Becoming-undisciplined through my Foray into Disability Studies

A few years ago, I was talking with a friend I went through graduate school with, which was even more years ago, about friendships. I recounted a story about how I struggled with telling a friend that I was having problems with the way we were interacting. I remember saying that with an intimate partner, I would just break up. But with friends, you don't just break up. Problems just hang there, mostly lurking underneath cutting comments, behind social miscues, ready to ambush the interaction at any time. His response? He told me that I was "such a product of Enlightenment." Whoa! Was I offended! It was worse than calling me a liberal. 1 Or so I thought. At the time. The next day, he and I had a fight that lasted nearly all afternoon. It ended with me taking an early cab to the airport. I waited hours for my flight, hiding in the bathroom stalls sniffling and wiping my nose while leaving intermittent voice mails at home for my partner. Once on the plane I was finally able to sleep, no doubt from emotional exhaustion, and withdrew from the effect of the encounter.

The fight bothered me for days, perhaps even weeks. I don't remember exactly. What I do remember was thinking that apparently I am a modern subject, one that cannot let the flow of people in and out of my life. My being ill at ease with friends had to be a result of not being able to live in flux, with loose ends, amid messiness. And my critical flaw could only be that I always seek closure. Or so I had been told. Oh, yes, and my discourse—make that my discourse—always had to prevail in every discussion. Hum. I didn't recognize myself in this portrait. And I still don't. But it is not identity that I am interested in.

All these years later, writing about the incident here while thinking about careers and enacting embodied knowledges, it helps me free up (I almost wrote clarify, but that strikes me too modern a word) some of the thoughts I have about how I have come to be a subject. I was able to put the hurt aside by conjuring a story whereby the whole scene had to do with career insecurities and theoretical transitionings. Insecurity however is much too psychologizing, and besides, it seems more a defensive attempt to place blame on him rather than figure out what was getting under my skin. I wanted to make the content more intelligible theoretically for I knew something else was in that interaction. I had blown a gasket because I didn't see myself the way that someone else did. It makes me wonder why in that moment even with the history that we had had together that he still made those comments. Was he trying out some new theoretical arguments, using me as a source of data, 2 making claims about subjects without accounting for singularities? Are we all products of Enlightenment, still struggling to break away? Or has poststructuralism wrested binarism out of dichotomies and fused them back together (Hekman, 2009)? How do temporal and spatial contexts matter? Are subjects effects of affects (as bundles of flowing forces) and connections (as spatio-temporal variables) (Braidotti, 2002, p. 21)? Or, are they something else? Had he made those comments knowing that it is not just relationships that are messy, that people are messy, too, then we would have had to agree that acts, events, and encounters form subjects in embodied ways in unexpected venues. That is, if we had talked of such things. What makes his comments still so enthralling to me (I have shifted away from my wounds, well, almost) is that after all these years I still am grappling with theoretical tools to assist me in articulating my objections.

The comment, the fight, and my reaction got me thinking about how subjects form. I have come to articulate more precisely what it is that I think of subjectivity. For me subjectivity is that placeholder for what I refer to as I, an assemblage of flows, intensities, and multiplicities as well as of striated and smooth spaces segmented by lines, including lines of flight. Shifts and changes across these spaces are fuelled by bundles of forces that flow with and against the textures of the spaces and the trajectory of the lines (Braidotti, 1994). Through this flow, my I as a subject connects with other I's as subjects, or what could also be called assemblages, in various ways at multiple scales across time continuums, and they all engage in acts that facilitate movement through these spaces at varying speeds. 3 Rather than the subject, I am interested in a subject—me, that is, I. A subject is formed in situ, as an embodied entity full of the bundles of forces that assembled to make an I a singular I. Although there are many I's that form me as an I, it is not the fragmentation of subjectivity that I am interested in. Rather I am interested in how to describe one refractive ray of I as subject in embodied ways, including for example, managing to conceal affect in situ, yelling once the insult has registered, and brooding for a long time afterwards. For it is through this kind of materialization, that is, acts, events, and encounters in situ, that show how assemblages as embodied subjects enter and exit other assemblages (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 407).

