Susan Merrill Squier

So Long as They Grow Out of It: Comics, The Discourse of Developmental Normalcy, and Disability

This essay draws on two emerging fields—the study of comics or graphic fiction, and disability studies—to demonstrate how graphic fictions articulate the embodied, ethical, and sociopolitical experiences of impairment and disability. Examining David B’s Epileptic and Paul Karasik and Judy Karasik’s The Ride Together, I argue that these graphic novels unsettle conventional notions of normalcy and disability. In so doing, they also challenge our assumed dimensions and possibilities of the comics genre and medium, demonstrating the great potential comics hold for disability studies.

Communities of the Air: Radio Century, Radio Culture

A pioneering analysis of radio as both a cultural and material production, Communities of the Air explores radio’s powerful role in shaping Anglo-American culture and society since the early twentieth century. Scholars and radio writers, producers, and critics look at the many ways radio generates multiple communities over the air—from elite to popular, dominant to resistant, canonical to transgressive. The contributors approach radio not only in its own right, but also as a set of practices—both technological and social—illuminating broader issues such as race relations, gender politics, and the construction of regional and national identities. Drawing on the perspectives of literary and cultural studies, science studies and feminist theory, radio history, and the new field of radio studies, these essays consider the development of radio as technology: how it was modeled on the telephone, early conflicts between for-profit and public uses of radio, and amateur radio (HAMS), local programming, and low-power radio. Some pieces discuss how radio gives voice to different cultural groups, focusing on the BBC and poetry programming in the West Indies, black radio, the history of alternative radio since the 1970s, and science and contemporary arts programming. Others look at radio’s influence on gender (and gender’s influence on radio) through examinations of Queen Elizabeth’s broadcasts, Gracie Allen’s comedy, and programming geared toward women. Together the contributors demonstrate how attention to the variety of ways radio is used and understood reveals the dynamic emergence and transformation of communities within the larger society. Contributor s. Laurence A. Breiner, Bruce B. Campbell, Mary Desjardins, Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Nina Hunteman, Leah Lowe, Adrienne Munich, Kathleen Newman, Martin Spinelli, Susan Merrill Squier, Donald Ulin, Mark Williams, Steve Wurzler

Feminist Theory and/of Science

In choosing the unwieldy phrase ‘Feminist theory and/of science’ as the topic for this special issue, we hoped to call attention to a paradox: the relative lack of traffic between feminist theory and feminist science studies, despite their shared commitment to feminism. Although feminist interventions in the sciences have ranged from problems of professional inclusion to issues of language, objectivity and epistemology, the field of feminist science studies has not fully incorporated some of the central insights of feminist theory. The converse is also true. A cursory survey of anthologies and textbooks suggests that feminist theory has also betrayed a certain chilliness to feminist science studies, granting the area adjunct chapter status rather than centrally incorporating its insights. The essays in this special issue challenge this double exclusion, not only addressing the distance between feminist theory and feminist science studies, but also refusing the marginalization of science – and thus of feminist science studies – within feminist theory. Instead, writing under the rubric of what might be called a ‘new materialism’, the authors included here argue for the relevance of materiality, performance/performativity and agency to feminist science studies. In so doing, they demonstrate that issues central to feminist science studies have the potential to complicate, enrich and thus reinvigorate feminist theory, as well as extend its purview. To begin this dialogue, Rebecca Herzig’s essay, ‘On performance, productivity, and vocabularies of motive in recent studies of science’, brings feminist theories of performativity into conversation with science studies conceptions of performance. She argues that, although science studies has explored the problems of essentialism and realism by stressing the performative nature of facts, investigative techniques and experimental spaces, the emergence of performance-based research threatens to reproduce essential notions about the body and the inherent productivity of science. Focusing on the work of Judith Butler – and perhaps more importantly on her interlocutor Karen Barad – Herzig suggests that feminist theories of performativity have already worked through several paradoxes and binaries, including the notion that there is a distinct, and unavoidable 123

Life Writing and Graphic Narratives

ABSTRACT This text is fashioned from an email exchange between the authors during the spring, summer, and fall of 2015. Our aim with this informal, collaborative process was to develop a few of the key principles for discussing graphic narratives as a mode of life writing, especially graphic memoirs relating to illness, disability, and care work, as well as issues of difference more broadly (including gender and sexuality). Thinking through the genres and media of graphic life writing, we discuss narrative, text authentication, institutional positioning, world-making, narrating difference, and the role of the visual, while giving particular attention to the importance of objects and temporality to the comics form. Rather than a resolved or comprehensive series of guidelines, we offer instead an experiment in epistolary criticism, through which we formulate several points of contact between graphic narrative and life writing scholarship—instances and considerations where the central concerns for scholars in both fields overlap. Ultimately, our sense is that graphic memoirs of disability, illness, and other types of difference share many characteristics with more traditional, exclusively textual life writing forms, though in graphic life writing the visual dynamic—involving the connections and disconnections between the verbal and visual—produces specific engagements with disjunction, complexity, and the ineffable.

Fetishism and Hysteria: The Economies of Feminism Ex Uterod

Laurie Fooss feminist novel Ex Utero is a comic exploration of the value of the uterus. Simultaneously recursive and resistant, Fooss novel reenacts, with a difference, two confining essentialisms: hysteria, a female disorder, and fetishism, whether understood as the psychosexual response to female lack, or as capitalisms motor, the displacement of desire onto commodities. The essay explores how, if we think of the womb neither as individual possession or commodified object, we can create a new space of possibility for women at the end of the millennium.