Conference Schedule, Tuesday, March 4
Sawyer Seminar Keynote Speaker (Memorial Lounge)
Diagnosis by Exclusion and the Stories that Make Us Sick, V. Jo Hsu, University of Texas at Austin
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.
Historicizing, Re/Constructing, Resisting Health and Care (Memorial Lounge)
Reconstructing Health in the context of sex and gender: Feminist Critiques of the Binary Framework in Science and Medicine, Faeze Fazeli, University of Notre Dame
This paper critiques the binary framework of sex in science and medicine through a feminist lens, exploring its harmful impact on health, bodily autonomy, and the lived experiences of intersex and trans individuals.
Historicizing the Pandemic: Temporal Rhetorics in Covid-19 Discourse, Khushi Patel, University of Central Florida
This paper examines temporal rhetorics in Covid-19 discourse and examines the impacts of the pandemic’s (ongoing) historicization.
Pathologization v Medical Care: Philosophical Perspectives from the Devaluation Model, Kavana Ramaswamy, University of Cambridge
Building a theory of impairment that enables a critique of medical pathologization of disabled people.
Who is PISD and How: Reimagining the People with Immune System Disorders (PISD) Caucus of ACT UP Through a Left Feminist Disability Justice Lens, JD Davids, CUNY Biography and Memoir
The under-recognized PISD (People with Immune System Disorder) Caucus of ACT UP, founded by activists with left movement experience, including lesbians with ME/CFS (then mis-labeled as chronic fatigue syndrome) as well as people living with HIV, held ambitious, multiple goals including cross-disease advocacy and bears important lessons for disability/chronic illness advocacy in our current time of pandemics, political repression, eugenics and health justice efforts.
Genocide as a Debilitating Process: Palestinian and Indigenous Resistance to Sexual and Gendered Violence in Settler Colonialism, Sarah Dweik, Matthew Parnell, Roua Daas, Sergio Peña, and Talia Kibsey, Penn State
11:40-12:40pm Lunch Break
Counter Publics, Alternative, and Online Communities (Memorial Lounge)
Dismantling medical fatphobia through alternative media, Thais Lopez-Espinoza, The Ohio State University
Examination of challenges to medical fatphobia in community-sourced alternative magazine Pipe Wrench.
Digital Professionalism and its Modern Use of Eugenic Legacies and Hierarchical Power Structures, Thomas Coulouras and Genevieve Shutt, Princeton University
This presentation will overview the ways in which LinkedIn’s internal mechanisms weaponize eugenic and hierarchizing institutional legacies, contributing to modern oppression in both the virtual and physical worlds.
Power in the Closet: LGBTQ+ Survival and Resistance in Jordan, Sanjna Kaul, University of Richmond
In the Jordanian context hostile to LGBTQ+ identities, the private intrapersonal spaces of one's presence in the closet, so to speak, acts as a site of agency: carving out queer futures, demanding queer survival, and strengthening mental resilience.
The ‘Genre’ of Chronic Illness: Chronic Pain Patient Narrative-Making, Courtney Felle, The Ohio State University
This presentation explores the shared genre conventions of narratives written by those with chronic pain, especially undiagnosed chronic pain.
Creating Feminist Queer Crip Zines as an Accessible Transformative Practice, August Bales, Lina Ross, Madigan Nolan, and Hailee Yoshizaki-Gibbons, Hiram College
Reproductive Justice (Memorial Lounge)
Sexy New Era: Exploring Pornography and the Othering of the Black, Queer, and Disabled Body to Contextualize the Feminist Movement’s Contemporary Sex Wars, Mya Koffie, Princeton University
This paper explores the significance of porn consumption and production trends to the legal women's rights movement
Disability, Gender, and Incarceration, Lauren Shallish and Jen Montag, Rutgers University-Newark
This presentation provides an analysis of how women, particularly those with disabilities, are targeted in prison through the domain of healthcare.
The Biopolitics of Reproduction: Abortion and Birth Control Along Racial and Gender Lines, Marie-Anne Perreault, Penn State
Using Foucault's concept of biopolitics, this presentation analyzes how struggles for reproductive rights (such as the development of birth control pills in the United States and the legalization of abortion in France) historically instrumentalized racialized bodies to further entrench racial inequalities in the pursuit of gender politics and reproductive justice.
Unfulfilled Womanhood: Infertility and Miscarriage in the Black Club Women's Movement, Elizabeth Gonzalez, Independent Historian
Reproduction and family planning are full of deeply personal and often painful sets of decisions, using social notes, personal correspondence, and personal journals of Black Club Women, we will see how the deeply personal space of fertility and family-planning comes to light.