Back to task, that is, writing about becoming-undisciplined through my foray into disability studies. I do not want to write a chronology of my career as a researcher, moving from labor process studies to contested illness, even though I have made some explicit decisions about research as a result of bodily sensations and capacities, as for example, choosing to work alone with historical documents on my two most recent research projects to limit interaction with people. Neither do I want to draw out causal relations between my ill body and my research interests or career development, not only because it is nigh impossible to determine cause, but also because framing trajectories in this way negates the multiplicities of types of connections among my many I's, your many I's, and the other I's I encounter as well as masks the possibilities of relationships among the rest of the components of those I's as assemblages. Nor do I want to write meaning into my story that supports epistemological claims that being ill makes for a better understanding of illness to the exclusion of other epistemological claims that could use illness to explore a variety of health, social, political, and even economic issues. So I have decided to trace a story of one I in yet another way.

I want to tell a story about one of my I's forming, constituting I as a subject. It is the I that brings forward elements of my career alongside my engagement as a disability studies researcher. I have not organized the writing of my story here around becoming a researcher in disability studies in terms of how my experiences with a fluctuating chronic illness shaped my scholarly interests and choices about research or of how I make meaning out of my career vis-à -vis embodied knowledges, as perhaps I would have in the past. Rather, I have organized my writing around ways to talk about becoming a researcher engaged with disability studies literature interested in contested illness and in enacting knowledge in embodied ways. My purpose is to write through the mass of mess 4 that shapes, constitutes, and assembles me as an I and to show how living with a chronic, contested illness has led me to disability studies as a discipline in rather circuitous paths both as part of my research interests in contested illness and as a way to make sense of writing autobiographically. As I write this story about I as subject, I am acutely aware of the multiplicity of I's that constitute me as a subject. Even though I want to mark one refractive ray of my own subjectivity and talk about it, I know that other I's will seep into the story. But this is not the point. The point is that I want to reflect on how I write and the assumptions that go into how I use one refractive ray of I as a subject to foreground my movement through becoming a disability studies researcher to becoming-undisciplined. So I offer these comments as a way that can possibly make my I become less discernible and my pathways to I more discernible, at least for now, especially to the other people who have I's that overlap with some of my I's, in an entangled sort of way. I write in hope that I am moving to a place where it is not important to have to say I and to recognize that I is only a manner of speaking (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, pp. 3, 4-5).

Segues, Parables, Apologues

What I usually do in my daily existence as an academic, when talking about intellectually engaging topics, is segue into a theoretical, methodological, or analytical issue via a story about something that I have recently done, witnessed, experienced, or have just been thinking about. In the classroom, the stories usually begin with an incident of some kind.

Ah, yes, Braidotti's idea of the Deleuzean body. Let me tell you. I walked to the bus stop this morning, well really, I sauntered, because I knew I wasn't going to make it, but I didn't want to rush. I hate hurrying. I catch the 7 or the 15, depending, at Fort & Foul Bay. Where I have to go, I cross the L-shaped parking lot; sit on the small brick wall; swing my legs over; and voilà , I'm right at the stop. And, as you know, this morning the slush was all packed together. So when I stood up and took a step down the incline, wham! I hit the ground, flat on my back. My head snapped back. I was so muddy. And I hurt. I thought first of the snow turning into packed slush, but I also knew that my balance has been somehow impaired since I got sick. When was it? Am I sick again? It has been so long. Is this a relapse? Did I reveal too much as I fell? I got up sheepishly and looked around. There were lots of people milling about—across the street going into the pharmacy, behind me coming out of the bank, and three or four people at the bus stop standing next to me. No one said anything to me. 'Are you okay?' 'Here's a tissue to wipe the mud off your face.' 'Wow, that must have hurt!' Nothing.

So that got me to thinking about how individual bodies get thrown into folds and how these folds are both exteriors and interiors (Braidotti, 1994, p. 112; Deleuze, 1999, p. 104). Through events, desire as life-force, and interaction—that which has gone on before (articulated as memory), that which is going on now (the immediate time framing), and that which will take place in the future—the body takes its place spatio-temporally as a force that is stable enough to endure changes of intensity and speed to keep its shape. That fall brought into focus the elements that constitute the limits of the body and showed that the interface between (what I'm going to call) my body and other bodies is located someplace in the midst of a massive collection of folds. That the incline no longer exists, for the landscape changed this past month when the transit company made a bus stop part way along the brick wall, does not mean that the folds no longer hold my injured body. The folds hold time (through memory) even when there are new folds, new unfoldings, and new refoldings. The spatio-temporal body takes up its place in time and continues to be thrown in and out of folds. Some of these folds are folds of subjectiviation, the process that generates a subject (Deleuze 1999, p. 107).

