Breaking New Ground in Disability Studies

Haverford College was well represented at the recent Society for Disability Studies Annual Meeting, held at Temple University in June. Three students and three faculty members participated in a panel called“Cripping Sex and Gender,” which explored the intersections between studies of disability and of sex and gender. (The term“cripping” describes the practice of examining texts, images, or ideas through the lens of disability.)

Kristin Lindgren, director of the College Writing Center, organized the panel and invited three students—Emily Bock '11, Jennifer Rodriguez '10, and Emily Shaw '10—to join. Lindgren chose students who, she says, had performed“exceptional” work on disability, sex and gender.

Emily Bock discussed her paper,“The Cure,” which deals with breast cancer.“My main idea centered on what it means to consider breast cancer as an issue that has overlaps in gender and disability issues, what it means for a gendered body to be ‘normal,' and to look at the compulsion I believe exists in our society to ‘cure' difference in physiological terms,” she says. She saw the conference as a prime opportunity to learn more about a field that interests her, and to interact with scholars from a variety of disciplines.

Jennifer Rodriguez gave a talk called“Disabled Gender Expression,” in which she presented excerpts from her senior thesis in philosophy.“Disability studies is a largely underrepresented field in academia, and I was honored to be in an environment that demonstrated how it must be incorporated in all academic institutions,” she says. At the meeting, Rodriguez got to meet activist Eli Clare, author of the books The Marrow's Telling and Exile and Pride, whose work she cites in her thesis.“You can definitely say that I was a little star-struck!” she says.

Emily Shaw displayed images from her online“Freak Show,” which shows bodies marked by disability, gender and race. She provided a commentary track by blending a circus barker's voice with quotations from Shakespeare's The Tempest and Katherine Dunn's novel Geek Love, a story of a carnival freak show.

In addition to the student presentations, faculty members Lindgren, Bryn Mawr English professor Anne Dalke, and Assistant Professor of English Theresa Tensuan discussed how they introduced disability studies into their courses.

Lindgren says that the conference's attendees were enthusiastic about the students' presentations.“Many audience members told me how impressed they were by the creativity and critical sophistication of our students' work,” she says.“It's unusual for undergraduates to present their work at this meeting; Haverford students are breaking new ground in the emerging field of disability studies.”    -Brenna McBride