Delores Phillips and Cultural Studies Association’s Crip Cultures/Critical Disability Studies Working Group Co-Host Theodora Danylevich discuss crip silences, crip futurities, and crip joy with authors Alyson Patsavas (University of Illinois, Chicago), Alyson K. Spurgas (Trinity College), and Jess Whatcott (San Diego State University). This podcast is accompanied by a scholarly commentary by Angela Carter.
Articles by Angela Carter
Angela M. Carter is an independent scholar, educator, and community organizer. As a Ronald E. McNair scholar, Angela became a first-generation college graduate in 2009 when she earned her BA in English from Truman State University. Dr. Carter completed her PhD.in Feminist Studies at the University of Minnesota in 2019, where she co-founded the Critical Disability Studies Collective, an academic organization advancing intersectional and critical inquiries around disability, ableism, and access. She has worked in various capacities over the last twenty years teaching, researching, and advocating around experiences of injustice and inequity in higher education. Currently, she is connecting with other disabled Minnesotans to form a grassroots community organization, AmplifyMN: A Disability Justice Collective.
When Silence Said Everything: Reconceptualizing Trauma through Critical Disability Studies
Reading X González’s, March 24, 2018, “March For Our Lives” speech—their words and silences—as an entry point into what I term a crip theory of trauma, this essay argues that the dominant narratives about and around Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) say more about the compulsivity of the “proper” citizen subject than they do the actual embodied experience and debilitation of trauma itself. The text reconceptualizes trauma narratives, like González’s, through critical disability studies to argue that certain cripistemologies—or crip ways of knowing—trauma arise that are not otherwise available or readily accessible. Most notably, by rejecting dominant pathologizing forces and embracing crip ways of knowing, this analysis brings forth a new working definition of trauma, as an embodied, affective structure. These ways of knowing offer crucial insights for efforts to grapple with the ongoing forms of trauma enacted and perpetuated across the globe, and are particularly urgent against a political and cultural landscape that, as my reading of González’s speech makes clear, in many ways refuses to hear, see, and learn from the knowledge that trauma produces.