ABSTRACTS AND BIOGRAPHIES

Diverse Bodies – Acceptable bodies? Cinematic Negotiations of Disability and Queerness in Morgan and God’s Own Country
 
Petra Anders, University of Bamberg, Germany

Day 2 Saturday 13th November 2021 │Event 5:  9h30 – 10h30 │Panel 2 The Other on Screen

It is very common to tell stories of disability as ongoing crisis. In these cases, disability is staged as a bodily as well as a character trait which makes it impossible to meet the norm. Will, the disabled character in Thea Sharrock’s drama Me Before You even commits assisted suicide because he cannot meet his own ableist standards of a sexy, rich, powerful, heterosexual, non-disabled man anymore. Gabriel Engel, the evil doer in Christian Alvart’s thriller Antibodies, on the other hand, is a murder who killed young boys because of his paedophile desires. He then becomes disabled as he tries to escape the police. In this way, he is othered three times: as a homosexual disabled killer. My paper investigates why some bodies and desires are rendered acceptable while others are not. I then ask how Michel Akers’ drama Morgan and Francis Lee’s drama God’s Own Country succeed in portraying disability and queerness as diversity instead of otherness. Whilst Will’s self-conception takes Thomas G. Gerschick’s observation that ‘the bodies of people with disabilities make them vulnerable to being denied recognition as women and men’ (Gerschick 2008: 361) to extremes, considering Robert McRuer’s concept of ‘compulsory able-bodiedness’ (McRuer 2013) and the ‘disability perspective’ (Ellcessor/Kirkpatrick 2019: 140) as outlined by Elizabeth Ellcessor and Bill Kirkpatrick can help discover, uncover or create subversive potential as well as empower ‘new voices’ and change ‘political struggles over power and privilege’ (Ellcessor/Kirkpatrick 2019: 140). We can thus claim and expand social as well as artistic freedom to express and embrace disabled queer identities.

Dr Petra Anders is a research assistant at the University of Bamberg. Currently her intersectional research focusses on cinematic representations of disability. In 2021, she has already given papers at online conferences in Ireland, the UK, the US and Germany. Recent publications include the chapter ‘Welcome to the Freakhouse? Disability bei Wim Wenders’ in Jörn Glasenapp’s anthology ‚Kontinuität im Wandel. Begegnungen mit dem Filmemacher Wim Wender’.

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Periodizing the “Post-AIDS” Body
 
Aaron Benedetti, University of California, Davis; United States of America

Day 2 Saturday 13th November2021│ Event 8: 15h00 – 16h00 │Panel 4 Challenging Invisibility

 The Fathers Project (2020), a fictional, documentary-style film and media production by artist Leo Herrera, imagines a past and a future in which HIV and AIDS have never existed, and in which those who have died as a result of the HIV pandemic instead live and flourish. The project’s premise is simultaneously idealistic and elegiac. It includes, for example, imaginary portraits of late US artists Robert Mapplethorpe and Keith Haring, who died of AIDS-related complications during the late-1980s and early-1990s period typically bracketed as "the AIDS crisis.” Herrera artificially ages archival images of Mapplethorpe and Haring to capture them as they might have appeared thirty years after their own deaths. In the film component of this project, Herrera also speculates on the socioeconomic, political, and biomedical futures that Mapplethorpe, Haring, and other gay men of the crisis period might have built in the United States—had they survived beyond the crisis. In Herrera’s imagined year 2020, for example, Vito Russo runs a successful campaign to become US president, and Herrera’s film “documents” this event and its consequences—all in dramatic contrast to the 2016 election of Donald Trump and the deaths and violence associated with the current coronavirus pandemic. I understand The Fathers Project as one manifestation of a broader trend in American media toward what Ted Kerr calls “AIDS crisis revisitation,” a post-2008 phenomenon of renewed media production about the US history of HIV/AIDS and HIV/AIDS activisms. Kerr remarks that this period of revisitation is unique in its reliance on memory, retrospection, and archival materials as means of engaging AIDS politics. In my view, Herrera’s work demonstrates deep ambivalence toward the ethics of HIV/AIDS historiography, not least because the HIV pandemic is global, ongoing, and continually subject to political contest. Herrera’s onscreen fantasies of sexuality and illness index wider cultural anxieties about the ethics of gay and queer collective sociability in the context of American neoliberalism. In my paper, I explore the possibility that AIDS crisis revisitation is an expression of neoliberal political contradictions: between the desire for an ethical relation to a supposedly coherent queer past, on one hand, and a compulsion toward assimilatory liberal subjectivity, on the other. In a supposedly post-AIDS United States, seropositive bodies become temporal markers, political and social throwbacks to a time, history, and geopolitics of “crisis” that is cast as temporally distinct from the present-time of progressive queer politics. In such a context, seropositive bodies become the locus for a rich, complex matrix of national and intimate fantasy.

