Reimagining Disability through “Disability Intimacy” (RSA (Renaissance Society of America))
San Francisco
Organization: RSA / RMMRA
Event: RSA (Renaissance Society of America)
RSA 2026
San Francisco - February 19–21, 2026
Reimagining Disability through “Disability Intimacy”
As disability justice activist Alice Wong writes, reading about disability intimacy “creates a dialogue” and is, of itself, “an intimate act bringing us together across space and time” (Disability Intimacy xx). Following these lines, this panel invites contributions devoted to the long genealogy of literary, visual, and historical representations of the disabled or “defective” bodymind, particularly those attentive to the concept of disability intimacy. This might include considering how disability sparks desire, enhances pleasure, generates trust, or brings characters together in close-knit formations. It might also involve examining crip ancestry, disability genealogy, and one’s affective—and maybe downright personal—relationship to the “mad” or halting figures of Renaissance texts, as well as to the period’s crip artists.
Embracing the possibility of disability intimacy encourages us to build on work that has long grounded early modern studies—on such topics as affect, voice, authority, and unruly embodiment—while pushing in new directions too. Allison Hobgood, for example, began clearing several of these paths in Beholding Disability, by exploring the “fraught terrain that is the disabled body when it is simultaneously a sexual body,” and considering texts that “narrat[e] disability and sex together,” and “invit[e] conversation about that juncture” (108).
To foster this much-needed conversation, we seek papers that reconceptualize the premodern body through various forms of disability intimacy; that challenge longstanding ideas of somatopsychic difference as both undesirable and undesiring; that engage with conceptions of disability as gain, rather than a lack or failure of signification; or use Renaissance models for engaging with the cultural past to interrogate its lasting influence on understandings of the closeness various bodies can and cannot achieve. We welcome transhistorical, transnational, translingual, and comparative approaches, and interdisciplinary work that dialogues with material understandings of the body, humanistic approaches, critical theory, or recent critical interventions in disability studies.
Please send abstracts by Tuesday, Aug. 12 to both Alani Hicks-Bartlett and Pasquale Toscano, alani_hicks-bartlett@brown.edu and ptoscano@vassar.edu :
Proposals should include the following:
- Paper title (15-word maximum)
- Abstract (200-word maximum)
- Brief cv (2 page maximum)
Sponsor Organization: Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association
https://www.academia.edu/143256088/CFP_RSA_2026_Disability_Intimacy
alani_hicks-bartlett@brown.edu
Alani Hicks-Bartlett/Pasquale Toscano