#antisisyphus

girl interrupted by susanna kaysen </3 (please look up trigger warnings beforehand if you do decide to read)

YES. oh i love this. especially since dean personifies the impala so goddamn much

i have many, too many to list here! below are a few links and names to get you started, but trans disability studies is a rapidly-growing field really exploding with new scholarship right now. trans studies specifically is having something of a "crip turn," particularly since the publication of Hil Malatino's long essay, "Trans Care." I don't know what's going to happen going forward, but as it stands, there is active and growing interest in the nexus of trans and disabled subjectivity, especially w/r/t social conditions that design (for) us lives deemed unlivable.

i'm going to focus in this post on scholarship that explicitly engages both with trans and disability studies thought, rather than just work from one area that happens to bring in a topic from the other. Of course, it isn't possible to fully delineate these areas, nor should we try. but trans studies and disability studies are whole academic fields with distinct genealogies and theoretical orientations, and it sounds like you're looking for work that brings these sometimes-disparate orientations together very deliberately. Mad studies also has its own disparate genealogy that is sometimes at odds with disability studies, depending on who you're reading; on the other hand, neurodiversity studies tends to follow and cite DS a little more closely. i'm not going to get into the weeds here, but i did want to provide a disclaimer about how complicated this shit is before i give a LIMITED! INCOMPLETE! list of places to start reading.

my work in transMad studies (which I made up; Trans Disability Studies and Feminist Disability Studies, and intersections therein, predate me) draws explicitly on trans, disability, and Mad studies approaches, as well as/alongside the critical digital humanities, poetics, and science & technology studies. i've written about transMadness / trans disabled digital work / Mad gender noncompliance / trans autie-biography. I also co-authored the chapter on the trans/disabled intersection in Trans Bodies, Trans Selves, 2nd ed.

Some key authors in the area of trans disability studies // transMad studies include but are not limited to:

Eli Clare

M. Remi Yergeau

Nick Walker

Mel Chen

Jake Pyne

Jess Rauchberg

Lydia X. Z. Brown

J. Logan Smilges

Justine Egner

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna Samarasinha

Alexandre Baril

Hil Malatino

Merrick Pilling

Cameron Awkward-Rich

Sky Cubacub

I have included alongside each name a link to one piece of their work that I like. Again, MANY people write about trans / disability / Mad issues in concert, or who talk about certain issues through a t/d/M lens. I listed only a small number of people for the reasons I mention at the start of the post.

Also, much of this work I have selected deliberately to trouble preexisting assumptions about trans disabled solidarity/activism/scholarship – namely, that it starts and ends at the question of pathologization. When we limit the scope of trans disabled liberation work to the boundaries of the clinic (material, discursive, or otherwise) we do ourselves a grave disservice.