Cripping Literary and Cultural Studies: Neurodivergent and Mad Methodologies (NeMLA)
Online
Organization: NeMLA
Event: NeMLA
Critical disability studies and the medical humanities have generated growing interest within cultural and literary studies in the past decade. Yet scholars in these fields tend to engage with disability and illness either thematically, examining their representations in literary and cultural productions, or rhetorically, tracing how they inflect the very form of these productions. Rarely do such approaches ask how disability and illness might transform criticism itself, that is, how neurodivergent or mad cognition might become a critical resource, transforming the ways we read, analyze, and inhabit literary and cultural studies.
This panel invites papers that take up this question, exploring what new methodologies neurodivergence and mental illness—including, but not limited to, autism, ADHD, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, OCD, PTSD, and depression—can generate. How might neurodivergent and mad ways of thinking and being-in-the-world produce innovative, crip approaches to literary and cultural analysis that refuse sane- and neuronormative standards?
Such a project finds grounding in Arseli Dokumaci’s concept of disability-as-method, “a creative approach through which research methods are informed by, modeled after, and tailored to the situated knowledges of disabled people” (Activist Affordances, 11). It also resonates with Robert McRuer’s call to challenge “straight composition, with its demand for composed and docile texts, skills, and bodies” (Crip Theory, 171), as well as with Jack Halberstam’s notion of low theory, a voluntarily undisciplined mode of knowledge that defies the linearity and restraint of established academic discourse (The Queer Art of Failure).
We welcome papers that generate or point toward new critical approaches grounded in neurodivergent and mad cognition and cripped methodologies. We particularly encourage submissions in which such cognition is presented as an embodied epistemological standpoint where neurodivergent or mad experience shapes the work from within, rather than serving as a structuring metaphor.
https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22321
Gabriel Proulx