CDSC Sponsored Panel: Disability in an Age of Fascism (HYBRID)

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

This panel explores the role disability plays in contemporary far-right, fascist, and authoritarian politics. Amidst global resurgence of far-right movements, scholars and activists have grappled with diagnosing this present, in particular asking to what extent fascism is a specific 20th century phenomenon and to what extent it can also describe the current moment. These temporal shifts are particularly salient when considering disability, given the way the Nazi T4 Program epitomizes and helps inaugurate 20th century fascism's opposition to disabled life. In our late-stage American empire, however, the far-right boasts a number of prominent white disabled boosters, perhaps autistic billionaire Elon Musk chief among them. In a 2020 American Quarterly review essay, Jina B. Kim suggests that the forefront of disability scholarship is already considering “disability in an age of fascism” by theorizing this double edge of disability. Such work investigates disability as a rationale for austerity, as a tool for empire, and also eschews wholesale recuperation and celebration of disability as self-evidently resistant to these uses.

Our panelists consider what tools critical disability studies offers to understand and resist contemporary fascist body politics. To ground the panel in the imperial operations of American fascism, Jiya Pandya offers a transnational genealogy of the disability rights movement. Pandya reveals US disability movements’ historic collusions with fascistic and eugenic global health programs while in turn highlighting disabled people’s resistance to the rise of fascism in places like India. The next two talks each theorize one such contemporary collusion. Continuing to problematize disability as minority formation, Brady James Forrest offers a queercrip analysis of Musk’s inauguration celebration “gesture” to ask what strategies for resistance disability studies offers when the face of fascism is another disabled person. Turning to rhetorical uses of disability, Sarah L. Orsak analyzes how a sexual politics of fascism wields trans and intersex associations with disability in efforts to criminalize trans healthcare and athletic participation. The panel closes by turning from theory to modes of resistance. Ly Xīnzhèn Zhǎngsūn Brown and Theodora Danylevich offer a joint account of the current state of far-right federal policy, its impacts on disabled people, and ongoing activist interventions. Together, these talks explore the fault lines of disability identity, solidarity, and complicity, and insist that these fault lines are critical for analyzing, and resisting, contemporary fascist movements.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• You Cannot Fight Fascism with Imperialism: Transnational Disability as Political Imperative - Jiya Pandya, Yale University

• “Heil Tesla!”: Autistic Gestures and the Demirhetorical - Brady James Forrest, Georgetown University

• Disability and the Sexual Politics of Fascism: Intersex Exceptions and Trans Exclusions - Sarah L Orsak, University of Virginia-Main Campus

• Policy / Action / Archive: Pursuing Disability and Economic Justice in Fascist Times - Theodora Danylevich, Georgetown University; Ly Xīnzhèn M. Zhǎngsūn Brown, Georgetown University

Chair

• Jina Kim, Smith College

Virtual Accommodation Panelists

• Theodora Danylevich, Georgetown University

• Ly Xīnzhèn M. Zhǎngsūn Brown, Georgetown University

• Brady James Forrest, Georgetown University

Comment

• Jina Kim, Smith College

Biographical Information

Jiya Pandya is a scholar and activist who works at the intersections of disability studies, postcolonial theory, gender and sexuality studies, and transnational history. They are currently completing their PhD at Princeton University, with a dissertation on the history of the concept of “disability” in late colonial and postcolonial India. Their work has been published in Disability Studies Quarterly, Lateral, and QED: A Journal of GLBT Worldmaking and has been supported by W. Newcombe Foundation and Centre for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies (BBQ+).

Brady James Forrest is adjunct faculty in the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Georgetown University where they specialize in transdisciplinary approaches to visual culture, fine art, and literature informed by trans/queer theory, critical disability studies, and critical race studies.

