{"title":"Ecorelational Aesthetics Embracing Animality and Conserving Disability","authors":"Katarzyna Ojrzyńska","doi":"10.3828/jlcds.2023.36","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/jlcds.2023.36","url":null,"abstract":"The article introduces the concept of ecorelational aesthetics, understood as a realm of artistic production and practice that creates a space for meaningful encounters between the human and the nonhuman, which can facilitate rethinking disability and its place in the world. Ecorelational aesthetics helps dismantle anthropocentric and ableist ways of thinking, and reconceptualizes disability as a crucial form of cultural and biological diversity rather than an aberration or deviation from nature. Analyzing Sunaura Taylor’s paintings, Claire Cunningham’s performances Beyond the Breakwater and We Run Like Rivers (with Julia Watts Belser), the concept behind Hanna Cormick’s performance The Mermaid , and the choreodocumentary Gatunki chronione ( Protected Species , dir. Rafał Urbacki and Anu Czerwiński), the article examines key aspects of this aesthetics which accentuates the essential vulnerability of all human and nonhuman beings and promotes an ethics of (inter)dependence and care. The article also uses this as an opportunity to reflect critically upon Rosemarie GarlandThomson’s notion of conserving disability as a valuable resource, i.e. an alternative way of being in the world that facilitates our cultural, epistemic, and ethical growth.","PeriodicalId":37229,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies","volume":"74 4","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135215814","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Rethinking the Species Divide","authors":"Liz Shek-Noble, Chelsea Temple Jones","doi":"10.3828/jlcds.2023.31","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/jlcds.2023.31","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":37229,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies","volume":"41 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135161583","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Decolonizing Interspecies Relationality","authors":"Rachel Lewis","doi":"10.3828/jlcds.2023.35","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/jlcds.2023.35","url":null,"abstract":"The article examines neoliberal and anthropocentric discourses of disability inclusion in the context of animal rescue. The first part offers a close reading of two US-based documentaries— Guardians of Recoleta (Kuhre) and God’s Little People (Berkley)—both of which perpetuate ableist and anthropocentric assumptions about transnational adoption as a “cure” or solution for animals with illnesses and disabilities. Drawing upon ethnographic participant observation at a cat sanctuary in Syros, Greece, the second part discusses narratives of feline skin cancer survivors that center around animal agency, pleasure, and desire. By caring for cats in a way that accounts for their capacity to experience pleasure as well as pain, volunteers at Syros Cats articulate a decolonial approach to the question of interspecies relationality, one based not on neoliberal models of ownership and property rights, but rather on a recognition of street cats as subjects of multispecies habitats.","PeriodicalId":37229,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies","volume":"79 2","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135166676","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Cripping the Ordinary: Veena Das’s Life and Words in “Unprecedented Times”","authors":"Alexandra Weiss","doi":"10.3828/jlcds.2023.38","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/jlcds.2023.38","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":37229,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies","volume":"11 3","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135166272","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Embodying Otherwise","authors":"Sarah Cavar","doi":"10.3828/jlcds.2023.37","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/jlcds.2023.37","url":null,"abstract":"Larissa Lai’s (2002) visionary novel, Salt Fish Girl , is teeming with sensations beneath and beyond capitalist control. An atemporal narrative follows Miranda, a near-future young woman conceived by a durian and afflicted by a “memory disease” that produces distinctive body odor and flashbacks to episodes of colonial violence that the powerful would prefer to forget. While subjected to treatment for this “disease,” Miranda falls in love with Evie, erstwhile sweatshop laborer with carp DNA and body odor to match. In a story of anti-state, anti-capitalist rebellion, Miranda and Evie defect from straight, sane, and abled sterility. Aided by human/carp comrades called The Sonias, they realize spaces Elsewhere and Otherwise at the edges of the collective imagination. Using a queercrip conceptual framework, the article attends to the alienated, nonhuman body as a site of erotic play through Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Ellery Russian’s (2010) concept of the “crip lust of recognition,” arguing that it is within that space of affirmation and lust that criptopias beyond the “rational” might be found(ed). Finally, Salt Fish Girl is read alongside recent works of