, connection, identity formation, and micro-practices of resistance in trans disabled digital communities. Trans disabled bloggers counter epistemic injustice by speaking back, reclaiming space, and responding to the cisgenderist and ableist/sanist micro-aggressions they experience in their daily lives. This exploration of trans disabled bloggers' micro-activism is divided into four parts. After reviewing the literature in the emerging field of trans disability studies in the first part, the second and third parts present our theoretical and methodological frameworks. Findings are presented and discussed in the three subsections of the fourth part, which delves deeper into our typology of three interrelated genres of trans disabled blog posts: informational, testimonial, and activist. As their names suggest, these genres aim respectively to: 1) inform other trans disabled internet users of identificatory possibilities; 2) testify about bloggers' lived experiences; and 3) advocate for trans disabled people through appeals to users both within and outside trans and disabled communities.
Pathology demands path. Defined as a track, a personal direction, and a scheduled course of actio... more Pathology demands path. Defined as a track, a personal direction, and a scheduled course of action, normative social life is dictated by paths that precede us and articulate the boundaries of our dreaming. In Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder, Twoey Gray illustrates ace Madness not only as an identity, but as a genre and a methodology of resistance against paths of compulsory able-bodymindedness and compulsory (hetero)sexuality.
M. Remi Yergeau’s Authoring Autism (Duke UP, 2018) is many things: it is the story of Yergeau’s o... more M. Remi Yergeau’s Authoring Autism (Duke UP, 2018) is many things: it is the story of Yergeau’s own autistic coming-to-consciousness and of the entwining narratives that produce their autistic subjectivity. It is also the story of contradictory and often warring discourses that invent “the autistic,” whether as a futureless child, an epidemic, a subhuman, or an earth-alien. Key among these is the image of the autistic person as “demi-rhetor,” either too autistic to signify or not autistic enough to signify autism. Into the latter category falls autistic scholars such as Yergeau and myself. Into the former, the much-maligned “shit-smearing” autistic, whose fecal matter(s) constitute a recurring theme of the text, whose project, as we will see, concerns the neuroqueering of rhetoric. In this work, autism does more than speak. It dances, cries, shits, and slings it –– and, according to M. Remi Yergeau, it’s time to start listening.
This review engages with two queer approaches to archival knowledge and critical literacy, repres... more This review engages with two queer approaches to archival knowledge and critical literacy, represented, respectively, in Cait McKinney's Information Activism and Eric Darnell Pritchard's Fashioning Lives. In Information Activism, McKinney explores the physical and digital contents of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, considering the implications of late twentieth-century lesbian activism on contemporary queer publics, and on their own identity. In Fashioning Lives, Pritchard fuses his own Black queer literacy narrative with a collage of interviews to form a capacious definition of "reading" and resisting racist, reductionist litgeracy norms. Blending autobiographical, ethnographic, and archival methods, both compellingly excavate racialized, gendered, and queer literacy practices, and present queerness as a text to be read, passed-on, and madekin with via intergenerational engagement. They also bring to light the epistemic violence underpinning both literacy norms and archives, while simultaneously identifying their ambiguity and partiality as possible points of queer transformation.
Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, 2024
Cavar and Bougie aren't a couple, but as far as scholarship goes, you could say they've been gett... more Cavar and Bougie aren't a couple, but as far as scholarship goes, you could say they've been getting it on. In this dialogue, we (Cavar and Bougie) will consider the titillating constraints and radical possibilities in scholarship across space and time zones, for work that is not only cripistemological in framework but also aromantic and asexual in method and manifestation. Exploring the unspeakable and unthinkable language of academic crushes, scholarly kink, and cybersex(uality studies), we will unpack our relationship as trans, neurodivergent queers and nascent scholars to each other and the critically queer, severely disabled digital spaces in which our relationship emerged. Ultimately, we ask: What does a queer, crip, and aro/ace approach to collaboration look like? What might it mean to explore scholarly "coupledom"? And what might be learned—what vital and visceral knowledges might be shared—with and through an erotics of virtual cowriting, uniquely available to us as scholarly homemakers in an increasingly digitized landscape? Fusing the queer quotidian with messy, spontaneous crip collaboration, and through both text and texts, we will explore the boundaries of our collaboratory experiment and the (crip)istemic possibilities it offers.
