Disability scholars have critiqued medical models that pathologize disability as an individual flaw that needs treatment, rehabilitation, and cure, favoring instead a social-constructionist approach that likens disability to other identity categories such as gender, race, class, and sexuality. However, the emphasis on social constructionism has left chronic illness and pain largely untheorized. This article argues that feminist disability studies (FDS) must attend to the common, chronic gynecological condition endometriosis (endo) when theorizing pain. Endo is particularly important for FDS analysis because the highly feminized and sexualized nature of endo pain is a major source of disability. Because medical treatments of endo enhance fertility rather than provide pain relief, those with endo must not only have access to medical services to manage their pain, but also demand better medical management of their pain as well as disability accommodations for their pain. Thus, I propose a pain-centric model of disability that politicizes pain through social-constructionist and medical models of disability by attending to the lived experiences of pain.
But in what ways does women's studies' relatively precarious place within academia fit into these conversations? How do feminists working in a variety of disciplines reconcile their feminist labor politics with the need to grow their programs and departments under the edicts of the corporate university, particularly when relying upon contingent labor to do so? These questions were at the heart of three collectively organized sessions on feminist contingency at the 2014 annual National Women's Studies Association Conference (NWSA) in San Juan, Puerto Rico, the highlights of which are presented here. This article hopes that the lessons learned in this historic event-lessons about silence-breaking and collectivizing, but also about inequity, privilege, shame, and guilt-will be used in women's studies classrooms, departmental meetings, and beyond, contributing to the growing conversation about this important issue, and perhaps even offering action steps toward solutions.
This article explores tensions between critical feminist pedagogy and the neoliberal corporate university, asking how engaging the body and redistributing student agency highlights larger questions of power that haunt the academy as a whole. Including specific embodied exercises used in WGS classrooms, this essay argues that as students and professors engage within an increasingly corporate university system, embodied activities that incorporate the body as a site of learning and critical analysis can access situated knowledges while projects that de-center power and responsibility are viewed with skepticism. I attribute this discrepancy to the neoliberal structure in which we teach and learn, arguing that we need to value and make visible the labor that goes into critical pedagogy.
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