This class will introduce students to disability arts and culture, and to creating community around/through/with disability. Our focus this semester will be on speculative gendered and embodied formations: forms of thinking forward in difference, in sci-fi and horror texts, designs, films, and technologies, and in theoretical texts of imaginative futures. What will humans/animals/others be, how are gender and sexuality (re)configured, how do we reimagine power and life, precarity and utopia, embodiment and enmindment? The majority of contemporary disability cultural production has been telling it straight, inserting disability into dominant US literature traditions, often through memoir-like approaches that focus on truth-telling. This approach to disability is important: it pushes back against the many decades of cultural production in which disability featured mainly as a short-hand for death, evil, or tragedy. But this focus has tended to overshadow another aspect of disability culture’s creative production: imaginative work that conceives of disability and embodied difference as a generative lens through which to imagine new worlds not grounded in realist assumptions -- the weird dreams.
We will read chapters from Leah Laksmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s The Future Is Disabled, Alison Kafer’s Feminist Queer Crip, Theri Pickens’ Black Madness :: Mad Blackness, Ria Cheyne’s Disability, Literature, Genre, and Alice Wong’s Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century. We will read excerpts of literary materials, including Addie Tsai’s Unwieldly Creatures, a queer bi-racial engagement with reproductive technologies in a Frankenstein retelling. We will also look at productions like (Portland, OR’s) Wobby Dance Company that are creating alternatives to straight stages, to the rehearsal/production regime that is often out of reach for disabled dance practitioners, and they and other companies/artists like (Seattle’s) NEVE or (Toronto’s) Syrus Marcus Ware who investigate storytelling approaches to performance, create imaginative installations, or use dance film and video as means of expanding time and space for disabled bodymindspirits.

This version of the course will partly work through the arts, not just about them – practical exercises will be part of the class work. We will also have one or two studio visits to North Campus where we will engage in creative work.

This class is hybrid (not hyflex): it meets in person or online (online for up to 30% of the overall course, in particular during the most snowy periods). We meet for two hours in class time, with an additional hour in self-study and online engagement with exercises from Studying Disability Arts and Culture (book provided for free). This arrangement of the material hopes to make the class more widely accessible and allows for a wider diversity of expression and disciplinary foci.

Course Requirements:

1 credit: attendance and Canvas responses to each class’s readings/exercises, wellness exercise
3 credits: attendance, Canvas responses, wellness exercise, group presentation, final class project or paper

Class Format:

This class is hybrid (not hyflex): it meets in person or online (online for up to 30% of the overall course, in particular during the most snowy periods). We meet for two hours in class time, with an additional hour in self-study and online engagement with exercises from Studying Disability Arts and Culture (book provided for free). This arrangement of the material hopes to make the class more widely accessible, and allows for a wider diversity of expression and disciplinary foci.