<p>We write collaboratively, as a recent graduate and long-time faculty member of a small women’s liberal arts college, about the mental health costs of adhering to a feminist narrative of achievement that insists upon independence and resiliency. As we explore the destabilizing potential of an alternative feminist project, one that invites different temporalities in which dis/ability emerges and may be addressed, we work with disability less as an identity than as a generative methodology, a form of relation and exchange. Mapping our own college as a specific, local site for the disabling tradition of “challenging women,” we move to larger disciplinary and undisciplining questions about the stigma of mental disabilities, traversing the tensions between institutionalizing disability studies and the field’s promise of destabilizing the constrictions of normativity.</p><p><strong>Keywords: </strong>academia,<strong> </strong>dis/ability, disability studies, education, feminism, identity studies, mad pride, mad studies, mental health, mental illness, queer studies, temporality, women’s colleges</p><p><em><br /></em></p>
This article serves as one of the supplementary pieces of this special issue on "Mapping Queer Bioethics," in which we take a solipsistic turn to "map" the Journal of Homosexuality itself. Here, the author examines the journal's 2011 consensus recommendations for the prevention of LGBT suicide. Invoking the axiom approach of Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick's seminal Epistemology of the Closet, the author argues that merely offering practical guidelines at the level of the demonstrative and the instructive may not be sufficient models to address the urgency of suicide rates in LGBTQ youth populations.
This essay argues that the emphasis on spoken contributions in English and other humanities courses can exclude disabled students. The COVID-19 pandemic's necessitation of online learning has forced instructors to offer students multiple entry points for conversation—not only through spoken dialogue but also text threads, anonymous polls, and communal annotation assignments. Instructors’ shifts in participation guidelines both before and at the height of the pandemic reveal faculty members’ adoption of a disability justice pedagogy that privileges flexibility. Drawing on these transformations, the author offers pragmatic suggestions for how to value course contributions beyond students’ capacity to voice their reflections aloud. The relinquishment of rigid academic expectations for participation makes space not just for students with disabilities but also for other minority populations, including women students, nonbinary students, first-generation students, and students of color who contribute their expertise in more capacious ways than the standard, discussion-based classroom allows. To conclude, the author considers how instructors might replicate accessible online tools—from Zoom chats to asynchronous platforms—in the return to face-to-face teaching. These new and primarily virtual forms of engagement reframe participation not as individual contributions to conversation, but as ongoing work intended for the purpose of community growth and collective care.
Nineteenth-century Spiritualism championed women with chronic illnesses as the ideal conduits for mediumship due to their assumed sensitivity. Positioning the movement’s many historical iterations of automatic writing as central to disability history, this article turns to two twentieth-century practitioners of automatic writing, Gertrude Stein and Lucille Clifton, whose centering of extrasensory perceptions in the compositional scene upend the privileging of the rational male subject who dominates accounts of authorship in literary studies. By modeling collaborative forms of writing that exceed consciousness, Stein and Clifton make way for embracing disabled authorship in our past and present.
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