Aaron Benedetti is a PhD candidate in cultural studies at the University of California, Davis, with an emphasis in feminist theory and research.  His dissertation engages archival studies, queer theory, and temporality studies by exploring how archival practices and logics are reflected in the forms of contemporary US queer politics and publics.  At UC Davis, Aaron Benedetti works alternately as an instructor and teaching assistant in the Departments of English, American Studies, and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. 

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Queer Kaiju and Disabled Daisuke: Queer Disabilities in Ishirō Honda’s Gojira
 
Thomas Caffrey, Dublin City University, Ireland

Day 2 Saturday 13th November 2021│Event 5:  9h30 – 10h30│Panel 2 The Other on Screen

Popular cinema often reveals underlying assumptions about marginalised identities, including disabled people’s lived experiences. Drawing from Elizabeth Freeman and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, this paper addresses the implicit tension between sexual desire and the disabled body in Ishirō Honda’s popular monster film Gojira (‘Godzilla’, 1954). The forbidden desires of the physically disabled war veteran Daisuke Serizawa are examined concurrent with the treatment of the titular monster. The physical form of the monstrous Godzilla becomes the ultimate expression of an opposition to the “tyranny of the normal” (C Lord & R. Meyer, 2019). It is tolerated whilst in darkness, but when made visible the monster is murdered. To this end, I interrogate the monster as a symbol of disruption in a hostile world: Godzilla is not a malevolent creature, rather an unfortunate monster cast out of time. The queer valences of this existence are interrogated at length as the world of the text makes no effort to accommodate this outsider figure. This is read in close relation to the sexuality of the scarred and partially blinded Serizawa, who grapples with an arranged marriage and societal rejection. Serizawa will be briefly close-read in comparison to Yukio Mishima’s physically disabled character Kashiwagi, who featured in the contemporaneous novel Kinkaku-Ji (‘Temple of the Golden Pavilion’, 1956). The paper draws from Crip Studies, Queer Studies, and Comparative Literature. These threads culminate in a final, detailed reading of the mutual destruction of Dr Serizawa and Godzilla as a sort of traditional Japanese Shinjū (‘lover’s suicide’) pact. The paper seeks to uncover the underlying intermingled threads of repulsion and desire between disabled bodies in Honda’s enigmatic film.

Thomas Caffrey is a first-year PhD Student in Dublin City University (DCU), studying under the supervision of Dr.Michael Hinds. He is currently studying intercultural exchange in the works of Haruki Murakami, and is keenly interested in the areas of post-modernism, queer studies, and mythology. He completed his undergraduate study at DCU in 2019, and his MA at Maynooth University in Literatures of Engagement in 2020.

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The Role of Sensory Experiences in Humanization of People with Disabilities
 
Satara Charlson, Brandman University, United States of America
 

Day 2 Saturday 13th November2021│Event 6: 11h45 –13h00│Panel 3 Art Practice as Resistance to Normativity

Art speaks in ways words cannot. The purpose of this session is to discuss the role of art-based sensory experiences in the classroom and its power to humanize people who society dehumanizes, specifically people with disabilities. Using art to humanize, and sexualize can be empowering and help create new social norms within society. Through the engagement of the senses, empathy can increase and people can become open to new definitions of social norms of beauty, sexuality and power. The presenter will give examples from teaching social justice at bachelors and masters levels regarding how the use of these sensory experiences can create positive social change.

Dr Charlson is a creative social work educator and social justice advocate who has been designing and teaching social work curriculum at the bachelors and masters levels for over fifteen years.  Charlson specializes in aging and the role art plays in social change.  She currently serves as a Professor of Social Work at Brandman University in Irvine, California.

