http://interalia.org.

pl
ISSN 1689-6637

Call for papers for a special issue of InterAlia: A Journal of Queer Studies
Ugly bodies:
Queer perspectives on illness, disability, and aging

In mainstream discourse, the (physically, mentally, and socially) healthy body is, or by definition
ought to be, productive. The heterosexual body must also be reproductive. In line with the
widely accepted ideal of liberal LG(BT) politics, socio-economic productivity is tantamount to
assimilation and fertility; while Poland is not in the vanguard when it comes to specific legal
solutions to aid reproduction, many recognized and influential groups aspire to this Western
model. From the healthy position, illness (and old age) can be approached through such
politically correct euphemisms as loving differently or differently abled, terms which have
gradually been replaced by possessing alternative motor and sensory skills. Illness and aging
can also easily be ignored, since the lack of representation or plain invisibility removes the risk
of confrontation, allowing the public to remain unaware of the existence of certain postulates
or claims.
Within the context of neo-Marxist movements, Judith Butler wrote in Merely Cultural (1997)
about the practice of reducing queer activism to demands for the recognition of cultural
identity alone, divorced from economic concerns. Political activism on behalf of disabled or old
bodies cannot be reduced to such demands, for we cannot ignore the problem of access to life-
saving/sustaining technologies and services and various types of infrastructure. There is
sometimes no way to eradicate or even alleviate physical pain unrelated to aspirations for
change in the social sphere. (Are there any forms of political and socials activism that can or
should be reduced to the merely social? Thus activism organized around disability which
cannot, after all, be essentialized as a single identity constitutes an ideal point of departure
for a kind of queer thinking that reaches far beyond issues of identity and cultural
representation, focusing instead on the broadly understood distribution of the good life.
We hope to encourage reflection on the potential opened up by a convergence or even an
alliance of crip theory and queer studies/practices, popularized by Robert McRuers Crip
Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (2006). McRuers study reaches beyond the
social (as opposed to the medical) model of disability, which has already been recognized
within academia. The transgressions laid out by McRuer raise the following issues which we
encourage contributors to consider:
Is crip & queer a literally and metaphorically desirable alliance against the neoliberal
social policy discourse? How do disability and illness problematize the liberal-humanist
subjectivity of contemporary politics?


Extranormative sexuality/gender expression, discursivized explicitly or implicitly as
disability, whether psychosocial, (re)productive, or other.
Sanonormativity and hygienonormativity: discourses of health as normativizing
discourses.
Spaces of excess: the promiscuous gay male and the docile invalid? The queer body as
hedonistic and the disabled body as subordinated to the rigors of medicine and the
expectations of the social security system?
The legacy of AIDS.
The Christian view of suffering as ennobling and sublimating.
How do the disabled desire and make love? Who looks on and what do they see? The
non-normative desire of ill, disabled, and old people as taboo.
Fat acceptance. Destabilizing the normative gaze, destigmatizing fatness.
The advantages and pitfalls of using specific methodological tools (intersectionality,
standpoint theory).
The medicalization and mutilation of transsexual bodies [1] the transsexual body as
felt to be at odds with ones psychophysical needs and desires, and thus deviant, in
need of minor or major correction (and therefore ill or disabled); [2] the post-transition
body as infertile.
Parallels between the need for visibility and the denial of visibility: representations of
nonheteronormativity and disability as, on the one hand, evoking pity, fear, revulsion,
the desire to help, even compassion, and, on the other, as giving strength.
Nothing is obvious: denormativizing the notion of beauty.
Disappearance under the sign queer: the specificity of womens experiences of
disability.
Generating images of disability in the sphere of everyday life. Limiting the
representations of disability to several emblematic images (wheelchair, white cane,
etc.) and limiting the spectrum of gender/sexual non-normativity to the acronym LG(B)T
within the context of political and economic visibility.
The rights of individuals vs. the rights of the public; emancipation within the framework
of the system vs. shame (the sanctioning of disability, which is possible only after it is
laid bare before the appropriate commission, vs. neoliberal autonormalization in the
name of a frictionless adjustment to the system). The possibility of dissent.
Telling crip stories: self-narration by nonsanonormative persons. Testimonies, memoirs,
art projects.
The transfer of life to the internet? Digitalization as a source of change in the
functioning of ill and disabled people.
) just dont know what the right term these days is McRuer 41. What governs the
ethics of speaking about illness, disability, and old age? Where do euphemisms
originate? How can we tell the difference between words that wound and fighting
words?


Improvement [1]. Nonhuman disabilities deliberately produced mutations and
deviations (for instance by breeding companion animals or livestock), and those that
constitute the side effects of the environmental impact of human practices.
Improvement [2]. Attempts to defy the limitations of age and physical health in liberal
political discourses. Contemporary eugenics. Transhumanist utopias.
Relations between the disabled and the able-bodied: between desire and care.
The above references to specific publications Czesaw Robotycki, Nic nie jest oczywiste
[Nothing is obvious]; Cheshire Calhoun, The Gender Closet: Lesbian Disappearance under the Sign
Women; Kenneth Plummer, Telling Sexual Stories: Power, Change, and Social Worlds) are not
intended as bibliographic prompts.
Editors of the issue: Paulina Szkudlarek, Dominka Ferens and Tomasz Sikora (with the help of
the whole editorial collective).
Deadline for abstracts: December 31, 2014.
Deadline for manuscripts: May 31, 2015.
The issue is scheduled for the end of 2015.
Email address: interalia_journal@yahoo.com
Guidelines for contributors to be accessed at
http://interalia.org.pl/en/artykuly/guidelines_for_contributors.htm