National Women’s Studies Association 2013 Annual Conference, Cincinnati

The National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) held its annual conference meeting November 7–10, 2013. The conference this year was called “Negotiating Points of Encounter” and included the sub-themes “the sacred and profane,” “borders and margins,” “futures of the feminist past,” “body politics,” and “practices of effecting change.” While the presence of disability studies and attention to accessibility within the organization has been slowly increasing for several years, this year was one of the strongest showings of disability studies work on panels both explicitly related to disability and not. Part of this increased presence is due to both the sub-theme of “body politics” and the work of the newly re-formed Disability Studies Interest Group, headed by Sarah Smith Rainey and Petra Kuppers since 2012, which sponsored both a panel and an Author Meets Critic session at the conference.

There were four panels explicitly formed around issues of disability. At the “Disruptive Disabilities” panel, Ryan Perry talked about moments when we encounter disability and how at times these encounters do not make sense, resulting in instances of disorientation that can change the way we relate to the world and our own embodiment. Elizabeth Schewe presented on the representation of obsessive-compulsive disorder and masculinity in the television series Monk. Finally, Maricela DeMiriyn argued that disability is made an invisible part of Frida Kahlo’s subjectivity in scholarship on her, despite the fact that Kahlo maintained a pluralistic sense of her identity, as a disabled, queer woman of color, especially in her portraits.

At the Disability Studies Interest Group-sponsored panel “Encountering Scientific Knowledge: Feminist Science Studies Meets Disability Studies,” Merri Lisa Johnson presented the neologism “cripistemologies of ignorance” to discuss how the presence of existing knowledge about borderline personality disorder obscures the nonsensationalistic lived experience of this disability, a point she demonstrated by examining two characters in the television show Grey’s Anatomy. Aimi Hamraie’s paper applied feminist new materialisms to the history of universal design, discussing the limits of metaphoric uses of universal design and explaining more of its historical material basis in architectural measurements prior to 1970 based on body measurement statistics from non-disabled men in the military. Finally, Kelly Fritsch engaged Jasbir Puar’s critique of disability studies and her terms “debility” and “capacity,” asking the question: Can we mobilize disability in a way that avoids the pitfalls Puar identifies? Fritsch contended that rather than being a thing, disability is a doing, an intercorporeal enactment, a cut based on particular materialities.

The other two panels were “Feminist Cripistemologies,” featuring Brenda Brueggemann, Beth Ferri, and Kelly Fritsch, and “Negotiating the Margins of Body Politic: Toward a Theory of Feminist Disability Studies Methodology,” with Ally Day, Aimi Hamraie, Kate Caldwell, and myself. In addition to these disability studies-focused panels, other sessions included work on disability, including Sarah Rizzuto’s paper “Sexual and Romantic Love: Insight into the Disability Experience Through Poetry,” Rachael Shockey’s paper “The Politics of Sexual Objectification: Rethinking Material Bodies in Building a Feminist Disability Studies,” and Ayla Engelhart’s poster “The Social Contract Revisited: Implications in Black Feminism, Critical Race Theory, and Feminist Disability Theory.”

The most prominent disability studies event on the expansive conference schedule was the Author Meets Critics session on Alison Kafer’s Feminist, Queer, Crip (2013). The Author Meets Critics sessions are a fairly recent development in NWSA’s conference structure. These events are not exclusive on the schedule like plenary and keynote events (other panels occur during Author Meets Critics sessions); however, they are prominently featured in the conference program and are highly competitive for acceptance. Kafer’s Author Meets Critics session was met with a nearly full room of over 100 people.

At the session, prominent scholars working in areas connected to the featured book provide comments, criticism, and questions about the text and the author then has the opportunity to respond. At Kafer’s session, the critics were Sarah Smith Rainey, Mel Chen, Nirmala Erevelles, and Shannon Winnubst. This session is best described in the words of Chen: “generous and generative.” Each scholar provided comments on Kafer...