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Lights, Camera and Erection: Sexual Assistance Discussion on Stage
 
Andrea García-Santesmases, Unversidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED), Spain

Day 2 Saturday 13th November2021│Event 6: 11h45 –13h00│Panel 3 Art Practice as Resistance to Normativity

The sexuality of disabled people has been historically denied, silenced, stigmatised and even castrated. However, in Spain, in recent years, it has gone from being a taboo topic to being publicly demanded as a right and a need that society must respond to. Since the start of the second decade of the 21st century, Spanish Independent Living activism has become sexual: they have started discussing sexuality and defining themselves as legitimate sexual subjects as well as producing several projects to put their discourses and claims forward. During this time, two successful documentaries have been produced on sexuality and disability and in the same backdrop (mainly the city of Barcelona). The two films were made just over a year apart, but they are radically different. Reviewing them allows us to understand the different imaginaries and tensions underlying the apparent consensus within the movement for the recognition of the sexuality of disabled people. One treats disabled sexuality as a source of dissidence (Yes, We Fuck!’ queer-crip approach) but the other as a source of exclusion (I Want Sex too’ medical/rehabilitative model). This comparative analysis of two documentaries helps us to understand not only how ‘this sexuality’ is constructed, but also the ableist and heteronormative constructions that underpin all sexualities. In conclusion, we can highlight that ‘talking about sexuality’ is not subversive but may even reinforce gender stereotypes, heteronormative structures, and ableist system. A model of sexuality that denies the body diversity, gender differences or human vulnerability is not an empowering one but an ableist way to normalise the disabled people’s experience.

Dr Andrea García-Santesmases Fernández graduated in Sociology at Charles III University of Madrid and in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Complutense University of Madrid. She holds a Master’s Degree in Sociological Research from the University of Barcelona. She holds a PhD with a distinction “cum laude” in Sociology. Her main lines or research are the intersections between gender studies and disability studies. She has also been visiting scholar at the Disability and Human Rights Observatory (ODDH) of the University of Lisbon (ISCSP) and at the Núcleo de Estudos de Gênero- PAGU of the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (São Paulo, Brasil). Currently, she is working as a PhD Assistant Professor at the Department of Social Work at National Distance Education University (UNED), and she is involved in different projects about independent living activism and as part of the CareNet research group.

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 Healing Through Art: An Examination of the Intersection of the Queer and Disabled Communities
 
Tiffany-Ashton Gatsby, University of Washington, United States of America 
 

Day 2 Saturday 13th November2021│Event 6: 11h45 –13h00│Panel 3 Art Practice as Resistance to Normativity 

Individuals identifying as both ‘queer’ and ‘disabled’ are presented with unique challenges when interacting with support systems of family, community, institutions, and biomedicine. For queer-disabled people, the act of seeking care within these systems does not necessarily result in healing and can often lead to increased trauma, often necessitating alternative healing options. Queer-disabled people use art as one such holistic healing modality in various ways, including through art therapy, individual art practice, and as a tool for community building and social justice. The artistic expression channelled by the queer-disabled community is an effective site of resistance that promotes visibility and has the power to affect change. My research explores how interaction within support systems drives queer-disabled individuals to utilize art as a form of healing and resistance. I examined the impact of community-based art projects in comparison to art therapy and art practice, conducted ethnographic interviews and participant observation where I created a community-based art project with a cohort of my queer-disabled peers. My research shows how the experience of using art as a healing modality empowers the queer-disabled community on an individual and group level. My research results provide a strong foundation for my further study of the queer-disabled community and the challenges faced when seeking care in the biomedical system while taking a deeper look into the complexities of engagement with the arts for healing.  

Tiffany-Ashton Gatsby (they/she) is a queer-disabled, gender nonconforming womxn of Ashkenazi descent living with Multiple Sclerosis. They are an undergraduate honors researcher at the University of Washington studying Medical Anthropology and Global Health, Interdisciplinary Visual Arts, and Diversity. They recently completed their thesis on healing through art in the queer-disabled community, as a foundation for further research in graduate school. As an artist, advocate, activist, and trauma survivor, Tiffany-Ashton focuses on representing issues faced by the queer-disabled community, including mental health, economic inequality, and social and political dissonance through abstraction, while examining performativity and perceptions of the intersection of gender and disability. They approach these topics through painting, sculpture, glass, photography, collage, assemblage, and film. They are currently working on larger film and performance pieces documenting lived experiences while interacting within biomedical systems, pushing back against the biomedical system, hegemonic cis-heteropatriarchy, and ableism while highlighting the issues queer-disabled persons deal with simply by existing in a medicalized and often desexualized body. Tiffany-Ashton is a Pride Foundation, Gilman, and GSBA Scholar and a member of the Mortar Board Honors Society and Phi Sigma Pi Honors Fraternity. They are a board member of the Seattle Dyke March and a volunteer for the National MS Society. They embrace their multiple, marginalized identities and move forward into a space of recognition and celebration, hoping to someday establish a network of collectives for queer-disabled individuals to gather and create community-based artworks for public installation made to bring visibility to the queer-disabled community.  

