Cripping Girlhood
keynote address by Dr. Anastasia Todd
In this talk, Dr. Anastasia Todd will discuss parts of her forthcoming book Cripping Girlhood. Cripping Girlhood offers a new theorization of disabled girls and girlhoods, tracing how and why the disabled girl frequently emerges in twenty-first century U.S. media culture. Through an analysis of a wide array of media, from TikTok videos to HBO documentaries, the book answers the question, “why disabled girls, why now?”, and reveals how the exceptional figure of the disabled girl most often appears in contemporary media culture as a resource to work through post-Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) anxieties about the family, healthcare, labor, citizenship, and the precarity of the bodymind. Todd goes beyond a critique of the figure of the exceptional disabled girl, and in examining closely disabled girls’ self-representational practices and cultural productions, showcases the political and cultural labor disabled girls perform, from cultivating disability intimacies and community on YouTube, to affirming the value of care labor and interspecies interdependence on TikTok. Ultimately, Cripping Girlhood uncovers how disabled girls “crip” girlhood, or upend normative understandings of disability and girlhood, and in the process, circulate their own capacious re-envisioning of what it means to be a disabled girl.
Anastasia Todd is an assistant professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Kentucky. Her work is at the intersection of feminist disability studies and girlhood studies. Cripping Girlhood (University of Michigan Press), her forthcoming book, is the winner of the 2022 Tobin Siebers Prize for Disability Studies in the Humanities. Her work has been published in Girlhood Studies and Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy and is forthcoming in Disability Studies Quarterly.