Disability, Gender, and Sexuality

Public conversations about topics such as bathrooms and sports suggest that cultural ideas about disability, gender, and sexuality are related. Examining approaches from queer theory, gender studies, and disability studies, such as Alison Kafer’s Feminist, Queer, Crip, we will discuss how the intersections of these categories have been framed theoretically and pay attention to poststructuralist and phenomenological approaches to think about bodies. We will, for example, ask how the political strategy of coming out as gay or lesbian has been theorized in relation to coming out as a person with an invisible disability, examine the parallels and differences of the terms “sex” and “gender” as they are theorized within gender studies and the terms “impairment” and disability” as they are used within disability studies, and we will compare the concepts of “compulsory heterosexuality” (Adrienne Rich) and “compulsory able-bodiedness” (Robert McRuer). Many of these theoretical ideas are also discussed in memoirs of writers with disabilities; we will therefore read excerpts from a variety of what G. Thomas Couser calls “new disability memoirs,” for example by Chloé Cooper Jones, Kenny Fries, Terry Galloway, Eli Clare, Robert F. Murphy, and Stephen Kuusisto.