Public scholar, poet, and activist Mel Baggs (sie/hir pronouns) died on April 11, 2020 in the thi... more Public scholar, poet, and activist Mel Baggs (sie/hir pronouns) died on April 11, 2020 in the thick of a catastrophic pandemic responsible for spotlighting long-held ableist, eugenic rhetorics that literally and figuratively structure disabled life. Since hir passing, however, Baggs's "emblogged" archive-remains powerfully relevant to anti-ableist discourse in an age of COVID-19, laying bare the invisible institutional contours, material and linguistic, undergirding disabled existence. In this article, I will engage with critical texts from Baggs's" online oeuvre, what I call an emblogged activist archive, written both from within and in the wake of pre-COVID institutional violence, asking what it means to survive/archive against a medical industry built to hasten disabled death. I will explore the ways in which Baggs reveals the discursive architecture of institutionalization, which follows and constitutes disabled subjects-including and especially Baggs hirself-both within and outside of hospital walls. Reading renewed interest in the euphemistic language of !triage," "quality-of-life," and "congregate care" through what I call hir "Baggsian Experiential Framework," I will argue that Baggs remixes the language of hir oppression, using new and renewed terminology including the "Nice Lady Therapist," "Snake Words," and the "Burrito Test." At the same time, sie remaps the institution as a discursive condition of disabled life rather than only a discrete(/discreet) location in which certain lives are led. Baggs uses emblogged, queercrip digital space to advance a formidable counter-discourse that has saved hir life and now preserves hir legacy.
Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 2023
Larissa Lai's (2002) visionary novel, Salt Fish Girl, is teeming with sensations beneath and beyo... more Larissa Lai's (2002) visionary novel, Salt Fish Girl, is teeming with sensations beneath and beyond capitalist control. An atemporal narrative follows Miranda, a near-future young woman conceived by a durian and afflicted by a "memory disease" that produces distinctive body odor and flashbacks to episodes of colonial violence that the powerful would prefer to forget. While subjected to treatment for this "disease," Miranda falls in love with Evie, erstwhile sweatshop laborer with carp DNA and body odor to match. In a story of anti-state, anticapitalist rebellion, Miranda and Evie defect from straight, sane, and abled sterility. Aided by human/carp comrades called The Sonias, they realize spaces Elsewhere and Otherwise at the edges of the collective imagination. Using a queercrip conceptual framework, the article attends to the alienated, nonhuman body as a site of erotic play through Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Ellery Russian's (2010) concept of the "crip lust of recognition," arguing that it is within that space of affirmation and lust that criptopias beyond the "rational" might be found(ed). Finally, Salt Fish Girl is read alongside recent works of speculative activistscholarship to theorize queercrip, multispecies resistance and imagination toward criptopian possibilities.
T4t is a history, a marker, and a signal –– but is it praxis? Amid longstanding discourses of que... more T4t is a history, a marker, and a signal –– but is it praxis? Amid longstanding discourses of queer and trans contagion, which both facilitated the close of craigslist’s “t4t” personals and spur claims of “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” today, I present t4t pollination as an alternative way of conceptualizing how trans bodyminds take shape through myriad relational, pollinatory networks, networks that pose radical and literally trans-formative alternatives to individualized, pathological transness. Specifically, pollination constitutes an intra-active (Barad 2007) “praxis of love” (Malatino 2019) wherein t4t does not only unite pre-existing trans subjects, but facilitates trans emergence through shared desire. First, I historicize craigslist and other digital trans counterpublics: in these anonymous sexual spaces, subjects became trans 4 each other. Then, drawing from queercrip, transfeminist, and New Materialist frameworks, I trace t4t desire as methodology and epistemology in the process of becoming-trans, a process which refuses medico-legal constructions of “legitimate” trans identity. This article makes two primary interventions: it is a queercrip expansion of existing New Materialist approaches to trans subjectivity, and also provides an anti-ableist approach to transphobic “social contagion” discourse by reclaiming social pollination. I argue that trans is “loved into possible” via intra-active recognition of desire, possibility, and similar-difference, that is, when awareness of trans possibility is pollinated. Such pollination –– the making of new trans subjects where trans was once deemed impossible –– is critical to a radical anti-ableist, anti-cissexist project.
Refuse! is a toolkit for thin/non-fat disorderly eaters for confronting systemic anti-fatness in ... more Refuse! is a toolkit for thin/non-fat disorderly eaters for confronting systemic anti-fatness in our communities and selves. This piece illustrates points of similarity / solidarity between thin disorderly eaters and fat people across bodymind and (non)diagnosis. Fighting systemic anti-fatness is necessary for a robust, harm-reduction oriented response to systems of medico-psychiatric violence that steal our autonomy in the name of “health.”
