The University of Kentucky is offering a graduate level course this spring that combines a “decidedly feminist perspective” with “disability studies.”
The course,“Topics in GWS: Feminist Disability Studies,” is being offered through the University of Kentucky’s Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, part of the school’s College of Arts and Sciences.
“Disability activists, scholars, and advocates have long pushed back against a myopic understanding of disability as a pathologized condition, an individual deficit, and as a self-evident truth of the bodymind,” the course description states. “Instead, they argue for the recognition of disability as multiplicitous: as an identity, as culture, and as valuable embodied human difference.”
“This graduate level seminar takes up these arguments and critiques, but from a decidedly feminist perspective. Throughout the semester, we will traverse the field of feminist disability studies, paying close attention to how different scholars think and write about disability, pain, and chronic illness. We will also read scholarship from feminist authors who don’t always use the language of disability,” the description continues.
Participants will study “crip feelings, and how gender, race, and sexuality inform the experience and legibility of disability, pain, and chronic illness,” among other topics.
Students pursuing graduate degrees and doctorates in Gender and Women’s Studies can use the class to help meet degree requirements.
Anastasia Todd, an Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies with a Ph.D. in Gender Studies from Arizona State University is teaching “Feminist Disability Studies.” Her research interests include “Feminist Disability Studies,” “Girlhood Studies,” and “Crip Theory.”
Todd is also the author of “Crippling Girlhood,” which is “is interested in what happens and what it means when certain disabled girl subjects gain cultural recognition and visibility.”
Other graduate level courses that the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies is offering in the spring semester are “Prejudice and Inequality,” “Gender, Law, Courts,” and “Philosophy of Law: Feminism.”
Campus Reform contacted the University of Kentucky and Anastasia Todd for comment. This story will be updated accordingly.
This article was originally published at campusreform.org