A student once told me that I like to tell stories—much like this one—and they aren't ever innocent. 5 She said they are more like parables. After giving this some thought, I figured it was better a parable than an allegory or some deployment of archetypes, neither of which I care for and both of which I usually mess up. At least I think this is the case. Allegories and archetypes are two ordered, yes, two ordered, based on binaries that shape one's thinking. For the record, I prefer to think about them, my stories, as methodological apologues, ones that pinpoint an event and then perhaps exaggerate it a little bit to make an argument or claim about something.

With my colleagues, I tend to describe a set of seemingly disparate thoughts that has brought me to the thought that I am going to share with them immanently.

When I was taking a shower the other day, I was thinking about what you were saying about responsibilization in light of the way the university takes up the federally-mandated need to accommodate persons with disabilities—of course without undue financial hardship. And then I thought about Tam's talk on sexual citizenship as defined predominantly in terms of sex acts rather than of how one actually lives one's life. You know how people can take up the same sort of problematic through different literatures—what is ontological security in peace studies is different than in say aging in place, and how I've never engaged with any citizenship literature. So, when I ran into Eisha, and she told me about what she wanted to know about the circulation of knowledge in knowledge transition policy—and by the way, I'm glad you're going to be on her committee—I began wondering about how to incorporate responsibilization readings juxtaposed against contested illness in order to get students to think through how knowledge about, say chronicity and accommodation, gets transformed into mainstream federal research policy for funding institutions. There is something about enhanced responsibility for workers needing accommodation for illness that is ongoing with fluctuating severity. What do you think?

My colleague's first response was "have you been reading about autobiography again?" She followed quickly with "yes, it is about the conduct of conduct" (Gordon, 1991, p. 48). At the non-unionized university where I work, faculty members needing accommodation are charged with the task of creating a plan that includes familiarizing oneself with federal laws governing accommodation, with university policies and procedures for requesting accommodation, with insurance company policies that administer long-term disability benefits and return to work programs, and with acquiring letters of support from health care practitioners. The faculty member is in a unique situation in that each isolated attempt to draw up a plan is an exercise of reinventing the wheel because administrators have sole access to previous accommodation plans. Faculty members, when at their most vulnerable, wracked with fear about losing their jobs, damaging their careers, and getting sicker, are directed to work-life consultants in human resources, consultants that have vested interests in maximizing contributions from each and every employer and saving money for the university. 6 Much like consumers, patients, and clients, faculty members are made responsible for our own ill bodies and disabling illness. We are tied to and enclosed by a "loose assemblage of agents, calculations, techniques, images and commodities" that govern us through our "freedom to choose" (Miller & Rose, 2008, p. 82), including, for example, work-life consultants, actuarial charts, sick leave and long-term disability policy, iconic representations of chronically ill people as malingerers, and uneven access to public and private healthcare services.

Although I hadn't been reading about autobiography, I figured that it was time to re-think autobiography in terms of enacting embodied knowledge in the context of being "not quite abled and not quite disabled" (Moss, 2000) while living with chronic illness and working in the academy. And it came to me that I was no longer thinking in terms of either ability or disability. I realized that my body was but one terrain with which to engage, one that held within it a range of possibilities that would fall into either ability or disability, and potentially both. Such positive potential is squashed by habitual binary thinking, in this case of disability as opposed to ability. 7 What I needed to look for had to do with mechanisms that brought into relationship the varied assemblage of I that I had come to understand as one of my many I's. I's that weren't identities, but were specific materializations of my understanding I as a subject.

Let me try to lay out how I became interested in disability studies.

