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!