AMST 130 Dis/ability Theory
This course provides an introduction to American Studies through a critical engagement with theories and cultural histories of “debility” and “capacity” in the U.S.’s mythos of “exceptionalism.” We will discover how various cultural iterations of “disability” have intersected with social constructions of race, gender, class, and sexuality in the U.S., from the colonial period to the present. In doing so, we will ask/trace/analyze how specific national renderings of disability/different-abledness came to be constituted as an affirmative identity category. We will examine how disability activism joined other 1960/70s freedom movements to yield recent academic critical-theory formations in the U.S., including Dis/ability Studies, DisCrit (Dis/ability Critical Race Studies), and Crip/Queer Critique.