Refuse! is grounded in a radical transMad fat politic and prioritizes bodily autonomy for all. Rather than predicating individual/collective “body positivity” on the idea of normative recovery (into an always-thin body), I offer tools for liberation that moves beyond the binary of individualized “illness” and “health.”
This theory poem-qua-checklist draws on micha cárdenas's multimodal project of transrealness, whi... more This theory poem-qua-checklist draws on micha cárdenas's multimodal project of transrealness, which allows us to think "trans" beyond normative understandings of subjectivity, truth, and collective/consensus reality. Ironically responding to the internal contradictions of the cisheteropatriarchal demands of gender, this piece seeks to exploit those contradictions, not toward resolution, but abolition/escape.
I, a Mad, autistic, multiply-disabled person, began my PhD in Cultural Studies in September of 20... more I, a Mad, autistic, multiply-disabled person, began my PhD in Cultural Studies in September of 2020. I started to make my home in graduate school during the COVID-19 pandemic, fully online, and I've excelled, calling into question normative assumptions of in-person socialization, education, and collaboration as superior to their virtual counterparts. In this article, I reflect on the cripistemic pedagogies of failure that facilitated a neuroqueered and transMaddened transition to Zoom-based graduate life. I will also consider email, text messages, and video calls as equalizing mediums in which both formal and fugitive spaces can open for queercrip collaboration across borders, timezones, and access needs. Lastly, I will tell the stories of technological 'failures' that I have experienced—miscommunications, failing internet, time delays—as generative possibilities rather than indictments of a non-normative learning. Necessarily imperfect and rife with humorous, intriguing...
Experimental autie-biography –– autistic autobio/ethnography –– addressing the nexus of cishetero... more Experimental autie-biography –– autistic autobio/ethnography –– addressing the nexus of cisheteronormative and neuronormative social conditions. Ultimately, this text illuminates a neuroqueer framework for understanding lives shaped by queer, trans, and neurodivergent/disabled experiences, not as siloed identities to be mutually disavowed, but as interlocking forms of experience fertile for solidarity.
This review engages with two queer approaches to archival knowledge and critical literacy, repres... more This review engages with two queer approaches to archival knowledge and critical literacy, represented, respectively, in Cait McKinney’s Information Activism and Eric Darnell Pritchard’s Fashioning Lives. In Information Activism, McKinney explores the physical and digital contents of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, considering the implications of late twentieth-century lesbian activism on contemporary queer publics, and on their own identity. In Fashioning Lives, Pritchard fuses his own Black queer literacy narrative with a collage of interviews to form a capacious definition of “reading” and resisting racist, reductionist literacy norms. Blending autobiographical, ethnographic, and archival methods, both compellingly excavate racialized, gendered, and queer literacy practices, and present queerness as a text to be read, passed-on, and made- kin with via intergenerational engagement. They also bring to light the epistemic violence underpinning both literacy norms and archives, while simultaneously identifying their ambiguity and partiality as possible points of queer transformation.
As part of a larger research project on the intersections between transness, disability, cisgende... more As part of a larger research project on the intersections between transness, disability, cisgenderism (also called transphobia), and ableism/sanism, this article presents the results of a three-month netnography of blog posts made between 2013 and 2019 by selected Tumblr and off-Tumblr blogs authored by people identifying as both trans and disabled. Mobilizing a theoretical framework that combines trans and disability/crip/Mad theory and the notion of epistemic injustice, we highlight the unique possibilities of community building, connection, identity formation, and micro-practices of resistance in trans disabled digital communities. Trans disabled bloggers counter epistemic injustice by speaking back, reclaiming space, and responding to the cisgenderist and ableist/sanist micro-aggressions they experience in their daily lives. This exploration of trans disabled bloggers' micro-activism is divided into four parts. After reviewing the literature in the emerging field of trans di...
What, how, and who is transbutch? In this thesis, I examine memoirs and personal essays that defi... more What, how, and who is transbutch? In this thesis, I examine memoirs and personal essays that define and defy boundaries between “butch" and “transmasculine" subjectivity –– and investigate my own queer experience in the process –– in order to counter the myth of an irreparable trans/ butch divide. Deemed by some to be “border wars,” conflicts between transness and butchness are emblematic of the contested (hi)stories on which the identities are founded: namely, white supremacy, colonialism, transmedicalism, and lesbian separatism/trans-exclusionary radical feminism. Ensuing identity-battles –– which have increased with increased access to biomedical transition –– rely on a teleological approach to identity, and, I argue, may only be ameliorated by prioritizing experiential multiplicity and political affinity over fixed, essential truth. Through engagement with a variety of personal narratives by authors such as S. Bear Bergman, Ivan Coyote, Rae Spoon, and blogger MainelyBu...
