Women,Gender,Sexuality Studies 395D - S- Intro/FeministDisabilityStu

What is the relationship between sexuality and disability? How did we come to know and feel what we think we know and feel about these intersecting realms of knowledge and lived experience? U.S. cultural ideals of beauty, youth, fitness, strength, skinniness, sex appeal, social skill, mental acuity, and (most elusive) "health" all rely on norms of ablebodiedness, heterosexuality, and whiteness. We will thus approach disability and sexuality not as fixed or singular categories, but as fluid, historically shifting, culturally-specific formations that intersect with race, class, gender, language, and nation. How do some bodies, minds, and psyches as well as sexual acts, desires, relationships, and identities come to be seen as deviant and others as normal? What are the national and transnational conditions or relations of power that form the context for these processes? Which cultural institutions have historically disciplined disabled, queer, and gender-non-conforming subjects? What legacies of resistance might we find in various forms of art and cultural production; in feminist and queer coalitions, activism and movements for Health or Fat Justice, and for disability, racial and economic justice; and in scholarship including LGBT and Disability Studies? Where can we look for models of queer kinship, care collectives, and "alternative" familial and community structures based on practices of interdependence? We will approach these questions through a range of critical essays, books, films, artwork, and community engagement, working together to queer and crip - or further trouble - contemporary epistemologies of sexuality and disability.