What is Ablenationalism? Anastasia Todd

Joeita speaks about "Affective Ablenationalism" with Anastasia Todd from the University of Kentucky.

SUMMARY

An in-depth conversation about disability and ablenationalism, exploring how disabled individuals are often coded as able-bodied in the imagined community of the nation.

Using the story of Trevor Maroshek, a former Navy SEAL, and his service dog, Chopper as a case study, we examine the concept of service dogs as a technology of rehabilitation, allowing disabled individuals to fit into the able-bodied norm and the white American nuclear family, the veneration of Chopper as a national hero and the role of military dogs in securing the nation state. Looking at the real-world implications such as confusion about the rights of people with service dogs and the discrimination they face.

Guest Bio:

Anastasia Todd is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Kentucky. Broadly, her research investigates the intersections of disability and girlhood from a feminist disability studies perspective. Her forthcoming book, Cripping Girlhood (winner of the 2022 Tobin Siebers Prize for Disability Studies in the Humanities), is interested in what happens and what it means when certain disabled girl subjects gain cultural recognition and visibility as “American girls, too,” to use the words of Melissa Shang, who in 2014 created a viral Change.org petition imploring American Girl to create a disabled doll of the year. The book explores the promise and peril of this newfound cultural visibility for select disabled girls. In examining representations and self-representations of disabled girls and girlhoods across the mediascape at the beginning of the twenty-first century, spanning HBO documentaries to TikTok, Cripping Girlhood uncovers the variegated ways the figure of the disabled girl is imbued with meaning and mobilized as a spectacular representational symbol. Cripping Girlhood also explores how disabled girls, more than symbolic figures to be used in others’ narratives, circulate their own capacious re-envisioning of what it means to be a disabled girl. The book uncovers the cultural and political work that disabled girls’ self-representational practices perform, from cultivating disability community through generating intimacy online, to affirming the value of care labor and interdependence across the species barrier.

Highlights:

• Show Open (00:00)
• Introducing Anastasia Todd (01:59)
• What is Ablenationalism? (02:27)
• History of Reliance on Service Dogs (07:00)
• Technology of Rehabilitation (08:36)
• How does the story of Chopper Perpetuate the Nation State? (10:53)
• The State of Veteran Mental Health and Wellbeing (16:40)
• Reciprocity in Service Dog Relationships (19:23)
• Service Dogs as Saviors (23:10)
• Show Close (28:13)

Links:

Pre-order Cripping Girlhood (University of Michigan Press, 2024)

Her new research project, in collaboration with Heather Switzer (WGS, Arizona State University) explores the intersection of invisible disability and young womanhood through creating and analyzing an archive of invisible disability narratives. As a cripistemological intervention, the project seeks to expand disability studies by taking seriously bodyminds that experience ableism yet have an uneasy and tenuous relationship with disability as it has been conventionally defined—that is, as physical, unchanging, and visible.

Anastasia Todd. 2023. “Cripping Visibility: Re-presenting Disabled Girls and Girlhoods.” NEOS. 15(1).

Anastasia Todd. 2023. “Affective Ablenationalisms and Interspecies Entanglements.” Disability Studies Quarterly. 42(3).

About The Pulse:

On The Pulse, host Joeita Gupta brings us closer to issues impacting the disability community across Canada.

Joeita Gupta has nurtured a life-long dream to work in radio! She's blind, moved to Toronto in 2004 and got her start in radio at CKLN, 88.1 FM in Toronto. A former co-host of AMI-audio's Live from Studio 5, Joeita also works full-time at a nonprofit in Toronto, specializing in housing/tenant rights.

Find Joeita on Twitter: @JoeitaGupta

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