As part of a larger research project on the intersections between transness, disability, cisgende... more As part of a larger research project on the intersections between transness, disability, cisgenderism (also called transphobia), and ableism/sanism, this article presents the results of a three-month netnography of blog posts made between 2013 and 2019 by selected Tumblr and off-Tumblr blogs authored by people identifying as both trans and disabled. Mobilizing a theoretical framework that combines trans and disability/crip/Mad theory and the notion of epistemic injustice, we highlight the unique possibilities of community building, connection, identity formation, and micro-practices of resistance in trans disabled digital communities. Trans disabled bloggers counter epistemic injustice by speaking back, reclaiming space, and responding to the cisgenderist and ableist/sanist micro-aggressions they experience in their daily lives. This exploration of trans disabled bloggers' micro-activism is divided into four parts. After reviewing the literature in the emerging field of trans disability studies in the first part, the second and third parts present our theoretical and methodological frameworks. Findings are presented and discussed in the three subsections of the fourth part, which delves deeper into our typology of three interrelated genres of trans disabled blog posts: informational, testimonial, and activist. As their names suggest, these genres aim respectively to: 1) inform other trans disabled internet users of identificatory possibilities; 2) testify about bloggers' lived experiences; and 3) advocate for trans disabled people through appeals to users both within and outside trans and disabled communities.
Pathology demands path. Defined as a track, a personal direction, and a scheduled course of actio... more Pathology demands path. Defined as a track, a personal direction, and a scheduled course of action, normative social life is dictated by paths that precede us and articulate the boundaries of our dreaming. In Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder, Twoey Gray illustrates ace Madness not only as an identity, but as a genre and a methodology of resistance against paths of compulsory able-bodymindedness and compulsory (hetero)sexuality.
M. Remi Yergeau’s Authoring Autism (Duke UP, 2018) is many things: it is the story of Yergeau’s o... more M. Remi Yergeau’s Authoring Autism (Duke UP, 2018) is many things: it is the story of Yergeau’s own autistic coming-to-consciousness and of the entwining narratives that produce their autistic subjectivity. It is also the story of contradictory and often warring discourses that invent “the autistic,” whether as a futureless child, an epidemic, a subhuman, or an earth-alien. Key among these is the image of the autistic person as “demi-rhetor,” either too autistic to signify or not autistic enough to signify autism. Into the latter category falls autistic scholars such as Yergeau and myself. Into the former, the much-maligned “shit-smearing” autistic, whose fecal matter(s) constitute a recurring theme of the text, whose project, as we will see, concerns the neuroqueering of rhetoric. In this work, autism does more than speak. It dances, cries, shits, and slings it –– and, according to M. Remi Yergeau, it’s time to start listening.
This review engages with two queer approaches to archival knowledge and critical literacy, repres... more This review engages with two queer approaches to archival knowledge and critical literacy, represented, respectively, in Cait McKinney's Information Activism and Eric Darnell Pritchard's Fashioning Lives. In Information Activism, McKinney explores the physical and digital contents of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, considering the implications of late twentieth-century lesbian activism on contemporary queer publics, and on their own identity. In Fashioning Lives, Pritchard fuses his own Black queer literacy narrative with a collage of interviews to form a capacious definition of "reading" and resisting racist, reductionist litgeracy norms. Blending autobiographical, ethnographic, and archival methods, both compellingly excavate racialized, gendered, and queer literacy practices, and present queerness as a text to be read, passed-on, and madekin with via intergenerational engagement. They also bring to light the epistemic violence underpinning both literacy norms and archives, while simultaneously identifying their ambiguity and partiality as possible points of queer transformation.
Uploads
Refuse! is grounded in a radical transMad fat politic and prioritizes bodily autonomy for all. Rather than predicating individual/collective “body positivity” on the idea of normative recovery (into
an always-thin body), I offer tools for liberation that moves beyond the binary of individualized “illness” and “health.”
Refuse! is grounded in a radical transMad fat politic and prioritizes bodily autonomy for all. Rather than predicating individual/collective “body positivity” on the idea of normative recovery (into
an always-thin body), I offer tools for liberation that moves beyond the binary of individualized “illness” and “health.”