My Research

My research combines disability studies, queer theory, feminist media studies,STS and U.S. cultural history. My body of work analyzes the transnational cultural politics of rehabilitation, citizenship, and embodiment by examining cultural representations of disability and capacity, especially overcoming narratives and inspiration porn,  to demonstrate  the centrality of these categories  to cultural notions of good citizenship that have facilitated  the reproduction racial capitalism and the ongoing erosion of social safety net programs from the 1970s onward through  a health- focused discourse of depoliticization.

Tracing the teen’s uneven passage from post-World War II rebel to twenty-first century patient, my first book, Chronic Youth: Disability, Sexuality and U.S. Media Cultures of Rehabilitation offers an original account of how American cultural producers, policymakers, and medical professionals mobilized representations of disability to cast adolescence as a treatable “condition.” By the 1970s, parents, policymakers, educators, psychologists, and cultural producers embraced a new problem-driven, pedagogical brand of popular culture, which promised to rehabilitate deviant teenagers into good citizens. This formula soon prevailed as the dominant mode of address for teen audiences and recast formerly denigrated media forms, like television or paperback novels, as productive rather than damaging forces in citizenship development. From the stuttering boys of ABC’s After School Specials (1972-1994) to the lovestruck girls with cancer of Lurlene McDaniel’s Six Months to Live (1989), countless teen narratives linked overcoming disability, for boys, or accepting disability, for girls, to “growing up” sexually and emotionally into healthy heterosexual adult citizens. Although this commonsense alignment of disability and adolescence may have begun as a storytelling convention, disability became much more than a metaphor by the end of the twentieth century, as neuroscientific understandings of the “temporarily disabled” adolescent brain became pervasive. This sweeping cultural redefinition of adolescence, away from post-World War II externalizing sociologies of juvenile delinquency and toward post-1968 internalizing understandings of teen angst, was powerful in the ways it shaped our contemporary understandings of youth. However, the transformation of adolescence into a pathological (but treatable) “condition” was most powerful for what it did for the logic of rehabilitation: naturalizing endless self-surveillance as healthy, profitable, and essential to good citizenship through depoliticizing narratives of overcoming disability and coming-of-age. By centering disability in its analysis of media as a technology of citizenship, Chronic Youth makes a vital contribution to feminist media studies, which often overlooks disability as a category of intersectionality. Centering youth and disability in its history of sexual liberation and emotional labor, the book offers a new genealogy of neoliberalism by showing how rehabilitation culture, through overcoming and coming-of-age narratives, idealized a “bootstraps mentality” that has facilitated a neoliberal privatization of citizenship and retraction of the social safety net.

My peer-reviewed and peer-edited articles push beyond solely assessing representations of disability for their accuracy or their positive/negative depictions to consider what cultural work they do. My article, “Cripping Safe Sex: Life Goes On’s Queer/Disabled Alliances” appeared in a special issue (“Bioethics, Sexuality, and Gender Identity”) of the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry. This groundbreaking special issue joined well-known scholars in disability studies, queer studies, and bioethics—fields that undertake similar critiques of medical knowledge but rarely collaborate—to produce a novel cross-disciplinary special issue. I was honored to have my work appear alongside that of many influential scholars in disability and feminist science studies: Robert McRuer (Crip Theory), Rosemarie Garland Thomson (Extraordinary Bodies, one of the founding texts of the field of disability studies), and Cindy Patton (Globalizing AIDS). My article, “Feeling Real: Disability, Teen Sick-Lit, and the Condition of Adolescence,” which was based on the third chapter of Chronic Youth.appeared in the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, This essay had significant coverage outside of the academy. It was featured in Smithsonian.com and Autostraddle, an independently owned online magazine for queer women and a nominee for GLAAD’s Outstanding Blog Award in 2013 (enclosed). my peer-edited article, “Policing at the Synapse: Ferguson, Race, and the Disability Politics of the Teen Brain” appeared in a special issue (“Inhabitable Worlds: Troubling disability, debility, and ability narratives.”) of Somatosphere, a medical anthropology website that features scholarly work by leading medical anthropologists such as Emily Martin and Jonathan Metzl. A revised version of my 2010 article, “After School Special Education: Rehabilitative Television, Teen Citizenship, and Able-Bodiedness,” appears in Disability Media Studies (eds. Bill Kirkpatrick and Elizabeth Ellcessor, New York University Press, 2018), the first-ever edited collection focused on disability media studies. The anthology includes pieces by emerging and distinguished scholars including Krystal Cleary, Katie Ellis, Gerard Goggin, Mack Hagood, Beth Haller, Lori Kido Lopez, Shoshana Magnet, Robert McRuer, Tasha Oren, and Ellen Samuels, with afterword essays from Jonathan Sterne, Mara Mills, and Rachel Adams. My article “Find Your Fit: Wearable Technology and the Cultural Politics of Disability” appears in New Media & Society, the number one journal in Communication Studies (4.18 impact factor). This article examines healthmonitoring technologies and their relationship to corporate wellness programsthrough a disability studies lens My sixth article, a collaborative piece (George Washington University), “The Gift of Mobility: Disability, Queerness, and the Cultural Politics of Rehabilitation”which I coauthored with Robert McRuerappeared in Feminist Formations, a leading journal in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies that is published by Johns Hopkins University Press. In this work, we examine U.S. global evangelical disability missionary work (Wheels for the World) as well as American evangelical involvement in the passage of Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill to theorize “disability exceptionalism,” our term for the deployment of disability’s depoliticization as representational currency for U.S. exceptionalism. An Article based on Capacity Feminism’s third chapter,“Slothful Movements: Disability, Acceleration, and Carceral Feminism in Disney’s Zootopia (2017)”appeared in Feminist Media Studies, . This article examines the disability politics of speed, capacity and mobility to show the ways in which neoliberal choice feminism relies on ableist norms of embodiment and movement. By showing how Zootopia represents (white) feminist determination as physical strength and ability at the same time that it aligns psychiatric disabilities with racialized, biologized criminality (“going savage”), this article shows how the film uses the presumed political neutrality of disability as an invisible platform for its rehabilitative narrative of the police and its anti-government politics.

