Essays sought for a special issue of GLQ: A Journal Of Lesbian And Gay Studies on The Intersections Of Queer Theory And Disability Studies
In multiple locations, activists and scholars are currently mapping the intersections of queer theory and disability studies. Queer/disabled thought has worked to move issues of embodiment and desire to the center of cultural and political analyses and to foster collective affinity within diverse groups. Although medi-calized constructions of normalcy have stigmatized both groups, undermining their claims to knowledge and authority, queers and people with disabilities alike have responded to oppressive historical conditions by creating oppositional identities and communities that speak back to the discourses of pathology, normalcy, and sympathy that would contain them.
Premised on the idea that our current division of the world into heterosexual/ homosexual is historical and contingent, queer theory considers how power is secured and contested around that binary opposition and how desires and identities do not fit neatly within such a model. Disability studies is similarly premised on the idea that our current division of the world into able-bodied/ disabled is historical and contingent, and seeks to determine how power is secured and contested around that binary opposition. Despite the commonalities between these two fields, however, a sustained dialogue between them is only now emerging. Although a highly developed body of cultural theory about AIDS exists, this work does not yet fully take into account the insights of disability studies. Queer theory more generally, although it purports to examine issues such as embodied desire and performance, often tends to theorize the body via the abstractions of postmodernism, eliding the immediacy and diversity of lived bodily experiences which have been central to the development of disability studies. Disability studies in turn has been slow to take up many of the concerns of queer theory, most particularly the importance of sexuality and gender as constitutive elements of identity and as fundamental influences in discourse/daily life.
Some questions we hope this issue will address are:
• How do queer theory's articulations of desire and erotic subjectivity further the project of theorizing sexual agency from disability locations, and what are its limits? How do disability locations extend the projects of queer theory in this regard?
• In what ways do queerness and disability paradoxically structure and reinforce the norms of heterosexuality and able-bodiedness from which they depart? How is this process inflected by their intersections with age, race, class, gender, and other social categories? Where and how do queer/disabled identities become transformed into oppositional politics? How do the frameworks of queer theory and disability studies suggest new possibilities for one another, for other identity-based frameworks of activism and scholarship, and for cultural studies more generally?
• What tools does queer/disability studies provide for conceptualizing the operations of medical discourse in daily life, and critiquing its pathologizing influences? How can these frameworks speak with and to each other about the strategic uses of medical discourses?
• What does knowledge in and as democracy look like? How do the liberal reformist and radical liberationist traditions common to queer and disability movements answer that question differently, and to what end? What are the relationships between knowledge, democracy, and access?
• Where and how (through what mechanisms of power) are queerness and disability binarized? In what ways is that binary always already transgressed?
We are interested in papers that address any topic pertaining to queerness/ disability. We would particularly like to consider essays theorizing:
• historical convergences of queerness/disability
• AIDS or breast cancer and/as disability
• transgendered identities and resistance to medicalization
• queer/crip autobiography and memoir
• crip/queer theory
• crip/queer sexualities and sexual practices
• compulsory heterosexuality and able-bodiedness
• race, queerness, and disability
• transnational disability/queerness
• mobility (across discourses, desires, identities, communities, borders)
• queer/disabled space
• body image, appearance (gym culture, cults of beauty and/or health)
• disabled/queer representations in literature, film, popular culture
• pathologized embodiment/desire
• cognitive or behavioral disabilities and queerness
• violence, hate crimes
• queer/disabled humor
Send submissions to:
Abby Wilkerson and Robert McRuer
Department of English
George Washington University
Washington, D.C. 20052
Essays should be received by August 1, 2001.
Society for Women in Philosophy
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