Syllabus Course Description:
This course engages with and responds to some of the more pressing current-day questions in disability studies and feminist practice. What is the relationship between gender and disability? What do critical disability studies have to offer feminist disciplines? Kim Q. Hall has made the argument that disability studies “like the gendered or disabled body, is more than a sum of its parts,” (p.1) and feminist scholars make the case that a fuller exploration of race, class, gender, ethnicity and embodied experience can help us understand how oppression operates across identities of difference. This interactive course includes in-class workshop activities, canvas online interactions, in class discussions and group activities.
As a starting point for locating how these two critical approaches inform and complement one another, I begin with an introduction to early theoretical frames in feminism and disability studies. Once I have established some of the grounding commonalities, I take a deeper look at some of the ongoing tensions between disability studies and feminist scholarship and enter into some of the more critical debates concerning representation, subjectivity, visibility, inclusion and embodied experience. We explore emergent postcolonial approaches to gender and disability, engage in the intersections of race, disability, sexuality, and identities of difference, and in the final weeks of the course, we discuss the multiple ways these disciplines work together to form critical interventions and approaches. This course will help students to think differently about how gender, disability, and identities of difference are represented in multiple contexts while they form a broad understanding of how common misconceptions are actively contested and resisted.
Course Learning Goals:
Understand Feminist Disability Studies Frameworks
Conceptualize the differences and/or similarities in the medical, deficit, social, cultural, feminist, crip, queer, and postcolonial models
Be able to discuss disability in national and transnational contexts
Ask critical questions about representation at the intersections of gender, disability, identity, and difference.
Engage in disability history, arts, activism, and social justice endeavors.
Course Assignments, Student Work, & Assessment:
Each assignment, reading, and discussion post for this course builds on the analytical strategies, scholarship and methods that I discuss or demonstrate in lecture/discussion and the material skills that students practice in group workshops. Each assignment intentionally draws on the work students have performed in the classroom or in previous assigned projects and culminates in a final representational analysis of a disability-related activist group or service organization chosen by the student. The assignment and reading structure follows a predictable pattern designed to generate student confidence and proficiency with the topic matter and methods as they move through the quarter. This course introduces difficult concepts from multiple disciplines that are new to most of the individuals in the class. It is my job to guide the students through the somewhat treacherous domain of representational analysis while also introducing multiple, complex, and at times contradictory disability and feminist studies theories and models. I provide multiple platforms for students to illustrate their engagement with the materials and with their classmates and I explicitly communicate throughout the quarter that I am most interested in their level of critical thought and questioning above their deep understanding of difficult theories and concepts.
"I really enjoyed our discussion on representation and disability. I think that working on the final paper throughout the quarter was a great idea and allowed me to better understand my organization. I also think that I gained a much better understanding of the content the week I did the group facilitation."