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Anne Dalke's picture

a few of my many, many questions!

Some of my (many, many) questions about this really interesting and important field Kristin is guiding us into:

1) "Cripping" is a neologism for me. I don't know what it means, and I want to (please).

2) I want to think more about the intersections between the two different sets of "identity studies" that are g&s and disability. Are they analogous? "More" than that? Where do the parallels break down?

Is gender (for example) a disability? (Kate Bornstein, whom I'm madly reading @ this point, certainly thinks so: she says it limits the full range of self-expression). Might a disability rights activist take offense @ such a claim?

Along this line, you all might be interested in a recent gritTV show about "the bullying of Casper Semanya." One of the guests says that all athletes are freaks of nature (large feet, long limbs...) but that the Semanya case only became a sensation because her freakishness was gendered, or rather gender-bending....

Okay (deep breath; not done yet; I AM engaged by this subject!!).

3) I would also like to think more about Lennard Davis's claim that "the novel as a form promotes and produces normative structures." I spend a lot of time thinking about genre, and I am a decades-old novel lover, so I am particularly curious if this is an action particular to the novel form, or....?

4) Contrary-wise, I was struck today when Kristin how many disability memoirs there are. So now I'm also wondering how that genre works in disability studies: it certain provides individualized accountings of individual lives. But then how theorize, or generalize, or act (we've been talking so much about activism...) ? What are the advantages, in other words, and the limits of the work that that genre can do?

Okay, I'll pause for now. More later!
A.

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