The Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice Noted Scholars Series presents

Bad Crip Feelings: On a Culture of Critique and the Tyranny of Hope

Dr. Logan Smilges

WHEN & WHERE
Wednesday, March 13, 12:30-1:30pm
Buchanan Tower 225 / Zoom

Please RSVP below in advance

A sandwich lunch will be served at 1:30pm.

ABSTRACT

Leveling a strong critique of the category of disability and liberal disability politics, J. Logan Smilges’s Crip Negativity asks and imagines what horizons might exist for the liberation of those oppressed by ableism—beyond access and inclusion. Inspired by models of negativity in queer studies, Black studies, and crip theory, the book proposes that bad crip feelings might help all of us to care gently for one another, even as we demand more from the world than we currently believe to be possible. In this talk, Smilges reflects on the reception of Crip Negativity over the past year, meditating on what people’s felt responses to it might tell us about disability studies’s affective attachments and political commitments.

ABOUT Dr. Logan Smilges

Bio

Led by commitments to transfeminism and disability justice, J. Logan Smilges writes and teaches at the nexus of queer/trans disability studies, the history of medicine, and rhetorical studies. Their first book, Queer Silence: On Disability and Rhetorical Absence (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), attends to the interanimating absences of disability and silence from the field of queer studies. It theorizes the resistance efforts of minoritarian queer subjects who draw on silence to build community, navigate hostile environments, and resistant institutional and state-sponsored violence. Their second book, Crip Negativity (University of Minnesota Press, 2023), levels a critique of the category of disability and liberal disability politics, asking what horizons might exist for the liberation of disabled people beyond access and inclusion. Currently, they are working on a third book-length project that maps a cultural and rhetorical history of mental disability and transgender as contingent medical and social categories in the United States.

Accessibility

• This will be a virtual and in-person event in Buchanan Tower. A wheelchair accessible and single-user, gender-neutral washroom is located across from the room. Otherwise, gendered washrooms are located on alternate floors in the stairwell between floors.
• The room has a capacity of approximately 40 people and will have open windows.

Please include any additional access requests or questions in the RSVP form above.