Queer Affect in Crip Landscapes: Disability, Desire, Devastation

April 1, 2019 -
5:00pm to 6:30pm

Abstract: In this talk, Dr. McRuer employs his critical observation that disability is a central, but undertheorized, component of a global austerity politics to focus on new and devastating forms of authoritarian neoliberalism across our hemisphere. He focuses specifically on Brazil where newly-installed President Jair Bolsonaro is primed not only to deepen austerity but also to wreak havoc on the country’s natural resources, opening the rain forest to increasing development as cities in the north burn and cities in the south sink further into the sea.

Deploying a medical humanities frame that situates the body in culture and in relation to cultural production, the talk examines the forms of queer/crip intimacies and desires, and forms of critical, collaborative care, that might emerge in the midst of such destruction. Reading through a crip analytic two queer films that are not immediately legible as “disability” films—Karim Aïnouz’s Futuro Beach (2014) and Filipe Matzembacher and Marcio Reolon’s Hard Paint (2018), McRuer considers precarious forms of queer/crip affects, intensities, and intimacies emerging from the wasteland of the north to the sinkage (environmental and economic) of the south. Employing waste and sinkage as keywords framing his analysis, McRuer suggests that the texts he interprets represent disabled ways of knowing (cripistemologies) that gesture towards the most famous idea to emerge from the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre: another world is possible.

Medical Humanities Mondays Lecture, co-sponsored by the Disabilities Studies Reading Group and the Humanities Center

Location and Address

109 Barco Law Building