I played basketball in high school. I was a little clumsy—perhaps the onset of the illness that has so deeply affected my balance?—and ended up with various injuries. One time I twisted my ankle at camp and had to get it taped each morning before going to practice. The trainer told me that my ankle didn't hurt and that I needed to buck up. When I got home, my parents made me go to the doctor. He x-rayed my ankle and told me that I had broken it. He also found other things in that x-ray. He diagnosed rheumatoid arthritis and said that I would lose most of my mobility by the time I was 21. So I quit playing impact sports and stopped eating nitrites. Both helped a bit. I took a geography class in university and decided that I wanted to become a geographer. I studied. I went to a conference. A geography professor suggested that I go to graduate school. What's that, I asked? He told me. I applied. I went to another conference. People yelled at each other. I was a little shocked. The geography professor told me not to worry; those people always yelled at each other. Hum. … I went to graduate school. I had migraines, extreme migraines. I studied. I began hating what I was studying. I didn't have a language to articulate what it was I was interested in. So I worked in the international development field. I got a job as an editor. I was well, still a bit clumsy, and I had no further deterioration of any joints. Should I be including this? Does this contribute to my story of becoming interested in disability studies? My geography professor from my undergraduate degree wanted me to do a PhD. Why? I don't think I even like teaching. And people are really mean. I don't like that. But I also don't like working for an international corporation. … So I taught geography. I became more articulate. I went to more graduate school. I studied women's labor. I got a virus that rendered the muscles in my neck so weak that I had to wear a brace for a couple of months. I finished again, with a PhD degree this time. I had a relapse of what I presumed was RA. Or was it scleroderma? I got a job in a geography department. I wonder why? I walked with a cane and wore wrist splints. A professor I admired was diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, or CFS. She told me she developed it from years of extended stress in the workplace. Hum … I certainly did not want to develop CFS. She was so sick. Five weeks into my first term teaching the first of a series of personal harassment acts taking place over the space of several years began. I applied for funding from the Social Science and Humanities Council, or SSHRC, for a project comparing women's experiences of RA and CFS. This project marked my first expression of intellectual interests in chronic illness as disability. I studied. I wrote. …

Clearly I can't do it; I can't tell my story this way. It's boring. And you've heard it all before. 8 Maybe not the details, but the discourses embedded in the story are well worn. Yet I do want to tell my story about how I as subject, embodied knowledge, and disability studies research have come together to constitute a specific I. And some of this information you need to get my points. My enthusiasm, my passions, my curiosity. My illness diagnoses, my reluctance as an academic, my choice of research topic. But when I practice telling my story, I keep tripping myself up. At what I can now call key points in my story, it was not my exuberance that led the change, nor my determination to reach a set goal; rather, it was something that blocked me, something that shut me down, something that cut me off. Each time I had to stop; I had to re-group. Much like now: I need to focus on how I am going to tell my story rather than describe the sequence of events that fit the task at hand.

Beyond Methodological Apologues

There are so many choices in writing strategies in autobiographical writing (e.g., Coffey, 1999; Davies & Gannon, 2006; Ellis, 2004; Personal Narratives Group, 1989; Pratt, 1996; Spry, 2001; Stanley, 1995). Within the sociology of health and illness, the geographies of health and healthcare, and feminist disability studies there has been a long tradition of researchers writing about one's own experience of chronic illness (e.g., DasGupta & Hunt, 2007; Driedger & Owen, 2008; Mattingly & Garro, 2000; Wendell, 1996). Most of the stories about chronic illness however do not reflect my thinking in other areas of research I'm interested in. I want my writing to capture some of the things that I've been thinking about in other contexts, things like disclosures in feminist materialism, viscous porosity, and nomadic subjectivities (e.g., Alaimo, 2010; Braidotti, 1994; Hekman, 2010; Hemmings, 2012; Tuana, 2008).

Three pieces of autobiographical writing stand out for me as writing strategies to bring embodied knowledge into my story of becoming a disability studies researcher in a way that makes sense of the mass of mess that makes up me as an I. So what I want to do next is to give you snippets of my story using three different strategies.

Becoming-woman; Becoming-undisciplined

These three strategies of autobiographical writing give me a conceptual framework that allows me to tell a story about becoming a disability studies researcher interested in contested illness that will resonate with me, and maybe with you. This framework takes seriously subjectivity as a site of inquiry in the various spaces I comes to be a subject, at least for a moment. Not only can the framework address the intra-actions of embodied entities, it can also be embodied itself, that is, it can arise out of a way of thinking that is sensitive to intra-related relations that generate embodied knowledge. It can capture the movements of hovering, swirling, and temporarily alighting, even in fits and starts. It also can capture movements at different scales—right, acute, and obtuse angles, changes in trajectories, and arcs of duration. It can hold multiple tensions, contradictions, and contestations without trying to resolve them. And it can permit the generation of subjectivities that can thrive in their state of flux, flexibility, and instability. Yet I am still left with the question, what would writing autobiographically within such a framework look like?

