Professor: Judith Raiskin

4.00 credits

• CRN 35898: Tuesday & Thursday, 2:00-3:20pm @ GSH 131

This course focuses on gender and dis/ability as a nexus of identity and discrimination, influenced as well by race, sexuality and class. We will examine the ways critical disability studies both enriches feminist theory and benefits from feminist and queer perspectives. We will explore how our society thinks about and represents bodies, ability, disability and illness and how those naturalized beliefs affect all of our lives, whether we are disabled or not.  The readings for this course have been chosen to offer theoretical tools for thinking about a range of disabilities and our beliefs about them (including those involving mobility, senses, cognition, and psychological states and those that result from illnesses, both apparent and invisible). Our focus will be on social, as opposed to medical, models of understanding disability and difference and will highlight activism and political interventions led by people with disabilities. The readings for this class offer a range of opinions by people with disabilities and I hope they will be illuminating and will inspire discussion and debate in class.