The G.W.U. Crip/Queer Studies Presents: "Cultural Territories of Disability"

"What passes for disability representation in the arts 
is instead mostly fantasy about us."

Simi Linton

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On Dec 3rd, Simi Linton spoke to a collection of several classes, as well as faculty and students in GWU's Crip/Queer Studies contingent. Her remarks, which she entitled, "Cultural Territories of Disability," took on the form of a seminar style dialog with the audience. Over the hour and a half, she examined the history and current contexts of disability in the public, the role of disability arts in democracy, and engaged students with a screening of some of her films that illustrate the lived affects art has on people with a diversity of embodiments. Professor David Mitchell introduced Linton and explained that her work has already been an influential part of his course which was now in its final weeks. Indeed, the event was a special treat for students who were able to receive a clarification and continuation of thoughts they had been stewing on all semester.

At the start of her talk, Linton explained how her first book came out of a dinner at a restaurant with the desire to portray disability as an active mode of embodying the self and society rather than a passive state. As a discerning period, Linton decided that working in the academy would put too many limitations on her time, work, and conversations. In the end, she decided to leave the ivory tower of teaching, "to bring disability into the public" and use the arts to reorient societal orientations, "the cultural authority of disability." Disability justice requires mass participation in order to transform the physical and societal environments that disable those with non-normative embodiments. As Linton brought the audience into the conversation on disability culture, she spurred competition between classes in order to get a diversity of vantage points and to push the attending classes to see crip cultural authority as a good worth fighting to develop.

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Excerpted from Transliterature Online
A Center for the Study of Transgender and Disability

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Coming Soon: Cultural Territories of Disability with Simi Linton

Thursday, Dec 3rd, 3:45-5:00 PM

310 Media & Public Affairs Building

MATCH and GWU's Crip/Queer Studies is extremely excited for Simi Linton's upcoming talk this week to finish off a great semester of disability studies presentations. Please come join us on Thursday if you're in the DC area for a night of insight, stimulating conversation, and -- of course -- dance: Note this is a collaborative effort between the English department and Sharon L. Snyder's Gender & Disability class in the Women's Studies Program at the George Washington University

Simi Linton is an author, filmmaker, and arts consultant. Her writings include Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity, My Body Politic, andthe essay “Cultural Territories of Disability” in Disability. Dance. Artistry., forthcoming from Dance/NYC. She is the subject of the documentary filmInvitation to Dance, which she and Christian von Tippelskirch directed and produced. Linton’s consultancy practice, Disability/Arts, works to shape the presentation of disability in the arts. Linton was on faculty at CUNY for 14 years, was a Switzer Distinguished Fellow (1995-1996), Co-Director of the University Seminar in Disability Studies at Columbia University (2003-2007), Presidential Visiting Scholar at Hofstra University (2006) and a recipient of the 2015 Barnard Medal of Distinction. Linton was recently appointed by Mayor Bill de Blasio to New York City’s Cultural Affairs Advisory Commission.

American Sign Language Workshop

“Thou shalt not curse the deaf, 

nor put a stumbling block before the blind"

Leviticus 19:14

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On Wednesday, November 18th, 2:30 to 4:30 PM the MATCH Crip/Queer Working Group held a workshop on American Sign Language (ASL) as part of its initiative to increase familiarity with non-verbal forms of communication. The event was led by Samuel Yates and M.W. Bychowski.

The event began with a brief history of how ASL evolved from the French Sign Language system (which used two hands instead of the one handed English model) before it was brought to the United States as part of a new education initiative. The advantages of ASL included the ability to allow members of the Deaf community to communicate with one another while previous models focused on lip-reading, a process which privileges the hearing as the active user of language and the Deaf as the passive recipient. We discussed Deaf and signing culture, the development of local signs and the creation of artistic practices such as Yale's ASL Shakespeare Project.

Next we learned how to sign letters and some basic words. Each of us learned how to spell our names and introduce ourselves: hello, my name is ______.  We learned about the role of facial expressions to punctuate and modify signs. Among the signing etiquette we discussed was the how simulcomming can put the emphasis on the language of the hearing, modifying ASL fit into spoken English and breaking the grammatical rules of signing. In the end, we looked through various options for learning more about ASL through college courses, summer intensive language programs, online tools, text-books, and even smart-phone apps. However each of us moved on from the workshop, however, we all gained a better appreciation of the valuable culture of ASL.