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Self and Body: The Two Complementary Halves
 
Anu Malik, The LNM Institute of Information Technology Jaipur, India

Day 1 Friday 12th November 2021│Event 3:  15h30 – 16h45│Panel 1 Narratives, Bodies and Affects

People share their experiences through stories. During an illness, people locate their personal experiences of illness in their life and are more predisposed to sharing these illness experiences through stories (Levy, 2005). The narrative in this study aims to explore the dichotomies between body and self. The author collected the interview and developed it into a narrative as part of the Ph.D. thesis. Polkinghorne (1995) identified characteristics to build narratives from the interviews. The interview is converted into a narrative using these characteristics. The narrative's central theme is around the struggle of a mother to make a living for her son and herself. Fate has been cruel to her, and for several years after her marriage, Mamta's (the protagonist of the narrative) wish to become a mother remained unfulfilled. For nine years after her marriage, she yearned for a baby, and by the time LIFE finally entered her womb when she was twenty-five, her husband had already left her to live with another woman. Mamta struggled to makes her end meet so that she could educate her son. She went into prostitution out of necessity, and her lack of knowledge and improper awareness brought HIV. Mamta had always neglected her body as well as self. She had never taken care of her body, and now after this illness, she had this chance of looking at her body from a different perspective. The dichotomy of self and body is distinctly visible in this narrative. Self and body are not considered as distinct entities, but they are looked upon as complementary halves.

Dr Anu Malik is currently working as an assistant professor of Psychology in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at LNM Institute of Information Technology, Jaipur India: She has a Ph.D., degree from the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, India. She is a psychologist by training and has a keen interest in research. For almost a decade, her research area focuses on suffering, stigma, health and illness. While, pursuing my Ph.D., she has learned and applied both qualitative and quantitative methodologies: combining narrative analysis, interview material, correlation analysis, regression analysis, mediation analysis, and path analysis. She has published two research articles in Scopus Indexed journals and a few others in the journals of national and international repute articles. She has also presented her research at national and international conferences. In addition, to teaching and research, She has been associated as a faculty coordinator of LNMIIT in a government program of rural development. Moreover, she was awarded the University Gold Medal in the master’s degree program.

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 Translating the Hypermobile Body
 
Hilary Potter, Royal Holloway, University of London, United Kingdom 
 

Day 1 Friday 12th November 2021│Event 3:  15h30 – 16h45│Panel 1 Narratives, Bodies and Affects 

This paper examines the intersections between disability studies and translation. Drawing on my lived experience of hypermobility, defined below, and my background in translation studies I argue there are parallels between them. This paper constitutes a new area of research, and it is hoped that it will lead to constructive discussion and potential future collaborations. Hypermobility is a condition affecting the joints which have above-average range of movement, meaning that the body works harder to remain stable, making the individual fatigued but also at risk of dislocations, both partial and total. It is a largely invisible condition, even to those who are afflicted by it and as such is often little understood, particularly in the workplace. Hypermobile people find themselves adapting to normative conventions to succeed, rendering the condition invisible. This paper considers how translation, particularly in the Anglophone sphere, parallels living and working with the condition before adapting additional translation theories to suggest approaches to increasing visibility of the condition and improving the workplace experience as a consequence. Translation is a process in which the basic strategy is determined by ideology (Lefevere) and in the Anglophone sphere the dominant notion of a successful translation is one that reads like an original text in that language, thus hiding the fact it is a translation, domesticating it in terms of linguistic but also cultural and social norms and conventions (Venuti). Here we see the first parallel to living with hypermobility. Yet, translation theories also suggest that there is an interdependence between writing and translating (Derrida) and that the two are bound to one another, and that translation can be used to subvert genre norms (Bhabha). By taking these approaches it is possible to generate awareness and make the condition more visible but also show how adaptations can be beneficial for all. 

