On the Road, At Conference
- On the Road, At Conference
Cripistemologies
New York University, New York, NY, April 19, 2013
NYU’s one-day symposium, Cripistemologies, was one of several conferences this year focused on the relationships between gender and sexuality studies and disability theory. Others included Debilitating Queerness: the Sixth Annual DC Queer Studies Symposium at the University of Maryland, College Park. Debilitating Queerness dovetailed with the University’s lecture series (bearing the same name), which featured (over the course of several months) lectures from Robert McRuer, Eli Claire, Jasbir Puar, and Heather Love. In her keynote address for the symposium, Puar offered a meditation on the normativizing impulses reflected in dominant modes of analysis in disability and transgender studies vis-à-vis the rubrics of debility and capacity.
Cripistemologies organizers Lisa Duggan and Robert McRuer assembled a group of scholars based in the United States and Canada to speak to various dimensions of queer, trans, intersex, and disability theory. Organized into three panels, the day began with reflections on the recently published special issue of the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, featuring Katerina Kolarova, Robert McRuer, and Aly Patsavas. The second panel, “Injury, Illness, Chronic Pain, and Disability Studies,” brought together anthropologists S. Lochlann Jain and Karen Nakamura as well as ethnic and gender studies scholar Patrick Anderson. In the final panel, I joined Toby Beauchamp and Morgan [End Page 209] Holmes as we considered the degree to which trans and intersex studies have engaged disability studies (and vice versa). With a keynote from Mel Chen, attendees were given the opportunity to consider how cognitive dis/ability inflects professional demands within the neoliberal academy. As Chen explains, academics are expected to be “super-cognitioners”—unable to acknowledge (without stigma) the fact of not knowing and/or not comprehending.
New York found several other queer happenings occurring nearby at the same time. The EMP Pop Conference was just down the road at New York Univesity’s Tisch School of the Arts and included presentations of papers from Scott Poulson-Bryant, Tavia Nyong’o, and Eric Lott on New York’s overlooked music scenes in the 1970s. And with a quick ride on NJ Transit to Rutgers University, New Brunswick, one could also attend Trans Politics: Scholarship & Strategies for Social Change, which included presentations from Marcia Ochoa, Jeanne Vaccaro, Ben Singer, and Dean Spade.
C. Riley Snorton is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Northwestern University. Snorton’s research and teaching focuses on black cultural production, queer theory, and transgender studies. He has published in Hypatia, Souls, the International Journal of Communication as well as edited volumes including Transgender Migrations, The Transgender Studies Reader (2nd Ed.), and Passing/Out. Snorton’s book, Nobody is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality On the Down Low traces the emergence and circulation of the “down low” in news and popular cultures at the turn of the twenty-first century and will be available in 2014 from University of Minnesota Press. His current project, provisionally titled Black on Both Sides: Race and the Remaking of Trans History, draws on an eclectic archive that includes Afro-modernist literature, documentary film, and journalistic accounts of black trans life to foreground the transitive relationship between blackness and transness. Snorton is also a member of the editorial collective of The Feminist Wire.
Selected Additional Readings
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