Fall 2014 Crip/Queer Programming

"She opened doors that were not only closed, I didn't even know they were doors"

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Reblogged from www.ThingsTransform.com
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Private Bodies, Public Encounters

Disability Studies is not anything new to the George Washington University, nor especially to its English Literature Department. The history of events such as the Composing Disability Conference, special guest speakers, and publications testify that GWU has been a home for Disability scholarship and activism to grow. Indeed, the host of parties ready to jump on board projects to Crip the University make evident the network that has already developed, e.g. the GW Creative Writing Program, Disability Support Services, Women's Studies, Philosophy, The University Writing Program, the Digital Humanities Institute, the Vice Provost's Office for Diversity and Inclusion, and Africana Studies.

With the Private Bodies, Public Encounters series of guest talks, movie screenings, and book readings throughout October (Disability History month), the University is signaling that "Disability has Come of Age at GWU." Pushed forward by a bulwark of faculty, the congress of departments and institutions are staking a claim for the future of disability studies in Washington DC. Following a socially engaged tactic central to crip activism, the coalition brought in speakers from near and far to skillfully deploy "Private Bodies" to shift the focus from individual persons or organizations to "Public Encounters." Each event stressed the ecology of embodied experience that connects rather than forecloses the lives of disabled bodies and intersecting contexts such as race, gender, and class.

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Good Kings, Bad Kings

Reclaiming access to bodies and shared experiences was a focal topic for discussion in the first event in Private Bodies, Public Encounters, with Susan Nussbaum's public reading of Good Kings, Bad Kings on October 6th, 2014. The over 60 persons in attendance on this first night were drawn in by various university seminars, posters, and a several story tall electronic billboard over Gallery Place. Once in the room, sign-language interpreters, micro-phone runners, and an interviewer helped facilitate the conversation between Nussbaum and a wide variety of guests. Indeed, for those who could not physically be in attendance, the event was video recorded as well as published via livetweeting. 

Followers online could check in via Twitter as Nussbaum unpacked how the writing of Good Kings, Bad Kings was aimed at crossing barriers of silence and representation. "S Nussbaum reading from "Good Kings Bad Kings," stresses importance of writing fictional  #disabled  characters  who speak in first-person" writes @JonathanHsy ,  "... trusts her readers to recognize BS when they see it! Reader experiences vary wildly; u need to struggle 2b clear but 'not pander.'" Audience members responded to Nussbaum's project aimed at affirming the lives that already exist within exploitative systems of incarceration and medical management, and then challenging these structures by creating creative access between life stories, contexts, and alternative worlds. Mitchell praised this multiplicity and boundary crossing as integral to the success of Good Kings, Bad Kings, noting the "wide diversty of #disabled experiences; we have very few books abt MULT disabled ppl; 1 character can't stand for all" (@JonathanHsy). In many ways, Nussbaum's generosity did not end in writing or reading the text, making herself available for book-singing, pictures and personal conversation after the event

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Sins Invalid

Excitement generated on the first night spilled over into the screening and discussion of Sins Invalid with Leroy Moore Jr. Working through technological challenges and problems of accessibility, the film brought audience members into the theater studios where an array of performers shared their lives and experiences of disability. Stories ranged from an intimate look into  private bodies and sexual encounters to a dramatic dance ending in a flying wheelchair in front of a blood-red cross representing the passion and violence of public encounters. The film used sights, sounds, and bodily contact to give viewers entrance points into lives that are often segregated or covered up.

Framing the screening, Moore Jr. discussed how the project of creating bridges required ideological as well as technical crossings. One goes from "Disability Rights" (the architectural and legal work towards equality and access) to "Disability Justice" (the cultural work towards diversifying presentation and community) by "coming face to face with your 'isms" argued Moore Jr (@Transliterature). This endeavor in intersectionality helped to generate collective projects such as Sins Invalid on stage and on screen, as well as Moore Jr.'s personal project Kriphop, the embodied performance of hip-hop and disability that changes one's experience to both (@Transliterature). Sharing some of his verse with the audience, Moore Jr. concluded by talking about the critical work of re-presentation that artistic ventures such as these accomplish offering alternative scripts for race, gender and disabled sexuality.