Coming Soon: American Sign Language Workshop

Wednesday at 2:30pm - 4:30pm
The English Department Lounge

American Sign Language (ASL) is a beautiful and helpful linguistic culture used by roughly 2,000,000 people. That makes ASL the 4th most used language in the United States! In affirmation of the significant societal role ASL plays and as part of a MATCH Crip/Queer Initiative to improve familiarity with non-spoken languages, the Working Group is offering an afternoon workshop for beginners and those completely new to ASL. Come with questions and learn the history, culture and skills that makes signing an invaluable part of society. All are welcome!

For more information contact M.W. Bychowski (Mbychows@gwu.edu)

Crip/Queer Reading Group: Cripistemologies: A Virtual Roundtable

"How, when, where, and why do queer, feminist, and disability epistemologies converge?

"Proliferating Cripistemologies: A Virtual Roundtable" 
by Robert McRuer and Merri Lisa Johnson.

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On October 21st, MATCH's Crip/Queer Reading Group met to discuss "Proliferating Cripistemologies: A Virtual Roundtable," composed by Robert McRuer and Merri Lisa Johnson for GLQ, Volume 8, Issue 2, 2014. The curated roundtable included contributions from Lennard Davis, David Serlin, Emma Kivisild, Jennifer Nash, Jack Halberstam, Margaret Price, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Jasbir K. Puar, Susan Schweik, Jennifer James, Lisa Duggan, and Carrie Sandahl. The diversity of the participants reflected the intersections and divergences of many different trajectories in the node of crip knowledges, including feminism, queer studies, phenomenology, marxism, anarchism, and critical race theory. Each scholar brought their own questions and concerns to the table, "What tensions or torsions exist among various cripistemologies? Are certain forms of queer (anti)sociality, for instance, in discord with interdependency as it has been imagined and materialized by feminist disability studies? Are there crip positions, embodiments, or moments of pain or pleasure that necessarily exceed the (compulsory?) identities or identifications of rights-based movements?"

In turn, the members of MATCH echoed the multiplicity of movements that meet in the node of cripistemology. Debates arouse around the utility and danger of identity based politics, rights versus justice tactics of activism, the uniqueness of subject positions and "the situated i" that is always already in relation, as well as the role of systems of government and the free market. The members of the reading group posed their own critical insights and questions as well, drawing out themes relating to post-colonialism, performance studies, transgender studies, and medieval theology. In the end, the definition or use of cripistemology was left uncertain but furthered each of our thinking and produced new collective insights.

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The G.W.U. Crip/Queer Studies Presents: "Cultural Madness"

A Talk by Karen Nakamura 

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On October 22nd, 2015, Karen Nakamura spoke on "Cultural Madness: Notes on an Anthropology of Psychosocial Disability" at the Center of Media and Public Affairs at the George Washington University. The event was co-sponsored by the English Department's Crip/Queer Studies programming and Disability Student Services. David Mitchell introduced Nakamura, noting her recent work, Disability of the Soul, and her upcoming project on Transgender in Japanese Culture. Nakamura opened with a call for more disability studies within the field of Anthropology, especially projects focused outside the United States. The speaker subsequently discussed her work with Bethel, an intentional Christian community in Japan that supports a wide variety of peoples with psychosocial embodiments, including schizophrenia and depression. The subject of Nakamura's documentary, "Bethel: Community and Schizophrenia in Northern Japan," was a group of neuro-divergent and neuro-queer persons living in a small town attached to a hospital and university. It was from this population of outpatients that the Bethel intentional community arouse to promote mutual support and dialog. As the name suggests, Bethel was sponsored and founded by a Church group who wanted to affirm non-privatized, non-medical alternative forms of care in order to compliment and contrast the medical practices of the hospital. Modeled on programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous, Bethel members would meet, share stories, offer assistance and accountability, and consider their relations to society and the wider world.

While many academics might be suspicious of non-medical, Christian programs working with disabled communities, Nakamura found numerous positive alternatives that the socio-religious model offers over the privatized medical model. Rather than drug away the power of those with psychosocial illnesses or incarcerating (or otherwise institutionalizing) them in ways that isolate them and limit their agency, Bethel stresses social and cultural methods that reaffirm relationships. After persons with psychosocial traits become alienated from friends and family either by symptoms or by medical and legal agencies, Bethel works with the person to help bring them back into community, reestablish social bonds, and creating a sense of family. Nakamura offered critiques as well. As a "total institution," the Bethel community creates a kind of dependency on its programming. There are few options to take some but not all of the assistance the institution offers. You are either all in or all out. Furthermore, Bethel promoted a world-view of suffering oriented towards a release into oblivion. Also, the Bethel community remains fairly conservative in its view of gender and sexual politics, limiting the forms of relation and embodiment of its members. Finally, Nakamura explained, the Bethel model is difficult to duplicate due to its ready made population drawn from the hospital's outpatients and inpatients.

