Queer/Disability Symposium December 7
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| still from Marguerite (Marianne Farley, 2017) |
Students in English 3980W and 3910 invite you to attend a public symposium where they will combine and present their work-in-progress Four sessions will be held Saturday, December 7, in Phillips Hall 412 (the Dean’s Conference Room), from 10:30 AM-5 PM. The schedule is below. Come out and support this innovative student work!
Both courses are taught by Professor Robert McRuer. PhD students Ian Funk and Emma Cassabaum were also assigned to these two courses. English 3910 is the department’s signature Disability Studies class. Disability studies is one of GW English’s primary areas of strength; the interdisciplinary field describes a diverse array of projects, located primarily in the humanities but speaking to and with the social sciences, that challenge the ways in which “normalcy” and “abnormalcy” have been deployed to conceptualize physical and mental difference. Disability studies considers not only how disability functions symbolically in culture but also how people with disabilities have themselves been shapers of culture.
English 3980 is a unique course that the department has offered for the past decade. Transnational Queer Film Studies and LGBTQ Cultures is simultaneously taught in DC and in Prague to students from the Czech Republic (and across Europe) by Professor Kateřina Kolářová of the Charles University Gender Studies Program. For one week each November, Professor McRuer’s students travel to Prague to meet their counterparts and to attend together the Mezipatra Queer Film Festival (Mezipatra means “mezzanine” in Czech, signifying a place in-between, in the middle).
SCHEDULE FOR THE SYMPOSIUM:
SCHEDULE FOR THE SYMPOSIUM:
10:30AM -11:45AM Take Care: Crip/Queer Relationality
Juliette Garofolo, “A Crip/Femme/Queer Analysis of Madness”
Carolyn Spellacy, “Flannery O’Connor, Posthumanism, and the Grotesque: A Disability Case Study”
Macy Evans, “Age, Disability, and Other Queer Avenues towards Joy in Marguerite”
Ren Koloni, “Schizo* Is Sexy: The Eroticism and Exoticism of the Mysterious Madness”
BREAK
12:45PM -2PM Freedom and Unfreedom: Contesting Disability Representation
Natalie Caloca, “Embodying Buck v. Bell: Disability in Conversation with History”
Kelsey Hylton, “The Emergence of the Lobotomy: The Case of Rosemary Kennedy”
Emma Mitchell, “Ability-Washing: Suppressing Disabled Sexuality in the Name of ‘Freedom’”
Esperanza Ortega-Tapia, “Yes, We F*ck! Sex, Disability, and Trans* Experience”
2:15PM -3:30PM Elsewhere: Imagining Dystopia and Utopia
Maureen Albero, “The Impairment of Sacagawea: Decolonizing Representations”
Kendall Geisel, “A Utopian Here and Now: Translation, Transposition, Transition in So Pretty”
Erin Harvey, “Dancing with Disabilities: Glee’s Misrepresentation of Integrated Dance”
Chase Kleber, “Show Me Affect: Disability Performance and Beyond”
Ragavendra Maripudi, “‘Degrees of Deaf Rage’ and the State of the Subaltern: Christine Sun Kim’s Will to Be Heard”
3:45PM -5PM Magical Universes: Identifications, Infatuations, and Mythologies
Rachel Love, “Language Choice and Self-Identification in the Work of Terry Galloway”
Alessandra Brolin, “The Mythology of Freddy Mercury”
Morgan Caldwell, “Boy: Homogenization and Disjuncture in the Philippines
Megan Rhodes, “Harry Potter and the Stigma of Disability: Squibs as Outsiders to the Magical Universe”
Hiba Khan, “Disability in Bollywood: Patriarchal and Institutional Ignorance in Taare Zameen Par”
Hiba Khan, “Disability in Bollywood: Patriarchal and Institutional Ignorance in Taare Zameen Par”
