Media Credit: Jordan Emont

From 4:00-5:30 p.m., Robert McRuer (professor of English at The George Washington University) will speak on “El Edificio de Enfrente/The Building across the Way: Crip Displacements and Queer/Crip Horizons.”

Theorists of neoliberalism, from David Harvey to Athena Athanasiou, have placed dispossession at the center of their analyses of contemporary global capitalism. Disability, however, has not figured in these analyses. Even as Kevin Floyd gives David Wojnarowicz pride-of-place in The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism, disability is displaced from consideration—arguably, by queerness. This presentation examines Livia Radwanski‘s photos of a Mexico City neighborhood’s redevelopment while attending to the ways in which disability might productively haunt theories of neoliberal dispossession. At first glance, these haunting images may seem unrelated to crip culture, but McRuer argues that disability can be located in them. Given how ownership, accumulation, and possession materialize in and through compulsory able-bodiedness, the displaced and dispossessed cannot exist without disability. Critiques of dispossession, then, must attend to crip displacements.

He will be introduced by Robert Parker, who is James M. Benson Professor of English, American Indian Studies, Criticism and Interpretive Theory, and Writing Studies. An open reception will follow the presentation.