Cisgender Ableist Cyber-Romanticisms: Stories Told by Autism Epidemic and Transgender Epidemic Bloggers

• In Event: Trans-Cyberian States of Emergency: Race, Gender, and Disability in Digital Trans Studies

Abstract

In this presentation, virtual ethnographic examinations of anti-vaccine blogger communities and anti-transgender blogger communities will be juxtaposed comparatively to understand how internet communities resurface romantic era formulations of the body as a product of worldly sin. In utilizing a historical structuralist institutional discourse analysis to read these blog posts, the goal will be to show how narratives of emergency are produced through the clash of an image of the toxic child that conflicts with familial, institutional and capitalist institutions. In the parental moment of terror, situated around a misreading of the Autistic/transgender child, traditional values are recapitulated in a causal chain linking the sin of the world with the flesh of the child.

In using a phenomenological approach to these narratives, it may be clarified how the perceptual sensation of the different body is connected with feelings of disgust. In such readings, it is possible to show the moment where judgment over-extends upon experience. In rethinking transgender and autistic bodies together as bodies that occupy the gesturality of the speech situation subversively, we may understand how cisgender ableisms cohere in the coloring of misunderstanding or alternative voice as a form of monstrousness. However, in order to arrive at the phenomenological analysis of the flesh, this paper will conduct a series of randomized experimental blog reviews along specific parameters such that the reading can be repeated in order to empirically utilize the blogs of anti-vaccine and transgender activists as linguistic artifacts for the consideration of social Darwinist modernist ecological romanticisms.

In linking Ableist Cisgender blog discourses to Americanist views of ecology put forward sometimes by the transcendentalist school, this presentation will extend the critique made by Sarah Jaquette Ray in The Ecological Other that the environmentalist movement has resented flesh deemed less than fit. In engaging in a conversation about how queer bodies and environmental idealisms through an ethnographic study of Autism and Transgender epidemic communities, it will be possible to understand how environmentalist discourses can get co-opted within heteropatriarchal parameters.

Author

• Zahari Zachary Richter, George Washington University