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Exerpted from Transliterature Online: 

A Center for the Study of Transgender and Disability Studies

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Coming soon: "Cultural Madness"

“Cultural Madness: Notes on an 

Anthropology of Psychosocial Disability”

Featuring Karen Nakamura

Thursday, Oct 22nd, 3:45-5:00 pm 

310 Media & Public Affairs Building

The George Washington University

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Nakamura is a cultural and visual anthropologist who researches disability movements in contemporary Japan. Her first project was on sign language, identity, and deaf social movements and resulted in a monograph and edited volume. After that, her second project was on schizophrenia and community-based recovery in Japan and this resulted in a book, its translation, and two films. She is currently finishing a third project which explores the intersections of disability, gender, and sexuality and will result in a book titled: Trans/Japan. After that, she is working on a project on prosthetic, replacement, and augmentation technologies in contemporary Japan and the USA.

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The event is wheelchair accessible. We welcome deaf & hearing 

impaired participants. Please contact dtmitchel@gwu.edu for ASL access

Sponsored by:

the English Department and Disability Student Services

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MATCH is Back: Planning Meeting 2015/16

This past week, M.W. Bychowski and Samuel Yates met to assess the accomplishments of the previous year and to plan events for Fall 2015 - Spring 2016.

Previously, monthly reading groups have proven a successful way to collect together scholars interested in topics related to crip and queer theory. We remembered the Low Theory discussion where MATCH affirmed through J. Jack Halberstam's Queer Art of Failure that philosophically rich cultural studies does not require participants to been fluent in a wide range of jargon or have the whole bibliography of theoretical texts under their belt. In that spirit, we planned that the MATCH meeting for October 2015 would be a return to the basics of Crip/Queer Studies by reading together a chapter from Robert McRuer's seminal book, Crip Theory.

Moving forward, one program that has been batted around in the past is finally coming to light. In order to improve academic praxis as well as theory, MATCH will be running seasonal American Sign Language (ASL) and Braille 101 Workshops in the Fall and Spring respectively. The purpose of these workshops is not to profess or learn mastery of these critically important languages but to increase exposure and familiarity. The exact form and schedule of these workshops are still to be determined but should begin in some form by the end of the Fall 2015 semester. We look forward to igniting interest in crip and queer studies at the George Washington University and beyond!

The G.W.U. Crip/Queer Studies Presents: "Why I am a Bioconservative"

A Talk by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson 

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On Sept. 17th, 2015, Rosemarie Garland Thomson spoke on "Why I am a Bioconservative" to a packed lecture hall at the George Washington University. The event was coordinated by the GWU English Department as part of its Crip/Queer Studies programing. David Mitchell introduced the speaker, praising her as a foundational figure in Disability Studies, authoring such influential texts as Freakery, Staring: How We Look, and Extraordinary Bodies. In an hour and a half, Thomson spoke on the important but often unspoken alliance between religious conservatism and non-religious disability activists around "Pro-Life" issues, specifically the abortion of fetuses to be born with physical or mental impairments, euthanasia, and the assisted suicide of the disabled.

By opposing not only the use but the cultural indoctrination of eugenics, disability activists find themselves joining forces with religious conservatives. Thomson contends that while religious and non-religious "bioconservatives" may disagree in first principles, these groups join together in their conclusions. For instance, "dignity" is a key issue within bioconservatives of either ilk. In this context, dignity designates a life worth living and deserving of "moral personhood" (rights and duties) as well as a "quality of life" (well being in medical care, politics, and employment). Religious and non-religious groups may disagree in the source and authority that bestows dignity: humanity or God. Nonetheless, persons of different belief systems can help preserve the dignity of those marked as undesirable: those who are "too expensive" in relation to their social worth.

Thomson stressed the important cultural work of bioconservatism that promote a culture of life. In particular, ritual practices such as the washing of bodies are acts of care common among religious and non-religious communities. Washing in hospitals, elderly care facilities, families by caregivers, as well as the sacramental blessing of children, the sick, and the dead are all examples of rituals that recognize the dignity of the bodies they encounter. Such rituals recognize the dignity of embodied experiences, Thomson argued. Through repetition, rituals directly create the conditions for a quality of life while affirming moral personhood. If washing were more openly a communal practice where the reception of care is a sign of dignity rather than shame, fewer people would be instilled with the belief that they would rather be dead than unable to clean themselves. 

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Exerpted from Transliterature Online: 

A Center for the Study of Transgender and Disability Studies

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CFP: Composing Disability: Crip Ecologies

Deadline for Abstracts: 

October 31, 2015

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Reposted from GW English News

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REVISED DEADLINE:

The new abstract deadline for GW's Crip Ecologies conference is October 31.

George Washington University’s biennial Composing Disability Conference returns in Spring 2016 with the theme of "Crip Ecologies." The event will be held April 7-8, 2016; featured speakers include Sunaura Taylorand Riva Lehrer, with others to be announced soon. Crip Ecologies is sponsored by the Vice Provost for Diversity and Inclusion, the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, Disability Support Services, the Department of English, the University Writing Program, the GW Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute (GWMEMSI) and the GW Digital Humanities Institute (GWDHI).

We invite proposals for papers and panels for this event. 250-word abstracts for papers and 500-word abstracts for complete panels should be sent by October 15, 2015 to cripecologies@gmail.com

Deadline for Abstracts: October 31, 2015

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Crip Ecologies: This symposium seeks to bring together scholars, artists, advocates, and activists working across the fields of ecocriticism, disability, and queer studies. Our goal is to think through the queer interchanges of environments and bodies in more radical ways. As vulnerable embodied beings that interact with our environments, we experience ourselves and others through a defining porosity: we are not only affected by the places we inhabit, but we also leave our imprint on these locations as well. Marginalized subjects, including disabled people, often experience their lives in greater proximity to environmental threats such as toxicity, climate change, generational exposures to unsafe living conditions due to poverty, militarization, body exhausting labors as in the case of migrant workers, etc. Further, we seek to investigate how non-normative bodies/minds can reframe what it has historically meant to be an environmentalist or "nature lover?” Crip Ecologies will draw out these wanted, unwanted, and even unknowable intimacies with our environments as materials for new trans-historical, cross-cultural, and crip/queer research about human, non-human, organic, and inorganic relationships that mark our experiences in the world.

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Possible topics include:

Composing Crip Ecologies
Crip Ecologies and Militarization/War
Crip Ecologies and Art
Crip Ecologies and Localism
Crip Ecologies and Environmental Justice
Crip Ecologies and Food Justice
Crip Ecologies and Farming
Crip Ecologies and Racial Borderlands
Crip Ecologies, Time, and Places
Crip Ecologies and the University
Toxicity, Embodiment, and Uneven Development
Queercrip Bodies in the Global South
Disaster Capitalism, the Environment, Disability
Entanglement Theory
Media Studies and Digital Interfaces
Crosscultural and Transhistorical Worldings
Race, Class, and Environmental Justice
Accessibility and Ecological Backlash
Politics of Racial/Crip/Queer/Trans Spaces
Intersectional Bodies and Policing in Security States
Class and Toxic Exposures under Neoliberalism
Rhetorics of Inclusion/Biopolitics of Exclusion
Non-productive Bodies and Alternative Practices of Everyday Life
Expendable Bodies and Economies of Neglect (Necropolitics)
Crip Mental Health Ecologies

For more information about the Composing Disability series at GW, visit this page on the Disability Support Services website and explore the Composing Disability tumblr site. You can also follow Composing Disability on Twitter (@ComposingDis) or join the community on Facebook.

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Coming Soon: Why I Am a Bioconservative

Why I Am A Bioconservative

Featuring Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

Thursday, Sept 17th. 3:45-5:00 pm 

310 Media and Public Affairs Building

The George Washington University

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This lecture has two interrelated purposes. First, it broadly suggests ways that principles, logics, guidelines, and rules of religious bioethics can serve effectively in situations and for populations outside of the particular religious tradition that generates them. Second, it offers the term bioconservative to describe my own ethical position as a disability bioethicist. To do this, I lay out a position between the concepts of conservation and liberal social politics to bridge religious and nonreligious belief communities. Because the term conservative is associated with the politics of the right, I bring forward a rationale for what is accomplished by invoking the term conservative and conservation for a disability equality and human rights-based perspective in bioethics. In the service of these larger aims, and most specifically, this talk draws from religious bioethics to explicate dignity as it pertains to quality-of-life judgments used in biomedical decision-making for life ending medical treatments. This is a written talk with PowerPoint.

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson is Professor of English and Co-Director of the Disability Studies Initiative at Emory University. Her her fields of study are disability studies, American literature and culture, bioethics, and women’s studies. Her work develops the field of critical disability studies in the health humanities, broadly understood, to bring forward disability access, equity, and identity to communities inside and outside of the academy. She is the author of Staring: How We Look and several other books. Her current book project is Habitable Worlds: Disability, Technology, and Eugenics.

