Critical Disability Studies Discourse Journal

Issue # 10

Issue Title: Wither/Hope: Unruly Bodies under Neoliberal Rule


How do disabled people interact with the state?

How do we form active responses to a state who seeks to kill us?


Quote to Consider:



“...the here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and now's totalising rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there.”Jose Munoz, Cruising Utopia, 1.



(Optimism) is a scene of negotiated sustenance that makes life bearable as it presents itself ambivalently, unevenly, incoherently.”

Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 14.


The world feels like it’s ending, or a widespread corrupt rule seems to continue unabated. Though there are continual crises of ecological and social factors, the state continues to reinforce its will–on a local and global level—thinking about the re-election of Ford, the refusal of multiculturalism as an official strategy in Quebec, the overturning of Roe vs Wade, the continued success of Marie Le Pen in France, the continued influence of the Hungarian Orban on facist movements throughout North America and Europe, or more abstractly, the complete lack of funding for housing for disabled people or other basic resources, growing tent city populations and the bottoming out of rates for social welfare.


Detailed Abstract Call

For this issue, Critical Disability Studies Discourse Journal wants abstracts which responds to violence done to our racialised bodies, our fat bodies, our queer bodies, our poor bodies, our disabled bodies– or the queer, crip and feminist intersection of disability and identificaiton that comes from ourselves or our community or that which is legtimated by others. We also invite sites and stories of resistance, of hope, of desire, and on rare occasions optimism. We hope to note joy, especially in bodies for whom joy has been a complex form.


In particular, this issue, titled ‘Whither Hope: Unruly Bodies Under Neoliberal Rule’ invites academic papers, written in community, and we welcome reviews of new or newish texts that have been useful in the push back against the world.


We also want schemes, visions, lists, recipes, art projects, dreams, documentations, films, photographs, visual and material cultures, in all media, in most states of completeness, either pragmatically, or ambitiously, about how bodies used to being unruled have refused that imposition, which imagine a new “then and there”.


Please send abstracts of 250 words or completed pieces cdd@yorku.ca Audio or digital submissions are welcome so long as they are accompanied by closed captioning completed by the author or third party. Artistic submissions are also welcome with descriptive text.