Professor Robert McRuer presenting a lecture

Denison University’s Department of Communication welcomes Robert McRuer, English professor at the George Washington University, presenting “Queer Affect in Crip Landscapes: Disability, Desire, Devastation.”

McRuer focuses on disabled subjects caught up in new and devastating forms of authoritarian neoliberalism across our hemisphere in this talk. The presentation looks in particular toward Brazil, where the newly-installed President Jair Bolsonaro is primed not only to deepen austerity but to wreak havoc on the country’s natural resources, opening the rain forest to increasing development as cities in the north burn and cities in the south sink further into the sea. Situated at the intersection of queer affect theory, mad studies, and crip ecologies, the talk examines the forms of queer/crip intimacies and desires that might emerge in the midst of such devastation and destruction.

McRuer’s recent work reads the current moment of global emergency as what he has termed “crip times”; he has argued that in our moment disability is a central, but undertheorized, component of a global austerity politics. “Crip Times: Disability, Globalization, and Resistance” centers on the particularly-punishing austerity regime that has been in place in the UK for almost a decade, but the book spins out to a range of other locations where a logic of austerity is deeply sedimented, including the United States, and considers as well the ways in which disabled artists and activists resist that logic.