National Bodies/Embodied Nations: Reading Disability in Chicana/o, Mexican, and Spanish Cultural Production

a workshop with

Julie Avril Minich

Thursday, May 11, 2006
CCSRE Conference Room, Building 240
4:00-6:00 PM

Respondent: Michele Elam, Associate Professor of English, Stanford University

Background reading for this workshop is Minich's dissertation proposal. An electronic copy of the proposal has been distributed to the regular workshop members via email. For an electronic copy of the reading, please contact Julie Minich at jminich@stanford.edu.

Abstract: This meeting will involve a presentation of Julie Minich's proposed dissertation work, followed by a discussion of the central research questions and preliminary arguments. The dissertation will discuss the representation of bodily difference in Chicana/o, Mexican, and Spanish cultural production that seeks to reformulate or critique present understandings of political collectivity. In particular, it is concerned with how disability functions in feminist, queer, decolonial, post-dictatorial and/or anti-racist engagements with nation. How do struggles to make public space, political collectivities and the nation itself accessible (in every sense of the word) relate to struggles for a nation capable of racial, gender and sexual justice? Instead of evoking a "failed", "broken" or "disillusioned" nation, the texts discussed in this project employ images of disability in order to recuperate the nation as a liberatory political possibility.

Julie Avril Minich is a Doctoral Student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese specializing in contemporary Chicana/o literature. Her additional research interests include feminist theory, LGBT studies, disability studies and film. She is also the 2005-2006 graduate student coordinator for the How Do Identities Matter? SHC Workshop/RICSRE Network.

Michele Elam is associate professor of English in the School of Humanities and Sciences. Her forthcoming book, Mixed Race in the New Millennium, focuses on mixed race in literary and cultural studies. Professor Elam has published articles in African American Review, American Literature, and Genre, among others, and is the author of Race, Work, and Desire in American Literature, 1860-1930 (Cambridge University Press, 2003). Professor Elam teaches seminars on Slave Narratives; Mixed Race Literature and Theory; W.E.B. Du Bois and American Culture; the Harlem and Chicago Renaissances; Introduction to African American Literature; and a graduate seminar on African American Literary History & Theory, among others.