On Being Transminded: Disabling Achievement, Enabling Exchange

Abstract

We write collaboratively, as a recent graduate and long-time faculty member of a small women’s liberal arts college, about the mental health costs of adhering to a feminist narrative of achievement that insists upon independence and resiliency.  As we explore the destabilizing potential of an alternative feminist project, one that invites different temporalities in which dis/ability emerges and may be addressed, we work with disability less as an identity than as a generative methodology, a form of relation and exchange. Mapping our own college as a specific, local site for the disabling tradition of “challenging women,” we move to larger disciplinary and undisciplining questions about the stigma of mental disabilities, traversing the tensions between institutionalizing disability studies and the field’s promise of destabilizing the constrictions of normativity.

Keywords: academia, dis/ability, disability studies, education, feminism, identity studies, mad pride, mad studies, mental health, mental illness, queer studies, temporality, women’s colleges