"Disability Studies and the Problem of Suffering" with Susan Schweik


 Center for Medical Humanities     Nov 7 2019 | 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM Humanities Gateway 1030



“For many disabled people, the tragedy view of disability is in itself disabling,” John Swain and Sally French wrote in 2004. Critiques like this of the close relation between disability and tragedy have long been staple features of activist disability culture and “disability pride.” A similar line of thinking has extended to associations of disability with suffering. But in a variety of recent contexts and under a variety of names (the disability justice movement, crip theory, dis/ablity critical race theory, postcolonial analyses of “the right to maim” and of debility), as well as in emerging memoirs that stage themselves as post-disability studies, “disability culture” is understood as in itself disabling in its denial of individual and systemic suffering. In this historical survey, I will examine moments in these necessary critiques that caricature the development of disability studies and of the disability rights movement from which it emerged. We’ll explore some counter-examples in which disability studies historically and transnationally has “suffered well,” confronting what Rabia Belt calls the import of suffering.

Susan Schweik is Professor of English at the University of California Berkeley, where she has worked since 1984. She is the author of The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public (NYU, 2009) and A Gulf So Deeply Cut: American Women Poets and the Second World War (1991) and is completing a book tentatively titled Unfixed: How the Women of Glenwood Asylum Overturned Ideas about IQ, and Why We Don’t Know It. Schweik has been involved with the development of disability studies at Berkeley for over twenty years. She was co-coordinator of the Ed Roberts Fellowships in Disability Studies post-doctoral program at Berkeley. She is co-founder and co-director of Berkeley’s Disability Studies minor and has been actively involved in the advanced Disability Studies Research Cluster in Berkeley’s Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society.

This event is part of the Mellon-Sawyer "Suffer Well" Seminar Series and is made possible by generous support from the Mellon Foundation. The Sawyer Seminar is a yearlong series that will offer lectures, symposia and presentations from invited speakers that explore human suffering in its various forms and to develop future scholarly projects that confront directly the place of suffering in human experience.

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