Crip/Mad/Queer Narratives

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

Disability, madness, illness, and neurodivergence are often situated as deviance, burden, and risk, just as queer and trans identity, experience, and embodiment are pathologized. This course explores literature written by, about, and/or foregrounding queer and trans chronically ill, disabled, sick, mad, and neurodivergent embodiments. Studying literature alongside disability theory enables tracing literary lineages and locating disability, madness, and queerness in narratives of deviance, resistance, and revolution. Situating texts like Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals and Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera alongside contemporary work by writers like Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Rivers Solomon, Travis Chi Wing Lau, and Kay Ulanday Barrett invites consideration of activist cultural work as science fiction, and disabled queer and trans literature as cultural and political commentary.