The Fragmented Body: Feminist Philosophy of Disability was a course I designed and taught at the University of Notre Dame, emerging from my research on trans melancholia, disability, and the body as a site of ontological fragmentation. Rather than treating disability as a biomedical problem to be solved, the course examines how disability challenges the dominant assumptions about personal autonomy, social normativity, and bodily integrity. I pair philosophical texts with disability memoirs and case studies to show how theoretical concepts intertwine with lived experience. For instance, I teach Shelley Tremain’s Foucauldian critique of the medical model of disability alongside Eli Clare’s memoir in Exile and Pride; I also pair Logan Smilges’s anti-cure worldmaking in their most recent paper “Toward a Crip Metaphysics” (2026) with the rich archive from contemporary South Korea in Eunjung Kim’s Curative Violence. Through the Teaching Beyond the Classroom Grant from Notre Dame, I welcomed Tremain and Smilges as guest speakers at the beginning and the end of the course, respectively, allowing my students to engage directly with the very scholars whose work structured our course.
Categories: Critical Disability Studies, Crip Studies, Mad Studies