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The event is wheelchair accessible. We welcome deaf & hearing 

impaired participants. Please contact dtmitchel@gwu.edu for ASL access

Sponsored by:

the English Department Rosenblum Funds 

and Disability Students Services 

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About Crip/Queer Studies at GWU

"The primary idea was to address 

an emerging interest in intersectionality studies – the ways in which we all occupy 

multiple identities"

David Mitchell

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Reblogged from www.ThingsTransform.com
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The value that Crip/Queer studies at the George Washington University has in the wider academic community was perhaps most clearly evidenced for me as I was preparing to leave GWU after completing a Masters Degree. At that time, I was fortunate and privileged enough to be accepted into substantial Ph.D programs, any of which I would have been immensely gracious to attend. It is this bounty of offers that drew my attention back to GWU. In some of the correspondence I received inviting me to join the university, it was mentioned that they wanted someone like me, doing what I do. They had no one else. Thinking this over, I found that they may very well be right. 

Indeed, what we do here at GWU is in many respects unique, or at least rare - too rare. Universities offer a bounty of gifts that no student can repay, but GWU offers a unique combination of resources and mentorship that cannot be found anywhere else - what we call our Crip/Queer Studies. In the end, I chose to go to GWU for my Ph.D because I am a unique scholar, with a unique project, and the unique programs at GWU, especially in Crip/Queer and Medieval Studies, creates a unique convergence of opportunities that I want to grow in and further throughout my career.

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What characterizes myself, my project, and Crip/Queer studies is not only an attention to the uniqueness of particular persons but the movement that turns from individual to collective struggles. It is not unheard of to have centers for Disability Studies and LGBT Resources, but often the premise of these programs is the policing of borders around identity categories. There are critically important issues and violences that stick to our bodies with the glue of identity and this should never be underestimated. However, identity can too often work by turning away from the shared experiences of those who are not recognized as sharing an identity. Too often, for instance, transgender is left out of the considerations of LGBT activist groups because the issue of gender is often handled separately from the issue of sexuality (which has become the focus of the organization). 

Likewise, to use the same example, transgender is rarely considered a part of the disability rights movement, despite the shared experiences with social mechanisms of diagnosis, treatment with drugs or surgery, and a history of alienation, stigma and incarceration. In academia, in part propelled by the work of the scholars here, the words Crip and Queer signify not merely a more elastic collection of experiences but a methodology that critiques identity as itself a part of the mechanisms of social control. Rather than close off the conversation, Crip/Queer studies embraces the collective struggle of the Trans, the Crip and the Queer with countless other marginalized modes of living.

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As a transgender woman completing her Ph.D with a dissertation on transgender in the middle ages, GWU's Crip/Queer studies area offers the unique resources and support systems that make my scholarship possible. Any time you enter into careers where your community and your area of work are underrepresented or unrepresented, there are bound to be countless roadblocks as people find it difficult to even imagine the possibility of your existence within the field. The choice to come out as transgender and transition occurred to the sound of countless doors closing - relationships I would never have, conversations I would never hear, jobs I would never get. 

The unlikeliness of finding work only compounded when I made the decision to pursue the study of transgender in the middle ages, a time and area of research, many too readily assume, in which discussions of transgender has no place. One of the first investments GWU's Crip/Queer Studies offered me was to open the door to give me entrance into a shared academic space. It does more than imagining the possibility of a more inclusive and diverse social project, it makes continued investments in students, faculty, staff, and programming to make those possibilities into a reality.

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In particular, it is worth noting a few features of GWU's Crip/Queer studies area that make it a fantastic resource. First, the quality and diversity of the faculty in the Crip/Queer area of study makes GWU a powerhouse that supercharges intellectual energies not only here, in the US, but transnationally. Students of Prof. Robert McRuer and Prof. David Mitchell travel abroad to places like the Czech Republic and Germany to experience the living material cultures of crip and queer subjectivities past and present. They also attract scholars from around the world to visit to give scholars at GWU perspectives on issues of race, religion, gender, sexuality, and disability that are otherwise difficult to get in and around DC. 

This influx of academic resources are none the more evident than in the Disability Studies conference hosted at GWU every couple years, where the University becomes a magnet for the critical work of leading scholars from around the world. The coursework provided by the Crip/Queer faculty and graduate students widen the discussion of medieval, early-modern, american, and british, post-colonial literatures to include often elided topics. As a result, the unique scholarship being produced from the undergrad level, to the Ph.D, to the faculty are demonstrating in quantifiable and unquantifiable ways the invaluable products of hosting a Crip/Queer studies group at the University.