The DTaP CFP for ATHE 2026 in Baltimore (July 22-26) is now live. Come and join us in considering the work of disabled people in theatre and the performing arts practice, education, and scholarship! cdn.ymaws.com/www.athe.org...

Reminder to anyone who hasn’t considered it yet: Intentional use of starvation as a weapon to control a population is a *War Crime*. And positive election results are not the same and end to American fascism. Now is the time to fight harder.

My neurospicy academic heart feels this so hard.

Obscene.

As good of a takedown as I have ever seen.

Disabled people: RFK Jr. is a dangerous eugenicist who wants people to die. Nondisabled people: DP: Here are examples of his eugenicist policy. NP:... DP: He actually wrote all this out in a book years ago. NP: Hey why can't I get a Covid shot??

Delighted to have found an excuse to use the term “Monster Fucker” in an academic chapter intended for publication. I am hoping my editor agrees its use is actually reasonable.

Important history.

I’ve become troubled by the strong impulse *against* democracy by many young progressives. The attitude that everyone else is too stupid to make good decisions, so they should not have choices in their lives, seems to be becoming ever more common. This is a bad impulse. Human bad choices are…

Disability interacts with every single element of history, and intersectional understanding of oppression is necessary to learn that history accurately. Black American Sign is a beautiful and vital language that should be better known. Learn about it for Disability History Month. 😈

Queercrips on July 1: It’s still Pride, let’s keep up the party. And also the protests. Disability Pride Month just started in the US. Now is the time to fight fascist eugenic policies promoted by Trump, RFK Jr., and all their evil friends. Everyone can fight!

If you were to suggest one work of theory to read, what would it be? A single writer is also okay, but one work would be preferable. Bonus points if it’s on monsters, the gothic, horror, disability/crip, or queer. My suggestion: everyone should read “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)” by J. J. Cohen.

Check it out!

This is a remarkably terrible plan. Even in the “bad pedagogical fads” category, this is an extraordinarily bad idea.

Obscene.

I had a wonderful time at the 2nd International Conference on Folklore and the Gothic, Wednesday and Thursday at Morgan State University in Baltimore, MD. Thank you to the Department of World Languages and International Studies for hosting us!

Delightful.

The Disability, Theatre, and Performance Focus Group for the Association for Theatre in Higher Education is hosting a day of virtual readings of plays by, for, and about the disabled community, on Friday April 4, 12-8 PM ET. Price is $20. All three readings are included, so please stay for the day!

Minnesota is trying to add “Trump derangement syndrome” to “draptomania,” “sluggish schizophrenia,” & “agitated delirium” in the Most Abusive “Diagnoses” in Psychiatric History Hall of Fame. I wonder if RFK Jr.’s “healing farms”/concentration camps will “treat” it, & if it’ll be possible to refuse.

I have been belatedly introduced to the existence of this workshop on disability and philosophy. Check them out!

There are many reasons I’ve been struggling to write the past week. Burnout, exhaustion, pain, and sickness are all on the list. But more than anything, I’m realizing how much I don’t want to write this paper about the end of rights for disabled people in the United States.

I have vivid memories of an article from grad school (so almost 20 years ago) about Batman and Catwoman, kink, furries/other erotic “animal” imagery in history, and construction of identity in gender and sexuality. It’s connected deeply to Susan Sontag in my mind. Anyone have a clue what this is?

How could you not want to know the bear schedule?

Tagging @purplezebrav.bsky.social to maybe take a look at this as well. They’ve been a disability activist for some time and I think it’d be something they would be interested in reading.

Does anyone have access to the article “Sexual Participation within Fan Cultures: Considering a Sed Toy as a Mode of Reception for The Shape of Water” by @eddiefalvey.bsky.social? I need it for a chapter in an upcoming edited volume and can’t afford the individual fee as an independent scholar.

Tentatively plotting a listicle/guide for excellent go-to resources on disability and theatre, so that no one who means well is led astray by Google. So many of the algorithm’s choices range from incomplete to outright offensive, and knowing how to assess a source is more than beginner knowledge.

I will add, the widespread interest in disability scholarship, pedagogy, & praxis is heartening. There is a sea change in awareness of the topic & desire to do better at access and inclusion. Please don’t stop because you aren’t an expert YET! Just bring an expert into the project & keep learning.

