"Sex, Shame, and Disability Identity: With Reference to Mark O'Brien"

a workshop with

Tobin Siebers

Thursday, January 19, 2006
Board Room, Stanford Humanities Center, 4:00-6:00 PM

Respondent: Julie Avril Minich, Graduate Student in Spanish and Portuguese, Stanford University

Professor Sieber's paper will be available in advance of the workshop. For a PDF of the reading, please contact Julie Minich at jminich@stanford.edu.

Abstract: As an emerging field in the first stage of development, disability studies found it useful to borrow concepts and modes of analysis from other minority discourses, such as feminism, critical race studies, and queer theory. More recently, however, disability studies has reached a second stage at which it has begun to claim its own set of questions and a distinctive mode of theoretical address, the analytical powers of which reveal gaps and unresolved questions in existing theorizations of identity and minority discourse. This talk will pursue, with the help of the writings of Mark O'Brien, the disabled Berkeley poet, three goals specific to a second stage analysis: it will introduce the distinctive principles of disability studies to those unfamiliar with them; discuss the sexual existence of people with disabilities, with reference to recent theories about gay shame and sexuality (Sedgwick in particular); and consider how the views of identity being developed in disability studies change how we theorize agency, the relation between the private and public spheres, and the sex/gender system.

Tobin Siebersis V. L. Parrington Collegiate Professor and director of Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. He has published essays on disability in American Literary History, Cultural Critique, Literature and Medicine, Michigan Quarterly Review, PMLA, and the MLA volume on disability studies. He is currently completing two books, Disability Theory and Disability Aesthetics.

Julie Avril Minich is a 4th year Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Stanford University specializing in contemporary Chicana/o literature. Her additional research interests include feminist theory, LGBT studies, disability studies and film.