Lecture: Jasbir Puar: Bodies with New Organs: Becoming Trans, Becoming Disabled

In this talk Jasbir Puar historically situates the most current intersectional flavours of the day, ?trans? and ?disabled?, which both come into being, or becoming, in the early 90s in the academy as well as in broader political terms and movements. She looks at how their parallel yet rarely intersecting epistemological constructs require exceptionalizing both the trans body and the disabled body in order to convert the debility of a non-normative body into a form of social and cultural capacity, whether located in state recognition, identity politic formations, market economies, the medical industrial complex, or subject positioning. Puar argues that the potential politics of trans disability are seemingly only perceived in terms of the intersectional ?trans-disabled subject? or the ?disabled trans subject?. Using assemblage theory to advance the relationships between trans and disability beyond an intersectional rubric of subject identification, she elaborates a politics of conviviality through engagements with the medicalization of the body that might de-exceptionalize the transgressive tendencies of trans and disabled in favour of a shared politics.

The lecture is part of the ICI Lecture Series Constituting Wholes II, which seeks to re-examine the critical potential of notions of wholeness by exploring the double movement in constituting wholes.