I know that the process of becoming is somewhat ubiquitous now, that we are all—both identity-wise and with our own subjectivities—in a state of flux. Poststructural-feminist-theoretically-sensitive academic audiences and students bristle when a teacher or a colleague stumbles across the words "I am …" who then feels compelled to introduce all the appropriate caveats. Even though I live and understand myself and those around me to become within becoming, I never know when I should invoke language to describe these processes, or expand upon the mechanisms that direct my trajectories. I always feel as if I am imposing my own thinking and doing so pretentiously. I desire it not to be so, but intentions are not always accounted for in individual encounters. The embodied knowledge emerging in situ is rarely immediately recognized let alone seized in the moment. I have tried to untangle bits of a point arising from a remark that started a fight with my friend and acted as a catalyst for me to be more precise in what I think about subjectivity. My flow appeared to be blocked, but I now think that it was only redirected.

So rather than use this widely-based notion of becoming, I want to be more precise. I'm interested in becoming as it is actually linked to movement, in the flux, in the fluid, over the unevenness of striated and smooth terrains. So I'm thinking in terms of becoming-woman. But it is not quite what I'm looking for because becoming-woman is something else. I'm defining becoming-woman as Deleuze and Guattari do (1987, pp. 292-293), the movement of a subject positioning away from a dominant one toward a subjugated one. Away from "man" toward "woman," away from "human" toward "animal," away from "difference" toward "imperceptible." I think about how becoming-[a subjectivity] (or is that becoming-[an identity]?) as an indeterminate process with hiccoughs, detours, and technical (that is, form and content) glitches. There always seems to be issues that arise and organize themselves around missed opportunities and thwarted trajectories. And each one of these striations has a story—and those are the stories that I'd like to think that I'm telling. My hurt from being seen as a product of Enlightenment. But I also want to keep in mind Richardson's ideas of writing as inquiry, Mol's expression of relational materiality, and Kaufman's thoughts around hacceity. So let me begin … again …

I want to think about becoming-disabilitystudiesresearcher in terms of subjugated subjectivities; more specifically I want to think about the movement from a dominant positioning, which may well be becoming-disabilitystudiesresearcher, 10 toward a subjugated one, one that I'm going to call becoming-undisciplined. I think about my own ties with the disability studies literature as a researcher interested in contested illness. And I find that the becoming-disabilitystudiesresearcher is not necessarily someplace I want to be going, some subjectivity that I want to take up, or someone—some I—whom I'd like to become. Nor is becoming-chronicillnessresearcher a trajectory that I think I would like to move toward. I have engaged with disciplinary processes that have set up some of the boundaries of distinguishing disability studies from other disciplines in my academic practices. To become a disability studies researcher, I have participated in disability activism on and off campus, trained students to become versed in disability studies as a discipline, written about disability, reviewed disability studies manuscripts, participated in disability studies networking—all activities that guard the boundaries of disability studies as a knowledge-based discipline. To know canonically the models, the politics, the issues, the theory, and the debates sets up disability studies to be interdisciplinarily disciplined.

Yet it is hiccoughs and crimps in my foldings and unfoldings that have redirected me and my trajectories. As a re-tooled after my arrival into an interdisciplinary program, I immersed myself in the interdisciplinary patina of disability studies. I was excited by the widening of disability studies to include feminist perspectives. To talk about contested illness as a disability from a feminist perspective was exactly what I was looking for. My understanding of interdisciplinarity was forming into something other than the patina of the university's strategic plan. I looked beneath the verde-gris and found something shiny. Something that I could actually enjoy again, intellectually. I could sense my movement in meetings with discussions about programming, student co-op placements and job searches, and university formal evaluation processes that on paper value interdisciplinarity. But so many people in the university claimed the patina as their own, and supported one type of interdisciplinarity—that of "bringing disciplines together" in a multi-disciplinary research model type of way—in practice.

And, and yet, I still felt liberated when I and my colleagues ran a two-week disability institute that brought together in an interdisciplinary context research, teaching, arts, and activism in innovative ways. The institute was not disability studies as written out in the literature, even though we covered the literatures in depth in class settings; it was something else. The institute was not about bringing disability activists together with disability studies researchers, even though we brought together a number of groups with competing views and contradictory interests together to talk; it was something else. The institute was not about examining structural and organizational practices that marginalize groups of people because of impairment and illness, even though many of the sessions discussed change through policy in non-profit organizations, governments as institutions, and workplace policies governing employment; it was something else. What that something else was, and is, has been stalled in its generation, stranded between the incessant need of an institution to produce academics qua academics, as for example, in reminding us that pay increases are for those who publish and are assessed for contributions to disciplined knowledge, and in producing good employees, as for example, in the attitude that "that was a nice project, come and be on the diversity committee and tell us how to make the university accessible to people with invisible illness (read mental illness)."

