Leftovers: A Critical Disability Ethic of Surviving, Healing, and Gathering

Rasch, Hilary D.

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Year:: 2023
Contributor:: Rasch, Hilary D (creator); Quashie, Kevin (Advisor); Kim, Daniel (Reader); Gandhi, Leela (Reader); Brown University. Department of English (sponsor)
Genre:: theses
Subject:: Autobiography; American poetry; disability; Disability studies; Photography; English literature; Critical Race Studies; media and performance; Chronically ill; black feminist studies; Asian Americans--Study and teaching; Tattooing; Self-help publications
Extent:: vii, 208 p.

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Abstract:: My dissertation, Leftovers: The Arts of Survival, Healing, and Gathering in the Afterfuture, attends to works by contemporary, primarily disabled, activist-artists in North America, including those from the feminist anti-violence movement, AIDS activism, prison abolition, and harm-reduction. The art that my project turns to reflects horizontal practices of (health)care, imbued with knowledge of crisis-response, therapeutics, self-help, and community accountability. These art-based care practices model “belonging-without-property,” a notion I root in disability justice, black and brown feminisms, marxisms, anarchisms, and performance studies. Refusing the hierarchies overdetermined by disposability and property that ableism arranges, I particularly embrace a critical disability lens that pays homage to critical race. Taking a critical disability approach helps me to understand how belonging-without-possession offers shelter from the “trash state,” or the systems and discourses that render beings and stuff unevenly disposable and contain them as property. My dissertation’s title, Leftovers, comes from Assata Shakur’s poem “Leftovers:” “After the bars and the gates and the degradation, what is left?” This leftover question directs my attention to the care practices of contemporary artists, as their work has been shaped both by the remains of 1970s radical black and decolonial activism and by its repression and institutionalization. The project’s chapters think about a critical disability ethic and aesthetic of belonging-without-possession through the rubrics of gathering, survival, healing, and accountability. Its chapters especially engage the work of dancer, photographer, and activist Kia LaBeija; poet and disability justice activist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, tattoo artist and oral historian Tamara Santibanez, among others.
Notes:: Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2023

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Citation

Rasch, Hilary D., "Leftovers: A Critical Disability Ethic of Surviving, Healing, and Gathering" (2023). English Theses and Dissertations. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:gnsqyc58/

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English Theses and Dissertations

Theses and Dissertations for the English department.
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