FEMINIST PERSPECTIVES ON BODY, DISABILITY, AND HEALTH

A Penn State Graduates in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Conference

Pasquerilla Spiritual Center, Penn State, State College, PA 16802

Tuesday, March 4 and Wednesday, March 5, 2025

Our current moment serves as an exigence for this conference theme, in a cultural atmosphere of pandemic(s), coerced medical assistance in dying, insufficient and dwindling access to social security and health insurance, the devaluing and abandonment of disabled lives, historical legacy of eugenics, ongoing threats to bodily autonomy, and increasing pressures of neoliberalism. Our conference theme considers whose bodies, abilities, and health are granted protection or treated as fungible. We hope to bring together scholars from a variety of disciplines who are eager to explore the intersections of embodiment and corporeality; health, illness, and wellness; and broad perspectives and frameworks on disability within feminist, queer, and trans studies. We conceive of body, disability, and health broadly, but are particularly interested in papers that examine trans disability studies or bridging the gap between STEM fields and feminist embodied practices.

We welcome works on the following topics (but not restricted to them):

Narrative, life-writing, representation
Disability epistemologies and movements
Agency, vulnerability, interdependence
Eugenics, nationalism, and reactionary discourses of gender/sex/sexuality
Citizenship, democracy, crip nationalism, biopolitics and necropolitics
Debility, disablement, disorder
Pandemics, COVID-19, labor
Identity and intersectionality
Chronic illness, chronic pain, chronicity
Models of disability and their relationship to a range of embodiments
Corporeal and social permeability
Embodiment, disembodiment, body/mind, corporeality, transcorporeality
Vitality and new materialist views of the body
Care work, caregiving, care networks
Medical humanities, perspectives and critiques of medicine
Prosthesis, technosolutionism, technoableism
Disabled ecologies, environmentalisms, climate critiques, and animal rights advocacy
Philosophical considerations on disability, feminism(s), queer theory, and trans studies

Format and Submission Details:

We invite all to submit but are attentive to graduate students in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies programs/disciplines and beyond, especially those who have little or no conference experience in these spaces. We invite individual, panel, workshop, or roundtable submissions but are open to numerous forms of submission within these formats including creative, written, artistic, and poetic expressions.

Feminist Perspectives will be a hybrid conference: facilitated in-person and via Zoom. There will be a lunch break each day, a sensory room on site, and access to a mediation space. Masks will be provided. For more information and updates, visit the Penn State Graduates in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies website. Please contact Brandi Lewis bpl5475@psu.edu with questions.

Bibliography:

Chen, Mel Y. “Masked States and the ‘Screen’ Between Security and Disability.” Women’s Studies Quarterly, vol. 40, no. 1/2, 2012, pp. 76-96. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23333437.
Hamraie, Aimi and Kelley Fritsch. “Crip Technoscience Manifesto.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, vol. 5, no. 1, 2019, pp. 1-34.
Kuppers, Petra. “Towards a Rhizomatic Model of Disability.” Disability Culture and Community Performance: Find a Strange and Twisted Shape, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, pp. 91-108. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230316584_5.
Mingus, Mia. “You Are Not Entitled To Our Death: COVID, Abled Supremacy & Interdependence.” Leaving Evidence, 16 Jan., 2022, https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2022/01/16/you-are-not-entitled-to-our-deaths-covid-abled-supremacy-interdependence/
Schalk, Sami and Jina B. Kim. “Integrating Race, Transforming Feminist Disability Studies.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 46, no. 1, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1086/709213.
Simplican, Stacy Clifford. “Feminist disability studies as methodology: life-writing and the abled/disabled binary.” Feminist Review, vol. 115, 2017, pp. 46-60. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44987292
Sins Invalid. “10 Principles of Disability Justice.” Sins Invalid, 17 Sep, 2015, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5bed3674f8370ad8c02efd9a/t/5f1f0783916d8a179c46126d/1595869064521/10_Principles_of_DJ-2ndEd.pdf.

To submit your proposal, fill out the Feminist Perspectives on Body, Disability, and Health Conference Submission Form by the extended deadline, Friday, January 31, 2025. Notifications will be sent by Saturday, February 15, 2025.

Sawyer Seminar Keynote: V. Jo Hsu, University of Texas at Austin

“Diagnosis by Exclusion and the Stories that Make Us Sick”

This talk considers the role of narrative in assigning disease—literal and imagined—to particular bodyminds. Blending story and critical analysis, Jo explores how medical research conceals old prejudices in the guise of scientific progress. The presentation journeys through a history that connects the pathologization of trans identities with the white supremacist roots of hysteria and the model minority myth in medical racism. What results is an insistence on our interconnected pasts and interdependent futures—and on the role that storytelling must play in approaches to healing.

Keynote Speaker: Andrea Miller, Penn State

“On Being Sick and Sad in Feminist Science and Technology Studies”

This talk takes an autoethnographic approach to consider what it means to do Feminist Science and Technology Studies (STS) when working through, around, and with conditions of grief, chronic illness, and disability. Specifically, I focus on forms of STS that emerge at the intersections of philosophy of science and decolonial anthropology. Despite critical shifts in how scholars think and do ethnography, particularly given its historically colonialist underpinnings, I consider what it means for STS to account for the ableist norms that nonetheless attend doing ethnography with rigor and reflect on what it might mean to do STS otherwise.