Bad Queers, Bold Crips, and Black Femmes - I: Disability Politics and Cripping Biomedicine

Abstract

In conversation with ongoing queer, disability studies, feminist, and antiracist projects in STS, this open panel seeks to further disrupt interrogations of sexuality, race, gender, and (dis)ability in the study of science, technology, and medicine by centering deviant objects of analysis and subject-positions: Bad Queers, Bold Crips, and Black Femmes. By the fact of their existence – but also through their intentional deviant practices – Queers, Crips, and Black Femmes disrupt idealized white, able-bodied, masculine, heteronormative, and feminine subject-positions as these are depicted in both popular and medical material. Rather than an STS that merely accounts for this deviance, we seek to build up an STS that actively celebrates these deviant subjects and their practices of self-making, community-building, and collective resistance to normative regimes of science, technology, and biomedicine. We welcome submission from all disciplines, historical time periods, and encourage methodological promiscuity.

STS has a long history of disrupting understandings of bodies, modes of knowledge, and entire disciplines. Operating in that tradition, this panel seeks to put those disruptions into conversation with deviant forms of inquiry and theorizing in queer studies, disability studies, sexuality studies, and Black feminist studies. How do Queers disrupt the technological and biomedical constructions around sex, sexuality, pain, pleasure, disease, and desire? What happens when Crips embrace biomedical technologies that seek to erase disabled subjects and instead use them to create an imagined Crip future? How do STS scholars and biomedical actors respond when working class Black women who are framed as ill or sick – such as women living with HIV – respond with bold assertions of their health?

Inspired by the deviant milieus of New Orleans, Bourbon Street, and with 4S 2019 convening in the shadow of Southern Decadence 2019, we welcome scholars from a wide variety of fields that seek to (re)define, appropriate, and revel in deviance through one or more critical STS lenses. We welcome traditional paper submissions and contributions in other formats or modalities.

Discussant

• Kate O'Connor, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Individual Presentations

• As Lucky and as Trashy as the Sun - July Hazard, University of Washington

• Biosociality Without Biomarkers: Impairment, Fatigue, and the Making of a Contested Diagnosis - Emily Rogers, New York University

• ‘Disability Worlds’: Enacting Positive Imaginaries of 'Difference' - Gareth Thomas, Cardiff University

• #CripTheVote: How Disabled Activists Used Twitter for Political Engagement During the 2016 Presidential Election - Heather Rose Walker, University of Illinois at Chicago

Session Organizers

• Jallicia Jolly, The University of Michigan

• Stephen Molldrem, University of California - Irvine

• Kate O'Connor, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor