Cleavings: Critical Losses and Deaf Gain
Prof. Michael Davidson
Date: Wednesday 18 December 2013
Time: 2.15pm–3.45pm
Place: Eden 109, Liverpool Hope University, UK
Many of Emily Dickinson’s best known poems deal with the loss of sight, based on her own experiences with temporary blindness in the mid-1860s, but they are less about the absence of sight than about how she experiences the limits of consciousness: “I could not see to see.” She probed the loss of sensation for what it could teach her about what is most familiar—and thus invisible. Using poems by Dickinson and recent work in cultural and queer theory, Distinguished Professor Michael Davidson will explore the fine line between “gain” and “loss” in disability studies. Using his experience of sudden hearing loss, he will argue that recent claims for “deaf gain” have vaunted possibilities of cultural inclusiveness to the exclusion of affective realms of frustration, loss, and failure that are seldom acknowledged experiences of deaf and hard-of-hearing persons. While endorsing the general thrust of deaf gain and its implications for the larger context of disability, he will argue for a more critical understanding of loss in the politics of gain.
Michael Davidson is Distinguished Professor in the department of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. He is author of numerous books including Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body (University of Michigan Press, 2008). He is on the editorial boards of both the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies (Liverpool University Press) and Literary Disability Studies (Palgrave Macmillan).
This seminar is part of the new CCDS series, The Voice of Disability. Other dates include:
15th Jan, Creative/Critical Research: The Poem sequence ‘Phantom/Sex Ontology’, Cath Nichols.
12th Feb, Oneself as Another: The Problem of ‘Voice’ in Alzheimer’s Life Writing, Lucy Burke.
12th Mar, Narrating Disability Inside and Outside the Clinic: Or, Beyond Empathy, Tom Couser.
21st May, The Reality and Rhetoric of Pupil Voice: Exploring the Educational Journeys of Young People Labelled with Behavioural, Emotional, and Social Difficulties, Marie Caslin.
25th Jun, Young DaDa: Evaluating Participation in the Arts, Claire Penketh.
For further information please contact:
Dr David Bolt, Liverpool Hope University.
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