Table Of ContentSex, Identity, Aesthetics
Sex, Identity, Aesthetics
The Work of Tobin Siebers and Disability Studies
Jina B. Kim, Joshua Kupetz,
Crystal Yin Lie, and Cynthia Wu,
Editors
University of Michigan Press • Ann Arbor
Copyright © 2021 by Jina B. Kim, Joshua Kupetz, Crystal Yin Lie, and Cynthia Wu
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First published October 2021
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ISBN 978- 0- 472- 03849- 7 (paper : alk. paper)
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https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11769364
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Identity, Aesthetics: The Work of Tobin Siebers and Disability Studies, and the names of the
editors: Jina B. Kim, Joshua Kupetz, Crystal Yin Lie, and Cynthia Wu.
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Cover design by Paula Newcomb.
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Reimagining Disability Studies 1
Jina B. Kim, Joshua Kupetz, Crystal yin lie, and Cynthia Wu
Part I: Sex
1. Witnessing “Disability Experience on Trial”:
Toward Critique and Emancipation 23
allison Weiner heinemann
Part II: Identity
2. It Depends: Academic Labor and the
Materiality of the Body 41
Cynthia Wu
3. Cracks Filled with Images:
Mental Disability, Trauma, and Crip Rhetoric in
Cereus Blooms at Night 58
Jennifer marChisotto
4. Ghosts of Disability in Naomi Shihab Nye’s Transfer 77
therí a. piCKens
5. Crawling Upstairs: Identity and Ideology in
Tobin Siebers’s Disability Theory 96
thomas aBrams
vi Contents
Part III: Aesthetics
6. Words and Images: Networks of Relationality
in Deaf, Blind, and DeafBlind Aesthetics 113
reBeCCa sanChez
7. Musical Modernism and Its Disability Aesthetics 124
Joseph n. straus
8. Staging the Asylum: Javier Téllez’s Disability Aesthetics 141
leon J. hilton
9. Disability Aesthetics:
A Pedagogy for Teaching a Revisionist Art History 161
amanda CaChia
Contributors 173
Index 177
Digital materials related to this title can be found on the Fulcrum plat-
form via the following citable URL https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.117
69364
Acknowledgments
This anthology was a labor of love. Many people contributed to its frui-
tion. The entire process from start to finish took years. Tobin Siebers
passed away on January 29, 2015. At the time, he held the position of V. L.
Parrington Collegiate Professor of English at the University of Michigan.
His colleagues sprung to action, planning a memorial service held
on February 6, which drew relatives, neighbors, friends, students, col-
leagues, and other compatriots from near and far. Loved ones recounted
touching and poignant stories, drawing laughter and tears alike from
attendees.
Flash forward another year to February 12, 2016. Tobin’s former stu-
dents Jina B. Kim, Joshua Kupetz, Crystal Yin Lie, Shannon Walter, and
Esther Witte had just finished hosting a two- day symposium in Ann Arbor
addressing Tobin’s contributions to disability studies. The event, “Crip
Futurities: The Then and There of Disability Studies,” brought dozens of
speakers and attendees together to explore emergent directions in the
field. Panels ranged in topics from bioethics and surveillance to disabil-
ity poetics; crip pedagogy to intercultural and intermedial encounters;
and theories of pain to the aesthetics of mental illness. Concerned with
plural ways of being, engaging, and understanding, “Crip Futurities” was
part of a collective and continual call for more diverse and accessible
futures in scholarly, activist, and communal worlds. The organizers pro-
vided travel grants for participants lacking institutional means to offset
their costs. It was funded by multiple University of Michigan sources: the
Department of English Language and Literature; Rackham Graduate
School; Institute for the Humanities; College of Literature, Science, and
the Arts; and the University of Michigan Initiative on Disability Studies—
which Tobin founded and co- led for years.
viii Acknowledgments
Cynthia thought the symposium might inspire someone to take up an
anthology project on Tobin’s work, not expecting at first for that person
to be her. She returned home from Ann Arbor and waited to see who
would jump at the opportunity. After a few months passed with no word
in the disability studies world about something in the making, she rallied
some of the symposium organizers to bring into being the volume we all
thought should exist. Sex, Identity, Aesthetics was the end product.
We would like to thank LeAnn Fields, the editor at the University of
Michigan Press with whom we initiated discussion about this anthology.
LeAnn has a lengthy and impressive track record of acquiring books
in disability studies, which dates back to the field’s infancy. In prepara-
tion for retirement, LeAnn handed the project to Sara Jo Cohen, who
valiantly shepherded it from beginning to end. We are grateful for her
keen eye, attention to detail, generosity, and good humor. We thank
two anonymous readers whose careful review made the manuscript
much stronger.
Finally, we thank Indiana University, which provided the subvention
in the form of a research startup for Cynthia, for this volume to be open
access. We believe that removing economic and other barriers to access-
ing knowledge is a top priority and that universities should find ways,
whenever possible, to ensure that it happens.
Introduction
Reimagining Disability Studies
Jina B. Kim, Joshua Kupetz, Crystal yin lie,
and Cynthia Wu
Tobin Siebers was one of the most prominent authors in disability stud-
ies. His work in the field remains frequently cited. His scholarship on
sexual and other affiliations, the links between structural location and
coalitional politics, and aesthetic representation in the visual arts has
shaped disability studies in indelible ways. The title of this volume, Sex,
Identity, Aesthetics, reflects these contributions. As Siebers has argued, a
consideration of ability status forces a rethinking of prevailing assump-
tions about the above cultural and social phenomena. This impels a revi-
sion of liberal humanism’s major principles. How do we redefine person-
hood to account for the full range of physical, sensory, neurological, and
intellectual ways of being? What does it mean to assert agency in the face
of interdependence? What does a disability- friendly worldview and envi-
ronment look like? How do we reimagine intimacy, kinship, relationality,
and pleasure? How might the realm of representation inaugurate these
conceptual shifts? Siebers examined these questions in ways that were
crucial to disability studies and disability rights activism. His contribu-
tions to our thinking about uneven distributions of power persists after
the passing of his natural life on January 29, 2015.
We write as Siebers’s former students at the University of Michigan
who were advised by him at various moments on disability studies’ time-
line. Cynthia Wu entered her doctoral program in the late 1990s when
disability studies started staking a claim for widespread relevance in the