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Self Preservation: the Art of Riva Lehrer

Closing out the month, professors and filmmakers Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell screened "Self Preservation: The Art of Riva Lehrer" and discussed the crip politics of aesthetics. Working in conjunction with the George Washington University Textile Museum, Snyder and Mitchell opened the event by showcasing a lab-coat constructed by Carrie Sandahl to draw critical attention to the medical industry's invasive surveillance and management of persons with disabilities. Demonstrating the inextricability of the lives of objects and bodies, the textile materialized the film's argument on Lehrer's work: liminal disabled lives can find preservation through art.

The film brought together interviews with Riva Lehrer and several of her subjects, friends, and fellow activists to unpack the politics of persistence in her work. While portraits are often said to tell a story across the space of the canvas, the film read back into the paintings how the temporal experience of producing the works affect the lives of those connected with the subjects and topics portrayed. "We can be heroes forever and ever, we can be heroes just for one day," cooed David Bowie as the film's soundtrack underlined the liminality of disabled lives. Like Nussbaum's writing and Moore Jr.'s performance, Riva Lehrer's paintings transform private bodies into matters of public encounter that carry the demand social change beyond the physical and ideological barriers that restrict the personal lives they connect. As Snyder and Mitchell's film and discussion afterwards argued, however, this work does not only move in one direction. The preservation of art can also have direct impact on the lives that produce it, giving the emotional, financial, and social support that sustain persons marked by disability  and affirm them as lives worth living.

Composing Disability Conference 2014

The following is a collection of tweets from

Composing Disability: Diagnosis, Interrupted 

Sponsored by the Disability Support Services,

the Department of English and the University Writing Program

at the George Washington University,

on 3-4 April 2014.

Thank you to everyone who spoke, contributed and tweeted.

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Reblogged from www.ThingsTransform.com
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April Meeting (Pirate Theory)

The Enemy of All

Daniel Heller-Roazen

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On Tuesday, April 1st (April Fools Day), 2014 the MATCH Working Group held meeting to discuss the Enemy of All by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Following in the wake of Mixology and then going Rogue (Panel) on Drunk Theory, it was time for some rum and Pirate Theory. The central question on the table: how to we take the non-docile (potentially intoxicated) body and turn it into political feeling?

Leading the discussion, Alan Montroso featured three chapters from the text: "Along Fluid Paths" dealt with the problem of locating piracy. When the object of study exists in motion, floating in the water-ways between the histories of nation-states, the history of pirates is better told through nomadology. Contrary to other non-human, un-human, inhuman or anti-human bodies, usually pre-territorialized within a politicized geography, the pirate's link with ocean-ways that have long alluded the attempts of nations to border or control allow them to be simultaneously everywhere and nowhere.

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Coming at "the Dialectic of the Sea-Dog," we traced the way early Nation-States created pirates as an extra-legal entity to battle against one another. Functioning in a loop-hole created by the governments, these pirates technically were neither the formal citizens nor armies of these countries and so could wage violence without legally constituting an act of war. Unable to formally pay those who were not legal entities (capable of being hired), pirates were given pseudo-legal looting "rights" to take what they will from their victims. Defined by the nations that disavowed them, Heller-Roazen argues that this was a contradiction that was targeted for synthesis and closure in the 20th century when world-wide nationalism (and war) put tighter and tighter limits on the definition of geography, citizenship and legalized acts of aggression. In a world governed by trans-national empires and so-called United Nations, non-legal combatants came to occupy the status, "enemy of humanity."

