Girls Only: Agentic Assemblage in Posthuman Feminism

• In Event: DisCrit: Mapping and Excavating the Intersections of Race and Dis/Ability

Abstract

This paper presents focus group data from high school girls with disabilities receiving a gender specific curriculum in a girls only classroom. We demonstrate how reading data with and through a posthuman feminist lens opens up different ways of thinking. Drawing on Bennett’s application of the DeleuzoGuattarian concept of the agentic assemblage, this posthuman feminist analysis of a qualitative study, attends to what happens to disabled high school girls becoming’s when specific female bodies are located in specific spaces, that act with an agential force. We conceptualizes how disabled high school girls becoming’s (i.e. identities, empowerment and voice) are reconfigured through posthumanism and feminist disability studies framework which works within and against the binary of categories of identity.

Authors

• Angela Ingram, Purdue University

• Marisa Kofke, University of Delaware

• Lauren Lindstrom, University of California Davis