My first book project is titled Crip Feeling, Queer Intimacy, and the Trans Gaze and argues that an attention to minor forms of feelings, intimacy, and ways of seeing offer alternative sociopolitical possibilities that center embodiment, affect, and relation over enlightenment notions of the individual, Reason, and the human. The project offers a number of key terms to enable a better attention to overlapping modes of being including: crip feeling/feeling crip, the transcrip gaze, and a transcrip theory of embodiment.

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? The 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, the slipperiness between disability identity and emotions is named crip feelings/feeling crip. 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; moves to a recruitment and extended reading of José Muñoz’s work on Fred Herko’s life and eventual suicide; and then offers a reading of a fictional representation of the overlap of queerness, disability, and emotions as an example of what may be possible when the slipperiness between disability identity and emotions occurs.

In their introduction to Cripistemologies Merri Lisa Johnson and Robert McRuer begin to chart where crip knowledge production comes from and eventually locate it elsewhere. Not the conference panels or R1 institutions but the watercooler and backwoods. They note that there are two yearnings present in knowledge production. Yearning to “attend to each other carefully and collectively” germinates elsewhere while a different kind of yearning, “to be the best, to have the best” is in evidence everywhere.” While it could be argued that cripistemologies that emerge from this elsewhere are made possible because of the physical space I think there is more to add here. While the space is important, I see equal importance in how the space becomes activated by those who occupy it. The watercooler becomes important because of its distance from the locations of work such as a conference room, an office, or cubicle. The knowledge produced at the watercooler might feel inconsequential but it offers a space for coworkers to discuss things beyond work. These discussions may be recapping a big sports game or a recent episode of a popular television show or they might be the only place where discussions of pay disparity and unionization are feasible because of the distance from their boss’ office and the ease with which conversations can be strategically started and stopped. I see the knowledge of the watercooler as a kind of subjugated knowledge that might shift our orientation towards the world but is only possible with some distance from the loci of power and authority. Elsewhere becomes the way of describing the places where this comes together and in the context of disability studies it is the figurative place from which crip knowledge emerges. This article imagines elsewhere as a way of describing the spaces created to foster alternative presents and call for different futures. This understanding of elsewhere extends Margaret Price’s “crip politic” defined as “a way of getting things done—moving minds, mountains, or maybe just moving in place (dancing)—by infusing the disruptive potential of disability into normative spaces and interactions.” What I see “getting done” by a crip politic is the activation of space and the creation of elsewhere.

Central then to this article is the question of how an elsewhere is formed within the afterlives of slavery such that a Black cripistemology can emerge? Said differently, how do Black disabled people create crip knowledge that “attends to each other carefully and collectively” in the face of not only ableism but anti-Black racism? If, as Saidiya Hartman describes, the afterlives of slavery in the United States are about more than particular laws but are in fact about a kind of anti-Black metaphysical infrastructure rooted in the “dutiful submission” of Black people then how can a Black elsewhere from which crip knowledge emerge come into being out of these conditions. Rather than focus on statistics or medical journals related to Black disabled people to attend to these questions I turn to the autobiographical which, as a genre, holds the possibility of Black disabled people writing themselves rather than being the objects of study. Further, as Saidiya Hartman notes, the autobiographical “is not a personal story that folds onto itself; it’s not about navel gazing, it’s really about trying to look at historical and social process and one’s own formation as a window onto social and historical processes, as an example of them.” By turning to the autobiographical I aim to explore not how Black disabled people were described but rather build on recent work defining critical disability studies that, according to Julie Avril Minich, ”emphasizes its mode of analysis rather than its objects of study.” Given that both Black studies as described by Hartman and critical disability studies defined by Minich invest in modes of analysis that center the perspectives and knowledges of Black and disabled people respectively it seems critical to turn to the writings and cultural production of Black disabled people.

To locate examples of Black elsewhere, I look to Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journal. In it, Lorde experience the violence of the medical industrial complex during their time in the hospital but they also challenge ideologies of cure and health as she alter the physical space of their rooms. I turn to Lorde and her entanglement with the medical system because through it all, her journals offer rich accounting of their experiences that become political theoretical treatises on Blackness and disability. Through close readings of their writings and experiences with medical professionals I aim to show how their quotidian resistance to ideologies of cure and compulsory able-bodiedness enabled the creation of Black elsewhere that offered new epistemological avenues with which to approach the world, even as they themselves faced grave illness. Working through this genealogy of disability offers a grappling with racialization not only through its itinerant violences but also the way Black disabled people create joy and community. Alongside this, Lorde grapples with the ways the medical industrial complex demands and assumes dutiful submission from each of them and both offer different modes of creating a Black elsewhere.

Crip Marxism, a project in collaboration with Rachael Nebraska Lynch, is a work in progress informed by our collective investments in Crip theory and critical approaches Western philosophy and its repercussions. The project traverses temporal periods and generic form to offer an accounting of the ways disability informs, structures, and challenges Enlightenment philosophy, Marxism, and the Commons.

This article analyzes the fifth chapter of Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time, “The Three-Day Blow,” a story that offers space to think through the potentiality retreat from the world. The chapter begins with Nick, one of the main recurring protagonists of the novel, going to visit his friend Bill at his family’s cabin after he breaks up with his girlfriend. This space of the cabin acts as an elsewhere where the status quo, such as the certainty of marriage, can be thought through and challenged. As they drink, move closer together, and discuss what Nick’s future would have been had he stayed with his girlfriend, Bill laments the idea of marriage and asks if Nick would not actually be happier unmarried and spending more time with him. Throughout the chapter Nick and Bill do not touch one another and Nick notes how he can feel Bill around him despite not being touched. What kind of trouble could be made through this absence and how does the cabin enable different kind of world to be thought? Thinking with Hypatia Vourloumis’ assertion that “unrequited touch is an unrequited world,” this paper close reads the chapter through the absence of touch. The lack of touching allows for the questioning of what would happen if they touch and what that might produce. Even as the touch goes unrealized, the space of the cabin offers a place away from the world where expectations and certainties can come under question and be troubled.

Building on Sami Schalk’s notion of disability metaphor, this article hones in on madness as a particular sub category of disability metaphor. Schalk notes that disability metaphor are “representations of disability that can be interpreted as representing something other than the lived experiences of people with disabilities, such as loss or evil.” When thinking of a mad metaphor I aim to expand the ways metaphor can be mobilized. Madness carries particular historical baggage within western thought. In contrast to the privileged position offered to rational thought or Reason within the West, madness exists as both a real lived experience of neuroatypicality and also a metaphor that coheres to deviance or otherness and at times, the violence of the metaphor causes neuroatypicality. Because madness is positioned as the antithesis of reason it can additionally be considered another mode of thought. To explore these many overlapping meanings of metaphor, I turn to Randall Kenan’s novel A Visitation of Spirits. The novel follows cousins Horace Cross and Jimmy Greene in the lead up and aftermath of Horace’s psychotic break and suicide.