A man who isn’t simply blind but speechless and possessed (Matt. 12.22-3); a paralytic who’s prostrate by an inaccessible fountain (John 1-15); someone who’s sightless, his eyes spat on and caked with mud (John 9.1-12): all three walk not into a bar but back to their homes, to tell of a healer named Jesus. I…
Category: Disability
Ethnographically Capturing the Autoimmune: Textures and Surplus
Ethnographically Capturing the Autoimmune: Textures and Surplus My New Year resolves to avoid fitting in within academic circles that reductively evaluate and lazily quantify my professional and personal contributions. I am tired of defending: my dissertation, my philosophies, and, ultimately, myself. Mentors and elders have confessed that the purpose of academic hazing is to…
In and On the Clinic
All of my previous trips to our nearby hospital have been marked by blood and bruises. As an especially clumsy individual, I’m used to squeezing paper towels tightly around gashed fingers or pressing ice compresses to a purpling forehead, blinking with the unfocused eyes of someone definitively concussed. Accompanied by my wonderful partner, I am…
Black and Beautiful, Smoke and Mirrors: The Freed One’s Granddaughter Wears a Crown
Facing down the barrel at the end of my reproductive year, the advent of menopause amplified my embodied differences.
Reframing the Cultural Clash: A Literary, Disability Studies Reading of “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down”
Anne Fadiman’s 1997 bestselling narrative nonfiction, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures, meticulously outlines the story of Lia Lee. Lia was a young Laotian refugee diagnosed with and unsuccessfully treated for severe epilepsy over the course of her childhood in California…
The Head of a Dog or Horn of a Rhino: Meaning, Milton, and Me
[H]e reproaches me with want of beauty and loss of sight: “A monster huge and hideous, void of sight.” … [B]ut he immediately corrects himself, and says, “though not indeed huge, for there cannot be a more spare, shrivelled and bloodless form.” It is of no moment to say any thing of personal appearance, yet…
Aversion to Aging: Futuristic Science Fiction and Ageism
Science fiction, a genre known for its extrapolations into the future, seem Science fiction. For a genre that is known for its seemingly equitable futures, it sure seems to take issue with age and aging. Indeed, disability studies scholar Alison Kafer notes that “Whenever I tell people I have been working on a book about…
Meeting on a Bridge of Silence: A Talk With Géraldine Berger, Bilingual Performer in French and Sign Language
“Géraldine Berger has no hearing disability. And yet, she has been speaking sign language for almost twenty years. This French “bilingual performer” – she makes a statement of being identified as such – has worked on more than thirty artistic productions involving deaf artists.”
“There Goes the Monster”: gazing at blind men in Restoration tragedy, part II
In my last article for Synapsis on Milton’s Samson Agonistes (1671), I mentioned that much of the tragedy is concerned with the fact that its blind hero is “[m]ade of his enemies the scorn and gaze” (34).[1] It’s worth highlighting this thematic epicenter not only because scholars more often emphasize Restoration political debates than disability…
My Anxious Brain Inspires Me
Melissa Maldonado-Salcedo // “A writer….must believe that whatever happens to him is an instrument…This is even stronger in the case of the artist that happens, including humiliations. embarrassments, misfortunes, all has been given like clay, like material for one’s art.” -Jorge Luis Borges This story offers a snapshot into my head to provide a humanistic…