HSSB 4020
The medical model of disability became a dominant paradigm of knowledge and representation in China at the turn of the twentieth century thanks to the advent and popularization of medical, scientific, and even eugenic discourses. This medical-scientific paradigm, I argue, gave rise to what can be called “compulsive able-bodiness” that undergirds the national ideology of ability. This chapter offers a crip feminist critique of Chinese nationalism in the early twentieth century by analyzing fictional works authored by seminal writers such as Lu Xun and Xiao Hong where themes of disability, gender, and nationalism intersect. Using the case of modern China and yet eager to join broader debates over identity politics, the chapter ultimately advances a critical account of disability as a material-semiotic, intersectional practice that both accounts for and moves beyond identity politics. This new materialist account of disability helps articulate the dialectic that preoccupies contemporary critical disability theories of subjectivity by aligning issues of embodiment (which are always already social) with issues of social practice (which always already occur in material spaces between material objects).
Hangping Xu is an Assistant Professor in the East Asian Languages & Cultures Department at University of California Santa Barbara. He holds a Ph.D. in Chinese Literature from Stanford University with a Ph.D. Minor in Gender and Sexuality Studies. Comparative and interdisciplinary, his research and teaching interests include modern Chinese literature and popular culture, Asian American literature, theories of world literature, film and new media studies, literary theory, comparative rhetoric and aesthetics. His research seeks to queer and crip these fields with a theoretical and thematic investment in global queer and disability studies. Because the fields of queer and disability studies share a fundamental critique of how normalization structures our embodiment, desire, affect, and subjectivity, he uses an intersectional mode of queer-crip critique to approach cultural and literary works produced in transnational context. Similarly, his teaching aims to expand the theoretical and political scope of queer studies by intersecting it with disability and gender studies. His classes invite students to use this queer-crip lens to understand and critique the operation of power under the heteronormative and ableist gaze. His teaching garnered the Centennial Teaching Award from Stanford. Prior to UCSB, he taught at Middlebury College.
The Arts Revolt Forum! is organized by Professor Sabine Frühstück (UCSB East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies).