My Research

My research combines disability studies, queer theory, feminist media studies, and U.S. cultural history to analyze the transnational cultural politics of health, citizenship, and ability. I use disability studies to illuminate how the disabled body has come to represent other forms of embodied experience that are considered deviant or Other. By analyzing disability as a social experience rather than a medical pathology, my work shows how the stories we tell about disability impact social institutions, economic practices, and cultural norms of healthy behavior and good citizenship. Specifically, my current body of work as well as my future research program examine how rehabilitation (i.e. the idea that all bodies should be perpetually improved) has coalesced into a culture for disabled and nondisabled people alike.

Tracing the teen’s uneven passage from post-World War II rebel to twenty-first century patient, my first book, Chronic Youth: Disability, Sexuality and U.S. Media Cultures of Rehabilitation offers an original account of how American cultural producers, policymakers, and medical professionals mobilized representations of disability to cast adolescence as a treatable “condition.” By the 1970s, parents, policymakers, educators, psychologists, and cultural producers embraced a new problem-driven, pedagogical brand of popular culture, which promised to rehabilitate deviant teenagers into good citizens. This formula soon prevailed as the dominant mode of address for teen audiences and recast formerly denigrated media forms, like television or paperback novels, as productive rather than damaging forces in citizenship development. From the stuttering boys of ABC’s After School Specials (1972-1994) to the lovestruck girls with cancer of Lurlene McDaniel’s Six Months to Live (1989), countless teen narratives linked overcoming disability, for boys, or accepting disability, for girls, to “growing up” sexually and emotionally into healthy heterosexual adult citizens. Although this commonsense alignment of disability and adolescence may have begun as a storytelling convention, disability became much more than a metaphor by the end of the twentieth century, as neuroscientific understandings of the “temporarily disabled” adolescent brain became pervasive. This sweeping cultural redefinition of adolescence, away from post-World War II externalizing sociologies of juvenile delinquency and toward post-1968 internalizing understandings of teen angst, was powerful in the ways it shaped our contemporary understandings of youth. However, the transformation of adolescence into a pathological (but treatable) “condition” was most powerful for what it did for the logic of rehabilitation: naturalizing endless self-surveillance as healthy, profitable, and essential to good citizenship through depoliticizing narratives of overcoming disability and coming-of-age. By centering disability in its analysis of media as a technology of citizenship, Chronic Youth makes a vital contribution to feminist media studies, which often overlooks disability as a category of intersectionality. Centering youth and disability in its history of sexual liberation and emotional labor, the book offers a new genealogy of neoliberalism by showing how rehabilitation culture, through overcoming and coming-of-age narratives, idealized a “bootstraps mentality” that has facilitated a neoliberal privatization of citizenship and retraction of the social safety net.

My peer-reviewed and peer-edited articles continue to explore the relationship among ageism, ableism, and heterosexism to demonstrate that pathologizing youth sexuality contributes to the infantilization and desexualization of disabled adults. In doing so, my work pushes beyond solely assessing representations of disability for their accuracy or their positive/negative depictions to consider what cultural work they do. My article, “Cripping Safe Sex: Life Goes On’s Queer/Disabled Alliances” appeared in a special issue (“Bioethics, Sexuality, and Gender Identity”) of the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry. This groundbreaking special issue joined well-known scholars in disability studies, queer studies, and bioethics—fields that undertake similar critiques of medical knowledge but rarely collaborate—to produce a novel cross-disciplinary special issue. I was honored to have my work appear alongside that of many influential senior scholars in disability and feminist science studies: Robert McRuer (Crip Theory), Rosemarie Garland Thomson (Extraordinary Bodies, one of the founding texts of the field of disability studies), and Cindy Patton (Globalizing AIDS). Second, I published “Feeling Real: Disability, Teen Sick-Lit, and the Condition of Adolescence” in the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, one of two “journals of record” for disability studies. This essay had significant coverage outside of the academy. It was featured in Smithsonian.com and Autostraddle, an independently owned online magazine for queer women and a nominee for GLAAD’s Outstanding Blog Award in 2013 (enclosed). Third, my article, “Policing at the Synapse: Ferguson, Race, and the Disability Politics of the Teen Brain” appeared in a special issue (“Inhabitable Worlds: Troubling disability, debility, and ability narratives.”) of Somatosphere, a medical anthropology website that features scholarly work by leading medical anthropologists such as Emily Martin and Jonathan Metzl. A revised version of my 2010 article, “After School Special Education: Rehabilitative Television, Teen Citizenship, and Able-Bodiedness,” appears in Disability Media Studies (eds. Bill Kirkpatrick and Elizabeth Ellcessor, New York University Press, 2018), the first-ever edited collection focused on disability media studies. The anthology includes pieces by emerging and distinguished scholars including Krystal Cleary, Katie Ellis, Gerard Goggin, Mack Hagood, Beth Haller, Lori Kido Lopez, Shoshana Magnet, Robert McRuer, Tasha Oren, and Ellen Samuels, with afterword essays from Jonathan Sterne, Mara Mills, and Rachel Adams. Finally, I have published “Find Your Fit: Wearable Technology and the Cultural Politics of Disability” in New Media & Society, the number one journal in Communication Studies (4.18 impact factor). My sixth article, a collaborative piece with Robert McRuer (George Washington University), “The Gift of Mobility: Disability, Queerness, and the Cultural Politics of Rehabilitation” was published in Feminist Formations, a leading journal in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies that is published by Johns Hopkins University Press. In this work, we examine U.S. global evangelical disability missionary work (Wheels for the World) as well as American evangelical involvement in the passage of Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill to theorize “disability exceptionalism,” our term for the deployment of disability’s depoliticization as representational currency for U.S. exceptionalism. Finally, my seventh article, “Slothful Movements: Disability, Acceleration, and Carceral Feminism in Disney’s Zootopia (2017)” was published in 2020 in Feminist Media Studies (Impact Factor: 2.63). This article examines the disability politics of speed, capacity and mobility to show the ways in which neoliberal choice feminism relies on ableist norms of embodiment and movement. By showing how Zootopia represents (white) feminist determination as physical strength and ability at the same time that it aligns psychiatric disabilities with racialized, biologized criminality (“going savage”), this article shows how the film uses the presumed political neutrality of disability as an invisible platform for its rehabilitative narrative of the police and its anti-government politics.

I am currently working on my second monograph, Capacity Feminism and Its Discontents, which analyzes feminist notions of strength and resilience alongside crip of color feminisms organized around revolutionary rest. Offering a critique of feminist body positivity (“It’s not how my body looks, it’s what my body can do”), the book will consider a variety of cultural locations of feminist strength and speed, including a pop cultural genealogy of the “supermom,” powerful-girls’ media, mental health and women’s sports, global missionary work, and the emergence of crip feminist forms of anticapitalist, revolutionary rest.

Finally, Kateřina Kolářová (Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic) and I plan to begin research for an article, “Aging in Dementia Village: Neocolonialism, Disability and Care,” which will analyze a dementia village in De Hogeweyk, Netherlands. A new approach to eldercare, these gated, supervised care facilities for people with dementia simulate “real life” to maximize elderly people’s mobility through public and private spaces. Combining close readings of public relations materials with observational data from a visit to the facility, we situate the villages within a broader global history of nursing homes, health care policy, and geriatric care. The project has undergone expedited IRB review and received an exemption, but the research is on hold due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Overall, my previous and future research asserts that analyzing disability and rehabilitation culture is central to understanding the cultural history of the U.S., politics, technology, and representation in a transnational context.