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Looking at "Justifying Humanity," Heller-Roazen's work as translator of many Giorgio Agamben's texts had evidently washed over his thoughts on the legal history of the concept "humanity." While mankind or the human have existed as theological, scientific, and philosophical concepts for some time, Heller-Roazen argues that the relevancy of humanity in a legal context is relatively modern. Looking at the diminished legal relevancy of "Christendom" as a catch-all trans-national term for "us" versus "them," the idea of humanity was brought in to serve as an over-arching status that a person gains by being raised up within civilized (colonial) society. Growing up alongside this understanding of humanity, the pirate functioned as a counter-national "Enemy of Humanity" that threatened the status and life of simultaneously everyone by being legally no-one.

February (Drunk Theory)

Drunk Theory

a rogue panel

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On Friday, February 7th, 2014 the MATCH Working Group held a special rogue panel on the night of the George Washington University English Graduate Student (GWU EGSA) "Post-ing: a Symposium on What Comes After," featuring the special guest speaker Roderick Ferguson.

Following a January discussion on Mixology and the role of alcohol in academic communities, MATCH sponsored a special Happy Hour at the Bayou bar and grill. Members prepared thoughts for a round of extemporaneous talks (or, rants) on topics including Manhattans, Vodka, Whisky, Wine, Beer, and Tonic.

Drinks in hand, the Reading Group discussed the pressures and reactions specific to race, gender, and sexuality. One speaker admitted that "Pink Drinks," such as Manhattans, open up men and butch women to comments by friends and co-workers. The pressure to perform specific roles at the bar and drink the right drinks can demand special behavior from academics that are looking to keep the conversation on their ideas and not on perceived incongruities in their gender or sexual identity.

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Whereas sugary cocktails undermine the reception of men, women & trans academics, drinking Whisky or dark liquor (especially for women) is perceived as serious business. 

For women that enjoy shots or Jack-n-Cokes, the consumption of whisky-based drinks can be seen as an attempt to imitate their male colleagues and appear tough. Even among intellectuals who would disclaim sexist division of liquors, comments such as "woah, is that scotch?" are far too common and can undermine the naturalization of women at bars and happy hours among their male and older colleagues.

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The demands on what drinks are appropriate for serious academics all work on the prior expectation that graduate students and junior faculty will need to be drinking and attending happy-hours, receptions, or after-hour events at bars if they are going to accomplish the necessary networking to be successful.

For many businesses, including the University, drinking can serve as an attractive Tonic that relaxes tensions and helps build community. This causes difficulty for people who cannot drink alcohol, including those who abstain because of health or religious reasons. 

Many serious discussions, plans and connections are made not on the conference or board-room floor but at the pub after the official event has concluded. Those who want to be included in these events are tacitly demanded to find ways to cope at bars or to insist on alternative meeting places, accommodations that often are met with personal or group resistance.

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Without even setting foot into a bar or putting a drink to our lips, alcohol still can direct how we act and how we are perceived. Alcohol ad campaigns such as the sexy cyborg that long promoted Svedka Vodka, continue to associate drinking with chauvinistic relations to women. 

The effect of this is to maintain environments of association in bars and conference wine-hours that place women in the position of sexual objects. After hour drinks at a conference can build up tensions that serve to objectify women that have worked all day to substantiate themselves as critical thinkers and formidable colleagues.

Granted that eroticism need not deflate a woman's power of being, but images like those from Svedka's cyborg ad campaigns set impossible standards of embodiment and performance. The curvy cyborg's stalk of a waist, broad hips and bare breasts train the eye of consumers to look for these features in the presence of vodka. This builds up desire for the drink by working on the promise of sex, but has the instrumental effect on the objectified women it uses to sell its product.

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The association between intellectual congress, sex & alcohol is hardly a recent development, whatever the futuristic cyborgs suggest. Wine in particular has fueled both the 4th century BC Symposium of Plato and its later Commentary by Marsilio Ficino in the 15th century.

