Christina Crosby: A Body, Undone
Department: Gender and Sexuality Studies
Date and Time: February 23, 2017 | 5:00 PM-7:00 PMEvent Location: HG 1030
Event Details
Christina Crosby
A Body, Undone: Living On After Great Pain
In the early evening on October 1, 2003, Christina Crosby was three miles into a seventeen mile bicycle ride, intent on reaching her goal of 1,000 miles for the riding season. She was a respected senior professor of English who had celebrated her fiftieth birthday a month before. As she crested a hill, she caught a branch in the spokes of her bicycle, which instantly pitched her to the pavement. Her chin took the full force of the blow, and her head snapped back. In that instant, she was paralyzed.
In A Body, Undone: Living On After Great Pain, Crosby writes with vivid and stunning honesty about what it means to live in a body unrecognizable to her, a body shot through with neurological pain, disoriented in time and space, incapacitated by paralysis and deadened sensation. Drawing on feminist and queer theory, disability studies and psychoanalysis, and her own rich and complex family history, Crosby offers not simply a memoir, but a tender and exquisite meditation on community, loss, precarity, and the interdependence that embodied life demands of all of us.
A Body Undone has received critical praise from The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Elle Magazine, The Boston Globe and Kirkus.