Sarah L. Orsak is an assistant professor in the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at the University of Virginia. Her work asks how disability operates as a racialized category and how this operation impacts scholarly field formation. Orsak’s work appears in Disability Studies Quarterly and Feminist Formations and is forthcoming in Transgender Studies Quarterly.

Ly Xīnzhèn Zhǎngsūn Brown is a writer, public speaker, educator, trainer, consultant, advocate, community organizer, community builder, activist, scholar, and attorney. For over fifteen years, they have worked to address and end interpersonal and state violence targeting disabled people, especially disabled people at the margins of the margins, in our own homes and communities, in movement spaces, in schools, in disability-specific institutions, and in jails and prisons. Their work begins at and centers intersections of disability, queerness, race, gender, class, and nation and migration. They founded and lead The Autistic People of Color Fund in partnership with the Autistic Women & Nonbinary Network. They created and curate Bearing Witness, Demanding Freedom, the Living Archive and Repository of the Judge Rotenberg Center’s Abuses. Along with Morénike Giwa Onaiwu and E. Ashkenazy, they co-edited the first edition of the anthology All the Weight of Our Dreams: On Living Racialized Autism. They are one of ten young activist icons featured in Amplifier’s We The Future Campaign. They are also featured in People of Color Productions’ docuseries-in-progress I Identify As Me directed and produced by Tina Colleen and Monick Monell, PBS’ American Renegades series, LikeRightNow Films’ The Ride Ahead and My Disability Roadmap, and HBO Max’s documentary Persona: The Dark Truth Behind Personality Tests. They are a past Gender+ Justice Initiative Fellow at Georgetown University and a Justice Catalyst Fellow at the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law. As an educator, they teach in the Disability Studies Program and the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Georgetown University as well as in the American Studies Program at American University’s Department of Critical Race, Gender, and Culture Studies. They are also a faculty member and Law and Public Policy Discipline Coordinator for the Leadership Education in Neurodevelopmental and related Disabilities (LEND) Training Program at Georgetown. Professionally, they work as Director of Public Policy at the National Disability Institute, where they focus on advancing financial freedom and economic opportunity for people with disabilities through strategic policy research, development, and implementation.

Theodora Danylevich (she/they) is a scholar-educator in Writing and Disability Studies as well as Women’s and Gender Studies and the Medical Humanities, with a background in 20th century American Literary and Cultural Studies. Their work has appeared in Rhizomes, Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, and Lateral. As an educator, they are interested in hacking the classroom space as a site for public engagement and an engine of transformative knowledge production. As an editor, she is invested in reimagining scholarly publishing towards greater access, inclusion, and creativity. They are also currently at work on a book project that develops a methodology of [sic]k archiving to theorize and enact Black feminist crip worldmaking.

Jina B. Kim is a scholar, writer, and educator of feminist disability studies and queer-of-color critique. She currently lives and works in Western Massachusetts as an assistant professor of English and the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Smith College. Broadly, Jina’s teaching and research aims to connect the intellectual and movement lineages of disability politics and feminist-/ queer-of-color critique, thus extending the work of building solidarity across difference modeled by texts such as This Bridge Called My Back. Her book, Care at the End of the World: Dreaming of Infrastructure in Crip-of-Color Writing (Duke University Press 2025) brings a disability lens to bear on feminist- and queer-of-color literature in the aftermath of 1996 U.S. welfare reform. Through developing an intersectional disability framework called “crip-of-color critique,” it demonstrates why we need radical disability politics and aesthetics for navigating contemporary crises of care. In 2021, Jina was supported by a Career Enhancement Fellowship from the Institute of Citizens and Scholars (formerly Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation) and a Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America Visiting Faculty Fellowship at Brown University. In 2012, she received the Irving K. Zola Award for Emerging Scholars from the Society of Disability Studies. Jina’s writing has appeared in Signs, Social Text, American Quarterly, GLQ, MELUS (Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States), South Atlantic Quarterly, Disability Studies Quarterly, Lateral, and The Asian American Literary Review.