ABSTRACT
Women’s and Gender Studies (WGS) and Disability Studies have indeed, per Garland-Thomson’s aspiration, had a mutually enriching relationship in the years since. There are now some whole courses in feminist Disability Studies where integrative intersectional analysis is a central focus and practice. For professors, adopting the flexibility of an access-as-practice approach also means questioning the kinds of pedagogies long favoured in feminist classrooms. Queer, crip, and Mad have “different histories, different cultural artifacts, and different networks of association”–though not necessarily fully discrete “memberships”–but can be a “formidable coalition” in epistemological and political struggle. Disability on the table and in the room, through crip, Mad, and neuroqueer knowledges and continuous coalitional access revision, interrogates systems comprising the ableist institutional iceberg, practicing what Mia Mingus calls “an accessibility that moves the reader closer to justice”. Because of its grammatical prefix, the word disability might mislead one to believe it has an opposite.