speculative activist-scholarship to theorize queercrip, multispecies resistance and imagination toward criptopian possibilities.","PeriodicalId":37229,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies","volume":"10 18","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135166277","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"About the Contributors","authors":"","doi":"10.3828/jlcds.2023.40","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/jlcds.2023.40","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":37229,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies","volume":"36 3","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135161590","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Mind the Gap","authors":"Maren Linett","doi":"10.3828/jlcds.2023.33","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/jlcds.2023.33","url":null,"abstract":"The article argues that eugenics was motivated, in part, by human exceptionalism. It first explores the ways in which eugenics understood nonwhite race, disability, and animality as forces capable of exerting a drag on the forward thrust of eugenic progress. Next, it traces the incoherent discourse about animality within eugenics, demonstrating that while eugenic breeding—eugenic methods—relied on human animality, the fundamental goal of eugenics was to improve human beings by distancing us from that animality. The final part of the article explores the imbrication of animality, race, and disability in Aldous Huxley’s 1948 novel Ape and Essence , arguing that the novel is a dysgenic vision that substantiates the eugenic call to increase the evolutionary distance between human beings and other animals, to cement human domination—conceived of as white human domination—of the planet.","PeriodicalId":37229,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies","volume":"75 2","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135215812","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Index to Volume 17","authors":"","doi":"10.3828/jlcds.2023.41","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/jlcds.2023.41","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":37229,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies","volume":"10 19","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135166276","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Deviating from Monstrosity","authors":"Zoe Copeman","doi":"10.3828/jlcds.2023.32","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/jlcds.2023.32","url":null,"abstract":"Between 1800 and 1807, Napoleonic reforms to obstetrics exposed more physicians to “monstrous births” (congenital anomalies). These reforms followed post-Revolutionary France’s need to re-define the “individual” and the Enlightenment’s attempts to naturalize the “monstrous.” Drawing on foundational eighteenth-century natural historical and medical texts, the article argues that the French Revolution was a major turning point in the conceptualization of dis/ability. To illustrate this, the illuminated volume Les Ecarts de la Nature (1775) by Nicolas-François and Geneviève Regnault and its 1808 edition revised by the physician Jacques-Louis Moreau de la Sarthe are analyzed through contemporary disability studies. The late eighteenth-century’s eventual eradication of monstrosities from the natural realm would lead to certain human bodies becoming normalized and others pathologized. This pathologization involved systematically categorizing human beings into forced binaries. Yet, by attempting to order that which does not fit into a binary, Les Ecarts attests that the dichotomy between “normal” and “abnormal” is a false narrative.","PeriodicalId":37229,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies","volume":"1 2","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135216700","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From Freak Shows to Freaknature","authors":"Jenne Schmidt","doi":"10.3828/jlcds.2023.34","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/jlcds.2023.34","url":null,"abstract":"Within environmental discourses, more-than-human beings with corporeal differences are often represented and exhibited as unnatural, abnormal, monstrous, freakish, bizarre, and deformed—as freaknature—and ultimately used as evidence of the harms of human-caused environmental contamination. The article examines the construction of freaknature alongside histories of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century American freak show to consider how these contemporary portrayals of the more-than-human not only reinvigorate the ableist tropes that were central to the freak show, but also reinforce logics of gender essentialism, transphobia, white supremacy, Orientalism, and racial purity. Both freak shows and freaknature operate/d as a scientific apparatus constructing and exhibiting some human and more-than-human beings as unnatural while shoring up other corporeal formations as normal/natural. Together, these crip figures on display call into question the binaries at the foundation of Western science.","PeriodicalId":37229,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies","volume":"10 21","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135166275","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}