Hilary Potter is a German Studies and Translation scholar looking to move into disability studies. She has been precariously employed since 2014 and is looking to change direction. Most recently she has been employed by Royal Holloway, University of London, and retains an honorary affiliation. She has published a monograph and several articles with more in the pipeline. She is the co-chair of the University Council of Modern Languages (UCML) Special Interest Group for Early Career Academics and and the joint representative for Early Career Academics at Women in German Studies. She is a contributing editor for the bibliographic journal, Year's Work in Modern Language Studies. 

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Disabling Affects and Transgressive Sexuality in Melissa Broder’s "Personal Essays: So Sad Today"
 
Karolina Turowicz, University of Wrocław, Poland
 

Day 1 Friday 12th November 2021│Event 3:  15h30 – 16h45│Panel 1 Narratives, Bodies and Affects

The 21st-century queer disability has many faces that take a variety of forms in literature. One of those faces is represented in the bold self-narrative (that was first published as an online collection of tweets) of a bisexual and polyamorous American writer and poet experiencing severe mental illness, Melissa Broder. Her painfully honest book "Personal Essays: So Sad Today" (2016) contains a self-reflective, emotion-laden case study of her own life scarred by emotional traumas, characterized by a constant struggle with disabling affects: crippling anxiety accompanied by panic attacks, sadness and shame, unfulfilled love and desire – all of those leading her to depression and obsessive behaviours centred around objects such as sex, food, internet, alcohol and drugs. In my presentation, I intend to analyse Broder’s non-fictional account with the use of Silvan S. Tomkins’s psychological theory of affect, theories of trauma and the knowledge derived from the interdisciplinary fields of disability and queer studies. While applying the affect theory to literature, I will specifically focus on the affects Broder describes in relation to her multiple sexual encounters with different sexes as well as her autoerotic experiences and fetishes, all of which can be viewed as transgressive. I will also inspect her queer and disabled identity of someone experiencing an amalgamation of very intense and life-disorganizing affects. The form of a personal essay applied to a self-narrative about living with mental illness will also be examined.

Karolina Turowicz (she/her) is an emerging Polish scholar and researcher of American literature. She graduated from the University of Wrocław in 2018 (Master’s Degree in general psychology), and again in the year 2020 (Master’s Degree in English Studies – translation). Currently she is a PhD candidate studying literature at the University of Wrocław’s Faculty of Letters. She specializes in trauma narratives and the psychological concept of affect, writing a dissertation on applications of Silvan S. Tomkins’s affect theory to the analysis of contemporary pathographies written by American and Polish authors experiencing mental illness. She also teaches at the Institute of English Studies (UWr). Her academic interests involve the intersections of literature and psychology, more specifically trauma and mental illness literature, narrative psychology, gender and queer studies, disability studies.

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 Negotiating Queer Disability: Hong Kong Lesbian and Gay Film Festival and Until Rainbow Dawn (2018) 

Heshen Xie, University of Nottingham, United Kingdom

Day 2 Saturday 13th November2021│ Event 8: 15h00 – 16h00 │Panel 4 Challenging Invisibility

As minorities among queer communities, queer disabled people have been marginalised at queer film festivals, which should be safe and inclusive spaces. It is comparatively rare to watch a film about queer disability on the big screen. Festivals sometimes cannot or do not provide the necessarily support for the physical participation of disabled communities (Dawson and Loist, 2018). This paper firstly demonstrates why queer film festivals should pay more attention to queer disabled communities, in line with the radically political nature of such festivals (Richards, 2016). Then, through the examination of Hong Kong Lesbian and Gay Film Festival’s (HKLGFF) programmes, it highlights the extreme lack of representation of queer disabled communities. The third part of the paper addresses the programming of screenings at HKLGFF 2018 of Until Rainbow Dawn (2018). A film describing the lives of queer deaf communities in Japan, its director and most of the actors belong to deaf communities. As HKLGFF’s first feature-length film about queer disability, the screenings can be regarded as a successful attempt to resist normative programming styles. This paper seeks to criticise the market-oriented festival strategies of queer film festivals and emphasise the necessity of the festivals to consider the interest of queer disabled communities.

Heshen Xie is a PhD candidate in Film and Television Studies at University of Nottingham. His doctoral research explores the relationship between the Hong Kong Lesbian and Gay Film Festival and Hong Kong queer culture through the perspective of political economy. He holds an MA in Film Studies from King’s College London, and his work has appeared in Frames Cinema Journal.

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