GEA Annual Conference: [De / st] abilized

Knocked off kilter, set in motion, thrown from orbit . . . ghostly, strange, misapprehended . . . othered, disabled, queer . . . late, nostalgic, anachronistic, futuristic . . . in what ways can bodies — biological, celestial, textual, conceptual, and beyond — be destabilized? How does a body destabilize the space and systems around it? Thinking of C. Riley Snorton’s assertion that “the possibility of misrecognition carries with it the opportunity for deliberation and the potential rejection of social scripts, which get mapped onto one’s body,” how does this opportunity or potential of the body work with, diverge from, and destabilize what we call ‘ability’?

This conference speaks to the intersection of disability studies, trans* critique, and critical race theory. We are inspired by scholars who seek to destabilize the imperialist, humanist, and identitarian discourses that adhere to bodies, including:

Mel Chen — “Is, then, the toxic body the disabled body? Or is the toxic body that collective body that biopolitically inoculates itself against a stronger toxin by affording itself homeopathic amounts of a “negative”  
toxin (disabled bodies) while remaining in a terrible tension with these negated entities?”

Christina Sharpe — “to think about new possibilities for subjectivities is to try to rehabilitate the regimes that demand our continued disposable lives…. Subjectivity is another form of governance that produces our slow deaths”

and Jodi Byrd — “I want decolonisation to not be figurative. I want our intellectual heft to transfigure the institutions that we’re in and I’m always a little unsatisfied that we haven’t done it yet”

A body moves in, and is laden with, a delicate web of inheritances, conventions, relationships, laws, seasons, rhythms, crises. A body can easily affect the balance of these systems. We want to ask: what is the relation of this disruption, this destabilization, to our concepts of “ability,” which carry connotations of normativity, practicality, and agreeability?

Where does ability start and destabilization end? We seek papers that think critically about instability and ability, as respectively negatively and positively construed positions. How is the distinction between these two positions continually enabled in social discourse, and how might it be destabilized?