Erotics In the Flesh Crip Feeling, Queer Intimacy, and the Trans Gaze, proposes erotics as an onto-epistemological imperative in the face of intensifying forms of Liberalism and state violence. Erotics in the Flesh examines three pairings of minoritarian cultural production which emerge in the wake of the Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump presidencies. Through this examination of participatory installation art, queer retrospective film, and trans portraiture, the project reimagines social worlds and semantic fields to consider the worlding potential of embodied affect, emergent structures of feeling, and erotics here in the flesh.

Special Issue on Disability and the Emotions. Ed. David Bolt. Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 14.1 (2020): 75-90.

If there is no crying in disability studies, then what becomes of those whose emotions are disabling or those whose disability is invalidated because it is considered just a feeling? This article explores the imbrication between emotions and disability in queer and affect theory. Building on Robert McRuer’s work connecting queerness and disability and José Muñoz’s theorization of brown feelings, I propose crip feelings/feeling crip to describe and attend to the slipperiness between disability identity and emotions. The term uses “crip” to signify how the confluence of disability and emotions further troubles the able-disabled identity divide and expands McRuer’s “ability trouble” not only to allow understandings of emotions to be put into crisis but also to proliferate opportunities for political alliances. The article begins with a reading of a keynote lecture that focuses on disability, feeling, and suicide to lay out the key terms and theoretical interventions. It then moves to a recruitment and extended reading of José Muñoz’s work on Fred Herko’s life and eventual suicide; finally, the article offers a reading of a representations of queerness and disability in culture to propose the overlap of queerness, disability, and emotions as an example of what may be possible when the slipperiness between disability identity and emotions occurs.

Submitted to Transgender Studies Quarterly and currently under review.

This article proposes transcrip study as an analytical approach and embodied intellectual practice through a recontextualization of disability within trans studies. This practice of thought becomes articulable by turning away from Discourse in two ways. First, theoretically, by thinking transcrip study through the relationship between disability and transness as affect as opposed crip/queer theory’s gravitational center: identity. And, second, textually, articulating a trans gaze rooted in embodied change as shown in Leo Xander Foo’s photographs of Lane, his cis caregiver, doing his T shot.