I am currently working on my second monograph, Capacity Feminism and Its Discontents, which analyzes feminist notions of strength and resilience alongside crip of color feminisms organized around revolutionary rest. This book,i s a continuation of my first book’s history of compulsory ablebodiedness and its centrality to cultural citizenship and racial capitalism. I trace how an ascension of cultural values of strength and resilience popularized  feminism r (i.e. The body positive  slogan “It’s not what your body looks like, it’s what it can do”), and how these values impact  cultural perceptions of work care, and dependencythat are central to the maintenance of racial capitalism. Like Chronic Youth, Capacity Feminismand Its discontents features a diverse archive comprised of TV, Film, literature, social media, sports coverage, newspapers, and public policy to examine how the rise of a seemingly apolitical strength-oriented feminism(i.e. capacity feminism) has facilitated broader currents of welfare retraction, and increasingly carceral approaches to the maintenance of cisnormativity in the name of protecting women’s achievements. the bookconsiders a variety of cultural locations of feminist strength and speed, including a pop cultural genealogy of the “supermom,” to the tradwife girls’ media, mental health/ Wellnessculture and women’s sports, as well as the emergence of crip feminist forms of anticapitalist, revolutionary rest, characterized by spectacular moments of refusal by women of color, as the coalesce into a diverse crip  anti-work politics emphasizing mutual aid, collective solidarity, and rest, discourses that I’m tentatively naming “slow feminisms, (i.e. “ The Nap Ministry,” and the “ “We do not care club” for women at various stages of menopause. My work intervenes into several bodies of literature, including affect theory, anti-work scholarship, histories of feminism,and racial capitalism, disability media studies and trans  studies by considering how unmarked forms of capacity continue to limit our conceptions of liberation and by offering a new critical disability studies assessment  of post- ADA cultural representations of disability, as disability  briefly gained cultural capital  in the age of multiculturalism

Memoir in Progress: From Wanda with love: chronic Stroke, Covid 19, and Lessons from disability Studies  This book will tell the story of my covid-19 stroke in December 2023.It is my goal to publish this book with a trade press so it can have a broader readership as a work of public scholarship that aims to introduce  disability studies concepts  to non-scholarly readers. The Prototypical story of acquired disability has a standard narrative trajectory, in which a nondisabled protagonist has no awareness of the cultural model of disability or its attendant arts, activism and culture. This book endeavors to show the profound difference that the institutionalization of disability studies has made, by inverting this prototypical story of acquired disability in the hopes of helping help others navigate new disablement with the reassurance and clarity afforded by crip wisdom and disabled ways of knowing.Nearly every stroke memoir currently available chronicles catastrophic stroke that results in the complete loss of speech, rather than chronic stroke with varying degrees of impairment(i.e. My Stroke of Insight). Stroke is a leading cause of death and disablement worldwide, Likewise, stroke survivors are getting younger and younger partially because of the increased risk of stroke caused by covid infection. This book is part of emergent disability studies scholarship about Covid-19 and long covid, and will contribute to the paucity of literature about children of disabled parents. By reflecting on how lessons from disability studies have helped me to navigate acquired disability. 

Future Projects

Kateřina Kolářová (Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic) and I plan to begin research for an article, “Aging in Dementia Village: Neocolonialism, Disability and Care,” which will analyze a dementia village in De Hogeweyk, Netherlands. A new approach to eldercare, these gated, supervised care facilities for people with dementia simulate “real life” to maximize elderly people’s mobility through public and private spaces. Combining close readings of public relations materials with observational data from a visit to the facility, we situate the villages within a broader global history of nursing homes, health care policy, and geriatric care. The project has undergone expedited IRB review and received an exemption, but the research is on hold due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Overall, my previous and future research asserts that analyzing disability and rehabilitation culture is central to understanding the cultural history of the U.S., politics, technology, and representation in a transnational context.

“Cyborg rather than aGoddess: A Transnational Crip History of Machines that Work”

This articlewill critically analyze Universal design as a technology of racial capitalism, by considering the ways in which inclusive Design in the workplace aims to create forever workers.