On the Road, At Conference

Abstract

NYU’s one-day symposium, Cripistemologies, was one of several conferences this year focused on the relationships between gender and sexuality studies and disability theory. Others included Debilitating Queerness: the Sixth Annual DC Queer Studies Symposium at the University of Maryland, College Park. Debilitating Queerness dovetailed with the University’s lecture series (bearing the same name), which featured (over the course of several months) lectures from Robert McRuer, Eli Claire, Jasbir Puar, and Heather Love. In her keynote address for the symposium, Puar offered a meditation on the normativizing impulses reflected in dominant modes of analysis in disability and transgender studies vis-a-vis the rubrics of debility and capacity. Cripistemologies organizers Lisa Duggan and Robert McRuer assembled a group of scholars based in the United States and Canada to speak to various dimensions of queer, trans, intersex, and disability theory. Organized into three panels, the day began with reflections on the recently published special issue of the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, featuring Katerina Kolarova, Robert McRuer, and Aly Patsavas. The second panel, “Injury, Illness, Chronic Pain, and Disability Studies,” brought together anthropologists S. Lochlann Jain and Karen Nakamura as well as ethnic and gender studies scholar Patrick Anderson. In the final panel, I joined Toby Beauchamp and Morgan