(The Center Square) – The University of Kentucky is offering a graduate level course entitled “Feminist Disability Studies” that considers “crip feelings” and how gender and race inform the experience of disability.
“Throughout the semester, we will traverse the field of feminist disability studies, paying close attention to how different scholars think and write about disability, pain, and chronic illness,” the course description says.
In the course, students “will think about care labor, mental health apps, the debilitating effects of academia, crip feelings, and how gender, race, and sexuality inform the experience and legibility of disability, pain, and chronic illness,” according to the description.
The course is taught by Professor Anastasia Todd. According to her school bio, Todd’s areas of interest include feminist disability studies, crip theory, and girlhood studies.
At the time of publishing, Todd had not responded to The Center Square’s two requests for comment.
In her book, “Cripping Girlhood,” Todd defines “to crip” and “cripping” as “a practice that interrogates or unsettles assumptions about disability and disabled people, and specifically in the case of this book, assumptions about disabled girls and girlhoods.”
“Crip has come to signify many things at once: an ‘in-your-face’ and prideful reclamation of disability, a capacious and flexible term encompassing all sorts of non-normative embodiments,” Todd wrote.
Cripping Girlhood “explores the promise and peril of this newfound cultural visibility for select disabled girls,” according to the book.
The “Feminist Disability Studies” description states that “disability activists, scholars, and advocates have long pushed back against a myopic understanding of disability as a pathologized condition, an individual deficit, and as a self-evident truth of the bodymind.”
“Instead, they argue for the recognition of disability as multiplicitous: as an identity, as culture, and as valuable embodied human difference,” the description says.
“This graduate level seminar takes up these arguments and critiques, but from a decidedly feminist perspective,” the description says.
The course will additionally “read scholarship from feminist authors who don’t always use the language of disability.”
Todd has been teaching at the University of Kentucky since 2018 and, according to her school bio, Todd’s research “investigates the intersections of disability and girlhood from a feminist disability studies perspective.”
In an interview with the Girl Museum entitled “Why We Need Girl Studies,” Todd said that “it is important that we think intersectionally and transnationally about girlhood.”
“Being attuned to globalization helps to decenter white, Western girlhood as the universal frame for studying ‘girlhood,’” Todd said.
Todd is to give a lecture in February at the University of Kentucky entitled “Integrating the Disabled Girl, Cripping the Health Humanities.”
The course is offered through UK’s Department of Gender and Women’s Studies (GWS).
GWS states that it “investigates gender broadly conceived, and the cultures and contributions of women worldwide from feminist/womanist perspectives.”
Neither UK media relations nor GWS department manager Michelle del Toro responded to two requests for comment.