On a closely related note, I am available to guest teach/for theory & syllabus support/give contact with other experts. For theatre labor, please reach out to DTaP to send CFPs, audition notices, hiring calls, etc to our mailing list. You CAN find a qualified person! Nothing About Us Without Us!

If you want to write/create about disability & you are not an expert, get a co-author that is. Qualified experts on every element of disability, crip theory, madness, neurodiversity, etc are everywhere. If you can’t find someone interested, consider that your project maybe ableist or fatally flawed.

Disability - like all marginalizations - is an area of work that demands expertise. This includes disability culture and arts, history, rights activism, theory, etc. Writing from the dominant position, without serious topic study, while merely “meaning well” is not good enough. List to experts!

The Journal of Consent-Based Performance Special Issue on Disability just came out. I am so proud to have been a part of this fantastic project. Check it out now!

This is going to be an amazing event. I’ll be there. Will you?

Quoting @miamingus.bsky.social is always a challenge, as her analysis is so insightful that I struggle to cut down selections. Sadly just writing “please read this entire blog before returning to my paper” seldom works in practice. Thank you for your work; it has made me the crip scholar I am now.

The grotesque and the monstrous are interrelated in many ways, but there is one vital difference: the monstrous is attractive as well as repulsive. It’s fascinating and often eroticized, though usually in deeply disturbing ways. The push of disgust without the pull of attraction is not monstrosity.

This is your periodic reminder that I am available for dramaturgy, disability access and representation consulting, guest teaching, and individualized support on theses and dissertations including but not limited to theory development and locating sources. Please reach out if interested.

I had the privilege of judging tech and design work for the VA High School Thesby Awards. It’s always fun working with that age group - we can see the artists they are becoming and the childhood they are outgrowing. Was super happy to see so many disabled kids excelling in theatre. Gives me hope.

Disabled creators, get those stories out!

Working title: Defending the Borders of Humanity: Freaks, Monsters, and Eugenics in American Culture Focused on the relationships between popular culture and sociopolitical history re: systems of oppression and power. Anyone interested in these topics, message me: I love to talk about monsters.

Is anyone out there going into writing a book proposal hardcore late winter/early spring this year and might be up for co-working through the process. I want to finally get my partial monograph under contract, and working with other people and creating shared deadlines helps me get it done.

Tagging @purplezebrav.bsky.social for this.

Not remotely my area so I cannot comment on accuracy, but it’s a really interesting analysis.

The cultural body of the monster can never be brought into the space of the human (other than in a daring attack before being cast back). Domestic it, and what’s left is no longer a monster and cannot do a monster’s job. It is outside because it is the Outside, the Ur-Other. It can never be tamed.

Returning to this thread for one last thought: sometimes the monsterized populations of real people gain human[ity/ rights], and are brought into the center. When this happens only the physical bodyminds move. The cultural body of the monster stays outside the border, & can be applied elsewhere.

I am very bad at microblogging: I want to use far too many words. But then privilege, power, abjection, grotesquery, freaks, monsters, and the like are huge, multifaceted topics, core to human culture. In the end the monster’s journey is a circle. No access to the center, but never fully cast out.

If the monsters can break the ritual and prevent the closure of the controlled instability, then they get to make the future. It’s very hard to do, as even in times of “reversal” we are never allowed to chance to change the narrative. But the privileged out slumming will never join the revolution.

Still, the potential for change remains. It’s just held in the hands of those who are placed outside of the realm of the tolerable, where the privileged go to play while slumming and then leave behind at the end. Even those usually on the bottom won’t rebel when they sometimes get to be on top.

The monster will rise again, the circus will come back to town, and pressure for change will rise. But after a night playing with monsters nothing changes. The cycle of the carnivalesque is one of temporary, ritualized, controlled, and collectively abjured reversal so that the end result is stasis.

That way the temptation is indulged only enough to bleed off pressure and not rupture. Just a little bit of wildness to take the edge off, just a kinky night out partying with those denied basic rights. And then the privileged go home and forget that others are human, & their knowledge is valuable.

And once those made valueless are valued and even envied, the propaganda of superiority fails and the normative is denaturalized. And then revolution can happen. Far better for those in power to encourage carnivale, or slumming, or gawking and the freaks and monsters, followed by ritual rejection.