WGS South 2024: Care Feminisms, Crip Futures on the Campus of USC Upstate in Spartanburg, SC
Guest post by USC-Upstate WGST Director Lisa Johnson
Delighted to share these updates from Dr. Lisa Johnson on events hosted by our regional Women’s and Gender Studies association, WGS South, including the annual conference March 28-30th. If you’re thinking of presenting, proposals are due by Dec. 19th (more info below). Hope to see you there!
Rolling Out a Disability Caucus for WGS South
On Oct 18, a virtual event featured a discussion of chronic illness and disability identity with the filmmaking team behind The Body Is a House of Unfamiliar Rooms, a short surrealist film that mixes paintings with live action to consider what happens within a person's life and romantic partnership when the body becomes unfamiliar. This event celebrated the launch of a Disability Caucus in WGS South (formerly known as the Southeastern Women's Studies Association) during this academic year. This was the first of two pre-conference events leading up to the WGS South conference on March 28-30, 2024: Care Feminisms, Crip Futures in Spartanburg, SC. We selected this theme to bring disability more fully into the picture of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies in the southeastern United States. The CFP includes more details. The early bird deadline for proposals is Nov. 19, and the final deadline is Dec. 19.
This goal of centering disability studies in WGS builds on the work of Rosemarie Garland-Thomson and other disabled feminists who have called for scholars of gender to consider the specific experiences of disabled people, join the intersectional fight against ableism, and engage with theoretical contributions from critical disability studies as they pertain to topics routinely covered in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies curricula and research. Creating a Disability Caucus is one strategy for building this commitment into the structure of the organization and will serve as an energizing network of disabled scholars and scholars of disability in WGS in this region. WGS South also includes a Student Caucus, an LGBTQ Caucus, and a People of Color Caucus to spotlight and strengthen networks among these groups of scholars.
II. Pre-Conference Event and Writing Academy Scholarships for Faculty
For our second pre-conference event and another opportunity to bring members of WGS South together as we launch the Disability Caucus, we will hold a virtual event on Jan 31 at 5pm (EST) featuring Esmé Weijun Wang, author of the New York Times bestselling nonfiction book, The Collected Schizophrenias. A review in the New Yorker places it on par with literary giants like Kaye Redfield Jamison's An Unquiet Mind and Elyn Saks's The Center Cannot Hold. (Zoom meeting link will be provided in January.)
In “The Collected Schizophrenias,” Esmé Weijun Wang Maps the Terrain of Her Mental Illness: “The new essay collection is not a memoir. Instead, Wang uses her own experience as a point of departure for philosophical inquiry” (New Yorker).
Wang's psychiatric journey from a bipolar disorder diagnosis in 2001 to a revised diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder in 2013—complete with psychotic breaks and pitstops for multiple institutionalizations—undergirds her commentary on the human rights of mentally ill and neurodivergent people. Like the Hearing Voices movement of schizophrenia self-advocates, Wang's narrative resists ableist views of schizophrenia and its cousins on the schizoaffective spectrum. It is simultaneously a disability identity and a morally neutral variation of human consciousness.
In addition to her work as an author, Esmé founded an online writing academy called The Unexpected Shape, aimed especially at supporting writers who are disabled, chronically ill, caregivers/parents, or others whose time for writing is limited and unpredictable. In her presentation for WGS South, Esmé will talk about her approach to writing amid the inevitable delays and distractions occasioned by psychiatric disability, autoimmune disorders, and life in an uncooperative body. She is dedicated to encouraging others to write in spite of—and sometimes about—the illnesses, pain syndromes, fatigue, and fluctuating energy levels that befall us. The key lies in recognizing that our writing practice (like life, like our bodies) can take unexpected shapes.
WGS South will sponsor two members to enroll in this writing academy for 6 months. WGS South members can apply for this special opportunity by emailing Hil Malatino (hmalatino@psu.edu) and Lisa Johnson (johns232@uscusptate.edu) by Dec. 1. Please indicate how the writing academy would support your professional development. We encourage others to consider signing up for her writing academy if it is within the reach of your professional development budgets. The cost for WGS South members is $47/month.
Esmé Weijun Wang has an MFA from the University of Michigan and has published two books. She won the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize and the Whiting Award for Nonfiction. She has been awarded residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell, and made appearances on The Today Show, NPR's Weekend Edition, and KCRW. Follow Esmé on Instagram @esmewwang, check out her substack, and read her recent article in The Washington Post about navigating Covid with an immunocompromised partner.
Opinion | Know what makes ‘post-covid’ life complicated? Cancer.
My husband has bone-marrow cancer. For us, the pandemic is only as over as it is safe to reenter the world: not particularly.
III. Announcing one of THREE WGS South Keynotes from the Author of "Widow's Peak" and Care Nation
Laura Mauldin is a writer and scholar based in New York City. In her gut-wrenching essay, "Widow's Peak" (Aug 2022), Mauldin recounts the personal story that prompted her entry into a career of researching healthcare and its failures. At 27, she fell in love with a woman she calls J who experienced a sudden recurrence of leukemia in the second month of dating, and she became J's caregiver until her death several years later. It displaced her focus on building an academic career, and it brought her face to face with human frailty—J's as well as her own.
From that vantage point, she recognized hard truths that will be familiar to many disabled and chronically ill people, their loved ones, and even many professionals in the healthcare industry. "We have a care crisis because we don't value caregivers, because we don't value the people they care for," she asserts in one interview. Mauldin made this terrible experience of loving, taking care of, and losing J into a tool for digging into the social problems that underpinned it and that are widely shared by so many people. "I don't know why it's my personality to do this," she reflects, "but if there is some kind of struggle or wound to go into and investigate, I want to do it. . . . I want to know how we, as humans, try to grapple with the failure of these bodies that we have to exist in."
After 'losing my life' caring for a sick partner, a professor examines the U.S. caregiver crisis
"I was losing my own life in this process. It was just being whittled down to this one thing that I had to do."
Her current project Care Nation (forthcoming from Ecco Press, 2025) blends memoir, research, and reportage on unpaid caregiving. She observes a pattern among her interview subjects for whom the roles of spouse and caregiver comingle in ways that resonate with her own experience, where illness and its costs are subsidized through "free" domestic labor. Specifically noting the ways marriage vows "provide cover for state abandonment," Mauldin's insights dovetail with much feminist, queer, and crip scholarship on gendered, privatized, and uncompensated healthcare, and the ways this system undermines the well-being of caregivers and the cared for. She has a gift for telling this story with urgency and impact, and she will present some of her findings at WGS South in a keynote on Friday, March 29, at 5:00.
Mauldin is a 2024 New America National Fellow, Associate Professor at the University of Connecticut in Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and a nationally certified American Sign Language interpreter. A sociologist by training, her research investigates how ableism structures our lives by examining the experiences and expertise of disabled people, family caregivers, and their communities. She is the author of Made to Hear: Cochlear Implants and Raising Deaf Children (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) and creator of the website www.disabilityathome.org.
More soon on our other two keynotes by the indomitable Sara Ahmed, as well as by WGS South President Hil Malatino, PLUS an opening plenary on Black Women, Health, and Dis/ability with Anna Hinton and Kat J. Stephens. With investments of time, energy, funding, and care from a broad collective of sponsors including Penn State, Clemson, Kennesaw, USC Upstate, and of course WGS South itself, this is a conference that readers of Hot Feminism will not want to miss! For questions, reach out to the WGS South Conference Chair, Lisa Johnson, at johns232@uscupstate.edu.