Some notes here: my mic stand broke, so I've been resorting to just holding the mic, and I think that caused some issues where the mic was not always at the proper distance. This created some difficulty in getting good audio levels where the video was sufficiently loud while also not clipping or becoming distorted. I did my best with the audio, but I wanted to express some extra gratitude for everyone that sticks through some poor audio quality in this video.
But, yes, family theory and disability studies... it was striking to me that there actually does not seem to be that much dedicated literature to this intersection. There was a few books-- All Our Families by Fink spoke towards disability but seemed to never truly engage with family abolition, Memoirs of the Disabled Child by Apgar was incredibly useful but more spoke towards the ideology of memoirs than being dedicated to the disability politics of the family in totality. Yet, it seems that disabled lives are remarkably impacted by our families, and in some unique ways, and this was an intersection that deserved more attention. So, I wrote the essay, and I made the video: I talked about how families are instrumental in the creation of disabled desire, and how the ways in which disabled desire is channeled often serves the ends of repression, how the family factors into a broader biopolitical and eugenicist project, and how patriarchy and our surveillance of mothers reinforce all of the above. …...more
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