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Lecture: Queer Affect in Crip Landscapes

The Department of Gender Studies cordially invites you to a lecture Queer Affect in Crip Landscapes. Disability, Desire, Devastation, given by professor Robert McRuer. The lecture takes place at Prostor39 on November 13, 2019.

Abstract of the lecture:

My recent work reads the current moment of global emergency as what I have termed “crip times”; I have argued that in our moment disability is a central, but undertheorized, component of a global austerity politics.  Crip Times: Disability, Globalization, and Resistance (NYU, 2018) centers on the particularly-punishing austerity regime that has been in place in the UK for almost a decade, but the book spins out to a range of other locations where a logic of austerity is deeply sedimented, including the United States, and considers as well the ways in which disabled artists and activists resist that logic.  “Queer Affect in Crip Landscapes” continues this work, focusing on disabled subjects caught up in new and devastating forms of authoritarian neoliberalism across the Western Hemisphere.  The presentation looks in particular toward Brazil, where President Jair Bolsonaro is primed not only to deepen austerity but to wreak havoc on the country’s natural resources, opening the rain forest to increasing development as cities in the north burn and cities in the south sink further into the sea.  Situated at the intersection of queer affect theory, mad studies, and crip ecologies, the paper examines the forms of queer/crip intimacies and desires that might emerge in the midst of such devastation and destruction. To pose those questions, I examine two recent queer films that are not immediately legible as “disability” films, but which I read through a crip analytic: Karim Aïnouz’s Futuro Beach (2014), set largely in the northern city of Fortaleza; and Filipe Matzembacher and Marcio Reolon’s Hard Paint (2018), set entirely in the southern city of Porto Alegre.  Wasteand sinkage are the keywords framing my analysis, as I consider precarious forms of queer/crip affects, intensities, and intimacies emerging from the wasteland of the north to the sinkage (environmental and economic) of the south.  Although I do not argue that the texts I consider provide easy answers for responding to devastation and destruction in crip times, I do suggest that they represent disabled ways of knowing (cripistemologies) that gesture towards the most famous idea to emerge from the city of Porto Alegre: another world is possible.