In the introduction to last summer's issue (https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v42i3-4.9546), we talked about the challenges this journal has faced and our goal of getting back to sustainability. We are happy to announce that, far ahead of our initial schedule, we are almost finished with our initial review of the submission backlog! We expect to re-open the submission portal fairly soon, and perhaps by the time this is published.
In yet more good news, we are delighted to introduce a new member of our editorial team. Rachael Nebraska Lynch has been working as our graduate student Editorial Assistant since the fall. She hails from George Washington University and brings a wealth of knowledge about disability studies and especially literary studies and theory. She is a wonderful colleague who demonstrates how bright the future is for our field.
We begin this issue with an article by Mark Bookman, who was a member of the SDS Board and passed away, unexpectedly and at too young an age, shortly after he completed this piece. This study, which is now a part of Mark's legacy, examines how Western disability rights politics has translated into a Japanese context. In addition to its revelations about Japanese disability politics, it should influence studies of disability politics in other non-Western regions, as the effort to spread a Western politics of disability rights continues around the world.
We then feature an article from Elizabeth Currans that unpacks mermaid performances to reveal how "becoming mermaid" reinforces and challenges normate embodiment.
The issue concludes with a five-article section on neurodiversity, past and present. Laura Seymour's piece reevaluates the case of an eighteenth-century Scottish man, Hugh Blair. The article critiques anachronistic medical diagnoses of historic figures and offers an alternative model for centering a neurodiverse perspective in historical studies. The second article takes us to the late-twentieth-century (mis)treatment of autistic people. Jennifer Jensen Wallach's study examines the disturbing ways that food factored into autism treatment and reveals productive points of contact between food studies and disability studies. Bringing us into the present, the articles by Marrok Sedgwick and Stephanie Fuller, and Susan Flynn, reposition the stories, discourse, and discursive learning among people with developmental/intellectual disabilities. Finally, Juliet Hess examines the "testimonial smothering" of Mad people in the academy. Neurodiversity remains one of the most exciting topics in disability studies and this section of the issue should contribute to that discussion.
We began this introduction by talking about sustainability and we'll end by asking you to help sustain this journal and our parent organization, SDS. We are committed to keeping this journal open-access, but we need people to pay their dues and participate in the membership drive SDS has launched. So with a nod to the centuries-old labor of many disabled people, we tip our cap and extend our tin cup, asking you to spare some of your coin. Please drop it here: https://www.patreon.com/SocietyforDisabilityStudies.