Evocative Expressions, Chronic illness, and Care (Garden Room)
Paper Pants and Fireflies: A Poetic Autoethnography of Chronic Illness and Healing, Dahlia Belfer, McMaster University
A poetic autoethnography exploring the intersections of chronic illness, identity, and healing, highlighting the transformative power of vulnerability and creative expression in reclaiming disability narratives.
Apocalyptic Aid: Care and Crip Worldmaking in The Girl with All The Gifts and The Fifth Season, Philip Bonanno, Penn State
In this presentation, I will interrogate both current utopic potential of feminist care ethics as well as what I coin as a "crip worldmaking praxis" through the lens of two contemporary pieces of speculative fiction.
De-mythicizing AIDS in "An Arrow's Flight" through an application of Susan Sontag's theories of illness, Arundhati Ghosh, Southern Methodist University
This paper applies Susan Sontag's "Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors" to the way in which Mark Merlis demythicizes AIDS through a retelling of Greek myths, in which his characters are outwardly queer men involved in the military.
Care Partner: An Autoethnographic Exploration Disability Care Rhetoric, Violet Strawderman, University of Delaware
Using personal experience as one partner in a marriage where both spouses are disabled, Violet uses disability experience and frameworks of care to challenge and critique common feminist discourse on care work.
Trans / Bio / Necro Politics (Memorial Lounge)
“Remember Chanelle”: Black Trans Madness and the Politics of Mourning, Daniel Yu, Princeton University
Examining the 1995 murder of Black trans woman Chanelle Pickett, this paper foregrounds the racial logics of disability that pervaded her death, refiguring Black trans mad mourning as a site of radical political potentiality.
Trans Crip Nihilism, Kean O'Brien, University of Wisconsin- Madison
How art can theorize trans crip nihilism and/or abolition?
Neither Citizen Nor Subject: Hijra Bodies at the Crossroads of Biopolitics and Necropolitics, Samrat Sharma, Pennsylvania State University
This paper explores the hijra body as a site of resistance and marginalization within frameworks of biopolitics, necropolitics, and conditional citizenship.
Decolonial Trans* Futurity: Transmedia Autotheory in QTBIPOC Classrooms, Yi-Fan Li, Penn State
This paper is an individual paper for the reimagination of a decolonial Trans* futurity in education.
Creating a More Accessible Classroom, Caroline Atwood, Penn State
Perception, Oppression, and Body/Image (Memorial Lounge)
Healthy White Nationalists: Far-Right Selbstbilder in a Digital Age, Scott Burnett, Penn State
This paper examines how healthy diet and physical fitness are imbricated in right-wing subjectivity that aspires to vitality, wellness, and a (hetero)sexually desirable masculine body.
Gender Composition of Peer Group Characteristics on Adolescent Body Image and Weight Adjustment Aspirations, Arianna Salas, Penn State
This paper explores how the social context matters for body image development, focusing on the gender characteristics of peers and how they are associated with either norm compliance or rejection in relation to individual body weight.
Fatness, Trauma, and Rhetorics of Innocence, Kendall Dinniene, Southern Methodist University
This paper shows how the dominant narrative of fatness as the result of trauma ultimately shores up anti-fatness along with heterosexism, white supremacy, and healthism.
(Re)imagining Instagram as a public pedagogy for body knowledge, Youngjoo Kim, Penn State
Integrating public pedagogy and feminist perspectives, this paper highlights the pedagogical potential of Instagram in enabling discourse regarding women's bodies in social media, counter-narrative activism, and the re-imagination of visual culture.
Access, Education, and Student Support (Garden Room)
Reparative Futures: Higher Education, Disability, and Reparations, Lauren Shallish, Linda Steele, and Ashley Gwathney, Rutgers University-Newark
This presentation will explain the legacies and current entanglements of eugenics and higher education as a foundation to exploring what reparations would entail with regard to disability and eugenics.
Disability "Inclusion" and the Failings of Higher Education, Elizabeth Hinsdale, University of Cincinnati
An examination of the ableism inherent in performative inclusion within higher education as seen through ableist rhetoric deployed by disability services directors.
Cripping the Campus: Disability Cultural Centers and the Socio-Spatial Politics of Access and Inclusion, Katie Sullivan, Vanderbilt University
This thesis analyzes the nascent phenomenon of university Disability Cultural Centers through oral histories and narratology, closely attending to the sociospatial politics of access and inclusion based on the experiences of disabled student activists.
Supporting Adolescents at the Intersection of Neurodivergence and LGBTQ+ Identity, Braden Kump and Caitlin McDermott, University of Pennsylvania
Examining the research process involved in supporting adolescents who identify as both neurodivergent and queer, centering on the lived experiences of individuals through a strengths-based lens.