Even without contemporary ad campaigns, treatises on eroticism and drunken stories about the lascivious Pan has perpetuated alcohol's association with sex for millennia. Often following in Dionysus's train, Pan leads his followers to other plains of thought and into the bedroom through the gifts of the vine.

The work of Pan's grape magic has helped form the school system that we have inherited, with its long tradition of sensual exchanges (of the mind and body). From the apprentices of Socrates to boys at boarding school, education's peculiar power games owe a lot to a system deeply invested in love and drink. 

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MATCH's critical engagement with Drunk Theory hardly diminishes our enjoyment of drink, although it does include a taste of its many bitter notes. Perhaps it is best to say that a glass of Beer has a great deal of power in the academy; and with that power flows many dangers as well as strengths.

Our work and our community would not be what it is without the tightening of bonds and relaxing of tongues that come at the pub house. As the jury glasses around the table testified, a theory working group convenes as the meeting of many full minds and full bodied drinks. However we may judge or liberate the spirits of the academy, we are all implicated in process and outcomes of Drunk Theory.

January Meeting (Queer Mixology)

"Pink"

by Robert McRuer

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Pink economies and pink ecologies flow through academia. Reading Robert McRuer's examination of this "unnatural" color, from the recently published Prismatic Ecologies (Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ed.), the MATCH Reading Group drank in how heady substances "sticks to" and "accelerates" minds and bodies (McRuer 64).

"Since the commingling of red and violent is a theoretical impossibility," writes McRuer "pink in a certain sense is about as real as the famous pink elephants Dumbo sees after he accidentally imbibes absinth" (64). 

This commingling of unnatural colors, unnatural bodies (flying elephants), and unnatural states of mind bring McRuer to examine how pink marks and mobilizes the gay community. Pink constructs gayness, as gay marketing and tourism reproduce pink drinks, pink scents, and pink mists around the world.

The libations & pink-dollars of gay production fuel academia. Whether directly, through the critical intervention of gay colleagues, or indirectly, through shared cultural reservoirs, the university is awash in pink.

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Contemplating the colors of unnaturally mixing, MATCH considered how absinth and its fellow spirits help theorists "stick" together and can propel the "acceleration" of ideas.

From wine hours to after-hour drinks, alcohol sponsors the official and unofficial meeting of minds across the academy. It was commented by one MATCH member that beyond what is spoken on conference panels and responded to during Q&A sessions, the real throw down of ideas usually happen at the bar once the schedules events of the day has died down. Tensions relaxed and elbows touching, challenges and collaborations in are often made over drinks.

Teetotaler and lust alike are conscious of the active material work that alcohol accomplishes for theory communities. Just as pink directs and chases gay bodies, whether or not they like it, the buzz that allows pink elephants to play around the academic community allow some bodies to feel unnaturally at home and others excluded from or trapped in a shared experience.

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No two people see colors the exact same way, scientists tell us (LiveScience.com). Between the differences in cones and rods in the eye, as well as variations in the brain, the sighted among us do not process light in any absolute fashion. Thus the pink that McRuer sees when he considers the Eau-Mo cologne bottle, may not be the same as the pink in my cotton candy cocktail (even if they measured at identical wave-lengths).

So too, no two people experience alcohol the exact same way. Whether drinks play across your tongue or around the room, alcohol produces an incalculable diversity of experiences for everyone it touches. Mixology reveals itself to be more like alchemy than an exact science. That is to say, it can be magical, demonic, transformative and explosive; making the stars spin widely across the sky at the same time as it brings us to gaze at them in new ways.

At this sticking point, the MATCH group began concocting a rogue session for the upcoming English Graduate Student Symposium, Post-ing, called Drunk Theory. Members will come together at a bar after the event has come to a close to share over drinks (of all sorts) the cultural and production of alcohol of various theoretical communities. Each person will speak on a drink of their choice and speak extemporaneously, flowing wherever the matter takes them and finding common sticking points.

For more on "Drunk Theory" please stay tuned!