Work in the Intersections: A Black Feminist Disability Framework

This talk situates disability, blackness, and gender with one another in such a way that we build on previous efforts to understand the complex ways in which cultural expectations for the body impact how we might frame the questions: what is disability and who is disabled? The under-examined impairments of Black people by Black Studies and the erasure of raced bodies – specifically Black bodies – within mainstream Disability Studies requires the introduction of a Black feminist disability framework. By employing a Black feminist disability framework, scholars of African American and Black Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Disability Studies have a flexible and useful methodology through which to consider this historical, social, cultural, political, and economic reverberations of disability for Black disabled people. This talk is based on a forthcoming article co-authored by Moya Bailey and Izetta Mobley.

Dr. Moya Bailey is Assistant Professor of Cultures, Societies, and Global Studies and of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Northeastern University. Her work focuses on Black women’s use of digital media to promote social justice as acts of self-affirmation and health promotion. She is interested in how race, gender, and sexuality are represented in media and medicine. She currently curates the #transformDH Tumblr initiative in Digital Humanities (DH). She is a monthly sustainer of the Allied Media Conference, through which she is able to bridge her passion for social justice and her work in DH. She is the founder and co-conspirator of Quirky Black Girls, a network for strange and different black girls, and now serves as the digital alchemist for the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network (http://octaviabutlerlegacy.com/). Her co-authored book #HashtagActivism: Race and Gender in America’s Network Counterpublics is forthcoming from MIT Press in 2019, and she is completing another book titled Contesting Misogynoir: Black Women’s Digital Resistance in U.S. Culture.

Sponsored by: Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society; the BAD CRIPP Community Forum; Prof. Karen Nakamura, Robert and Colleen Haas Distinguished Chair of Disability Studies; Disability Studies Research Cluster; Berkeley Center for New Media; Center for the Study of Sexual Culture; Center for Race & Gender; & the Departments of African American Studies, English, and Gender and Women’s Studies

Please refrain from wearing scented products. Venue is wheelchair accessible. ASL interpretation provided. CART transcription available with advance request to: knak@berkeley.edu

facebook event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/970972043054748/