ABSTRACT
The concept of “twin pandemics”—both the phrase itself and the effort to seek justice for Floyd in the COVID-19 crisis—offers an opportunity to examine what Alison Kafer and Eunjung Kim call “the inevitable incompleteness of intersectionality”. This chapter presents an assessment of intersectional disability studies. In the quest for institutional legitimacy and critical currency, disability studies often presents itself both as a source of much-needed intersectionality and as in need of the intersectionality acquired through encounters with other interdisciplines. The chapter departs from the claim that intersectional disability scholarship cannot be predicated on an absolute rejection of the medical model and the notion of cure. Paredes' short story “The Hammon and the Beans” is a foundational text in Mexican–American literary studies. It also offers a powerful illustration of what Jasbir Puar calls debility, or the “ongoingness of structural inequality and suffering”.
