Meep's FDN 5002 Presentation
Presented by Meep (e/em)
Slides
Bibliography
Note
I attended most of our class meetings from the comfort of my bed with the camera off. Usually, if I am going to be visible, I move either to the chair by the foot of my bed or, for something more formal like a presentation, to the studty area I have set up in my living room for that purpose.
A few days before I was scheduled to give this presentation, another member of the Disabled Academic Collective shared their work on Artivism from Bedspace. I fell down a rabbit hole of reading about bedspace and beds as "a visionary site of political organizing" and "building community within and against the push to dispose of each other" (Khanmalek & Restrepo Rhodes, 2020). This is something I knew in my bones (or maybe, in my malfunctioning collagen) as a sick and disabled queer [SDQ] but had not read an articulation of. I was ashamed of the work I did from my bed and tried to hide it, to perform normative non-disability.
… but for my academic work to be embodied, it must also be honest. I do not work at my desk. I do most of my reading, writing, theorizing, and creating in bed (or in stolen moments at my place of paid employment). This is where I am most comfortable. This is where you knew me.
Khanmalek, T. & Restrepo Rhodes, H.A.(2020). A decolonial feminist epistemology of the bed: A compendium incomplete of sick and disabled queer brown femme bodies of knowledge. Frontiers, 41(1), 35–58. https://doi.org/10.1353/fro.2020.a755339