An Attunement to Quiet: Crip Feelings, Queer Intimacy, and the Trans Gaze, argues for the richness and potentiality of quiet as a structure of feeling. Rather than think through the identity categories which precede us and are inherently in our past, quiet invites us to look to the affective positions we share and bonds we make with one another in the present. The positions and bonds under examination here become sites of investigation to explore the worldbuilding potential of eroticism, incommensurability, hapticality. To articulate quiet, the project gathers and analyzes an archive of feeling to articulate the way these positions and bonds accrue over time to form the nuptial; a narrative of affective becoming. Following the contours of these narratives, the project organizes itself around three minor social formations which each provide an alternative ways of life through difference.

Special Issue on Disability and the Emotions. Ed. David Bolt. Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 14.1 (2020): 75-90.

If there is no crying in disability studies, then what becomes of those whose emotions are disabling or those whose disability is invalidated because it is considered just a feeling? This article explores the imbrication between emotions and disability in queer and affect theory. Building on Robert McRuer’s work connecting queerness and disability and José Muñoz’s theorization of brown feelings, I propose crip feelings/feeling crip to describe and attend to the slipperiness between disability identity and emotions. The term uses “crip” to signify how the confluence of disability and emotions further troubles the able-disabled identity divide and expands McRuer’s “ability trouble” not only to allow understandings of emotions to be put into crisis but also to proliferate opportunities for political alliances. The article begins with a reading of a keynote lecture that focuses on disability, feeling, and suicide to lay out the key terms and theoretical interventions. It then moves to a recruitment and extended reading of José Muñoz’s work on Fred Herko’s life and eventual suicide; finally, the article offers a reading of a representations of queerness and disability in culture to propose the overlap of queerness, disability, and emotions as an example of what may be possible when the slipperiness between disability identity and emotions occurs.

Submitted to Transgender Studies Quarterly and currently under review.

This article proposes transcrip study as an analytical approach and embodied intellectual practice through a recontextualization of disability within trans studies. This practice of thought becomes articulable by turning away from Discourse in two ways. First, theoretically, by thinking transcrip study through the relationship between disability and transness as affect as opposed crip/queer theory’s gravitational center: identity. And, second, textually, articulating a trans gaze rooted in embodied change as shown in Leo Xander Foo’s photographs of Lane, his cis caregiver, doing his T shot.