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Crip Genealogies Virtual Book Launch
April 14, 2023 @ 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Free
Crip Genealogies Virtual Book Launch
Friday, April 14 at 4:00 – 5:30pm (ET) on Zoom
Join us as we celebrate the publication of Crip Genealogies, a new volume that seeks to reorient the field of disability studies by centering the work of transnational feminism, queer of color critique, and trans scholarship and activism. The co-editors — Mel Y. Chen, Alison Kafer, Eunjung Kim, and Julie Avril Minich — will briefly introduce the volume, followed by comments from eight contributors and a conversation with the audience.
The image on the cover is a detail of Sandie Chun-shan Yi’s artwork titled Skinny (2014–2019), made in collaboration with Rahnee Patrick. The color photograph consists of a close-up view of two small sacs made with silk organza resting on a white background. One sac takes up the lower half of the image while the other sac appears to float above it. Both sacs contain pieces of human skin flakes and have clusters of embroidery stitches in dark red and ivory colors. e book title, Crip Genealogies, sits in between the sacs. The editors’ names—Mel Y. Chen, Alison Kafer, Eunjung Kim, and Julie Avril Minich—appear in smaller font and in all capital letters above the book title, to the right. The bottom right corner features the text “with a foreword by therí a. pickens” in lowercase letters.
Mel Y. Chen is associate professor of gender and women’s studies and director for the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture at the University of California, Berkeley. Following Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Duke University Press, 2012), they are completing a second book titled Chemical Intimacies, on intoxication’s involvement in archival histories of the interanimation of time, race, and disability. Besides publishing widely in journals, Chen coedits a Duke book series titled Anima, enjoys teaching to the odd note, and is part of a small and sustaining queer/trans of color arts collective in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Alison Kafer is the Embrey Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and an associate professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin, where she also teaches courses in lgbtq studies and disability studies. She is the author of Feminist, Queer, Crip (2013), which theorizes crip futurity and imagines futures for disabled people through cross-disability, cross-movement, and coalition politics. Her more recent work appears in Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience; the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies; and South Atlantic Quarterly. She is currently working on a manuscript on disability and reproductive justice.
Eunjung Kim is an associate professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies and the Department of Cultural Foundations of Education and Disability Studies Program at Syracuse University. She is the author of Curative Violence: Rehabilitating Disability, Gender and Sexuality in Modern Korea (Duke University Press, 2017, winner of Alison Piepmeier Award, James B. Palaise Prize). Her work has appeared in journals such as Catalyst: Feminism, Theory and Technoscience; Sexualities; GLQ; and Social Politics, and in edited collections, Against Health; Intersectionality and Beyond; Asexualities; and Disability, Human Rights, and the Limits of Humanitarianism. Her research and teaching is in transnational feminist disability studies theories, asexuality theories, and crip ecologies. She is a member of the disabled women’s organization Jangaeyeosong Gonggam, wde, in South Korea.
Julie Avril Minich is an associate professor in the departments of English and Mexican American & Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Minich is the author of Accessible Citizenships: Disability, Nation, and the Cultural Politics of Greater Mexico (2014), winner of the 2016 MLA Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies. Her next book, titled Radical Health: Unwellness, Care, and Latinx Expressive Culture, is forthcoming from Duke University Press in October 2023.
Lezlie Frye is an assistant professor of gender studies and disability studies in the School for Cultural and Social Transformation at the University of Utah. Her research concentrates on the cultural history of disability, race, and gender in the United States since the 1970s, with a particular emphasis on histories of state violence, citizenship, and social movements. Lezlie received her PhD in 2016 from the American Studies Program, Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, at New York University and was the 2014–15 Predoctoral Research Fellow in the Fisher Center for Gender Studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Lezlie is currently working on a manuscript titled “Domesticating Disability: Post–Civil Rights Racial Disenfranchisement and the Birth of the Disabled Citizen.” Lezlie’s academic work is preceded by over a decade of popular education, performance, activism, and organizing work that coheres around disability, racial, and economic justice.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a queer disabled and autistic nonbinary femme writer, educator, curator, and disability/transformative justice worker of Burgher/ Tamil Sri Lankan and Irish/Galician/Roma descent. They are the author or coeditor of ten books, including The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs, Beyond Survival: Stories and Strategies from the Transformative Justice Movement (coedited with Ejeris Dixon), as well as Tonguebreaker, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home, Bodymap, and Consensual Genocide; with Ching-In Chen and Jai Dulani, they coedited The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities. A longtime performer with Sins Invalid, they are creating Living Altars/The Stacey Park Milbern Liberation Center, performance and retreat space by and for disabled qtbipoc writers. They are the 2020 recipient of the Lambda Foundation’s Jeanne Cørdova Prize in Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction, recognizing “a lifetime of work documenting the complexity of queer experience,” and a 2020–21 US Artists Disability Futures Fellow.