My movement toward this something else, that is, beyond disability studies, beyond interdisciplinarity, demonstrates to me that I as subject no longer fit in an institution organized around knowledge-based disciplines; that I as subject am caught in a relational material tension that rhetorically claims one thing and discloses something else. I feel less desire to take up a disciplined subject positioning. Even though I feel frustrated hovering around and within an I as subject that is moving toward this something else, I know it is a something—act, event, encounter—facilitating my movement toward smoother spaces, less organized body, and more deterritorialized spaces. My movement has been informed by the breaking apart of my body (see Shildrick & Price, 1996), something that enhanced my lack of desire to engage with institutional and disciplinary-based processes upon returning to the university after having been off to recover from a relapse of whatever illness process my body held at the time. The interdisciplinary program in policy and practice that created that something else as beyond-disability-studies-space, beyond-interdisciplinary-space, is now defunct. 11 There is no space for something else in an outcome-oriented institution that normalizes academic practices via standardization, surveillance, and the responsibilization of our own conduct, at least not in this place. Yet I see this move supporting my own movement—not toward the disciplines of public health or social policy, not toward geography, sociology, or women's studies, not toward disability studies. Rather, my movement is raveling disciplinarity and I am becoming even more undisciplined.

Becoming-undisciplined holds within it a set of tensions that push me further into the margins of a university setting, an academy, and disability studies intellectually, pedagogically, and politically. As I move toward becoming ever more undisciplined, I find that I, and perhaps I's, embracing undisciplinarity for it provides me the opportunity to practice an affirmative ethics, one that is committed to change in the present that brings about "multiple modes of belonging" in the future (Braidotti, 2010). My practices involved in my becoming-undisciplined are positive, generative, productive and hold within them the potential for a plethora of articulations of that which is as yet unseen, unknown, unthought.

Does movement toward becoming-undisciplined mean that my interests, passions, and curiosities have changed all that much? Sure, they have fluctuated much like the rest of my world. But research-wise I'm still interested in contested illness, embodied knowledge, and the making of subjects. Yet the concepts I use to disclose the materiality of the world around me tells a different story, hopefully one that is more nuanced in the connections between living with the chronicity of a contested illness and my research interests in contested illness. As a first attempt, this is not so awful that I can't make the points I want to make. So bear with me a little longer.

Closing Remarks

One of the things that I'm interested in now is seeing what texts do rather than what they mean (Colebrook, 2000, p. 3). I expanded my thinking to look at the production of the texts and not just to read them. I want to do something with my texts. I want to effect something. It isn't that I want to throw away all meaning, for I think that would be premature, for meaning has something to do with all of this. But meaning is not my entry point, it is not an articulation of and, and yet. I don't want to talk about what it means to be chronically sick with a contested illness vis-à -vis being a disability studies researcher, just as I don't want to claim that I as a subject with a multiplicity of I's in process is more important than another I as an assemblage because I write about them. Rather, I want to reflect on how the acts I disclose show how one refractive ray of I as subject is inhered in these hiccoughs and crimps that form the texture of my foldings, unfoldings, and refoldings of my many becoming-woman subject positionings, some of which I am not necessarily comfortable with. And I want to invite you to inhabit this text with I and me and maybe some of my other I's just in case you might find something else useful or effective from all the I's that are entangled in the assemblage that has come to piece your "I" together.

For this piece of writing, I set my task as writing about becoming-undisciplined through my foray into disability studies and how it has contributed to reinforcing and dislocating my positioning as a disability studies researcher in an interdisciplinary setting. Why is it I-to-desire-to-become-undisciplined in a university setting in two disciplines that do not value interdisciplinarity in the way that I (would) practice it? For me, it is because such a subject positioning opens up more possibilities for I as subject. Although I may be a product of Enlightenment, in a particular place at a particular time for a fleeting moment as one of the folds of subjectiviation, I don't have to be all the time. I want to know if my story about the pathways that have led me to articulate this particular refractive ray of I as subject through the striations I've talked about, as part of an assemblage that holds within it non-materialized singularities of this particular I, resonates with anyone else, no matter the overlaps, entanglements, or criss-crosses. I know that becoming-undisciplined marks a limit (perhaps a threshold?) that exists only as a horizon. Yet keeping my sextant on that horizon is what gets me through the academic day.