Natalia Duong is a researcher, teacher, and performance maker whose work spans performance studies, Asian American studies, disability studies, and the environmental humanities. Her forthcoming book, Chemical Diasporas, examines the transnational spread of the chemical compound Agent Orange and the sensory and affective geographies created through its dispersal. Natalia received a PhD in performance studies with a designated emphasis in gender and women’s studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Her writing can be found in Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience; Canadian Review of American Studies; Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism; and Dance Research. Natalia is currently a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Suzanne Bost is a professor in the Department of English at Loyola University Chicago. She is the author of three books—Mulattas and Mestizas: Representing Mixed Identities in the Americas, 1850–2000 (2003), Encarnación: Illness and Body Politics in Chicana Feminist Literature (2009), and Shared Selves: Latinx Memoir and Ethical Alternatives to Humanism (2019)—and she coedited, with Frances Aparicio, The Routledge Companion to Latino/a Literature (2012). She has also published more than two dozen articles on Latinx literature, feminist theory, illness and disability, and archival practices. Her current work focuses on decolonial feminisms and silence.
Magda García received her PhD from the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where her dissertation research on affect theory, Chicanx/Latinx literary and cultural studies, and the speculative was supported by a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship. She is currently a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego, where she is working on her manuscript, titled “Claiming La Bruja: Rage, the Speculative, and Contemporary Border Tejanx Feminist Affects.” She is coeditor of Transmovimientos: Latinx Queer Migrations, Bodies, and Spaces (2021), alongside Ellie D. Hernández and Eddy Francisco Alvarez Jr. She is from the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas.
Faith Njahîra Wangarî (she/her) is a disabled wheelchair-riding scholar-activist with muscular dystrophy from Kenya. Her experience as a researcher, consultant in the humanitarian sector, and beyond has involved work on inclusive education, disability accessibility, sexuality, and health advocacy. She has given guest lectures at organizations and in university classrooms. She is a coproducer, with Shiilā Seok Wun Au Yong (2019), of the documentary film For All the Brilliant Conversations, a film about friendship, healing, and navigating trauma. Njahîra also contributed to #YouthCan (2020), a book collection of African stories in various sectors. She loves basking in the sun, dancing to music, being with loved ones, all the things that add to her joy. Njahîra founded Muscular Dystrophy Society Kenya in 2013 as a support platform for those with muscular dystrophy and their loved ones. She serves on the boards of the 1in9 Campaign (South Africa) and National Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (Kenya). Njahîra holds a graduate degree from Syracuse University through the Open Society Foundation’s Disability Rights and Inclusive Education scholarship program. Currently, she is a doctoral researcher interrogating healthcare professionals’ interactions with persons with disabilities with the Centre for Human Rights at the University of Pretoria, South Africa.
Kateřina Kolářová is a researcher at the Sociological Institute of Czech Academy of Science and teaches in the Gender Studies Program at the School of Humanities, Charles University, Prague. Her work engages intersections of disability, crip, queer, and race theories; dialogue between postcolonial and decolonial studies with disability and queer studies; and feminist queer crip interrogations of microbial lives and microbiopolitics. The manuscript for her forthcoming book, Rehabilitative Postsocialism: Disability, Race, Gender and Sexuality and the Limits of National Belonging, won the 2019 Tobin Siebers Prize for Disability Studies in Humanities. With Martina Winkler, she coedited Re/Imaginations of Disability in State Socialism: Visions, Promises, Frustrations (2021), which maps disability politics under state socialism across Eastern Europe.
Sony Coráñez Bolton is assistant professor of Spanish and Latinx and Latin American studies at Amherst College. He studies the intersections of Latinx and Filipinx cultural politics, literature, and embodiment through the lenses of postcolonial disability, queer of color critique, and transnational feminism. His forthcoming book, Crip Colony: Mestizaje, US Imperialism, and the Queer Politics of Disability in the Philippines, analyzes the disability politics of Filipinx mixed-race subjects during the historical transition from Spanish colonial to US imperial rule. Sony’s work has appeared in Journal of Asian American Studies, Revista Filipina, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, and q&a: Voices from Queer Asian North America.
CART and ASL will be provided.
If you require captioning and ASL simultaneously, we recommend using a laptop or desktop computer, and not a tablet or smartphone.
Please email accessibility needs as they relate to this event to msf440@nyu.edu
Co-sponsored by: Office of Global Inclusion, Diversity, and Strategic Innovation, Disability Studies & Advocacy, Proclaiming Disability Arts
