VariAbilities 2021
Exhibiting Humanity; Inhabiting the Body
Thursday
10th-Saturday 12th June, 2021 (US East Coast Time)
On Zoom PASSWORD: ringling
Image: “Contortion Act”: Costumed acrobat balanced on one leg with other leg over arm, smoking hookah
Image: “Exhibited, with the Season’s Greetings”: Booted man center with snake wrapped around body flanked on left by Tom Thumb (person of short stature) in general’s uniform, on right by young girl in pink dress and lifting long white hair.
[courtesy of the Tibbals Collection, Ringling Circus Museum]
Welcome: Setting the Stage 8:30
am Dr. Chris Mounsey,
Founder “VariAbilities Biennial Conference”
Session 1 9:15
– 10:30 am Acts and Agency
Betsy
Golden Kellem, The Libel Suit of Millie-Christine McKoy
Will
Visconti, "Impure Circe": La Goulue as Animal-Tamer
Session 2, 10:45-11:30am Introducing
the Archives of the Ringling Circus Museum & Tibbals Collection
PUBLIC Keynote 12:00–1:15 pm
“PANEL
DISCUSSION: Revisiting Cultural Spectacles and Extraordinary Bodies in
2021”
Rosemarie Garland Thomson,
Professor
Emerita of English and Bioethics, Emory
University;
Author
of Staring: How We Look (2009) and
Re-Presenting
Disability: Agency and Activism in the Museum (2010);
co-editor
of About
Us: Essays From the Disability Series of the New York Times
Michael Chemers
Professor of Dramatic Literature, Theater Arts, UC Santa Cruz;
Author of The Monster in Theatre
History: This Thing of Darkness (2017),
and
Staging Stigma: A Critical Examination of the
American Freak Show. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History.
(2009)
Analola Santana
Associate Professor of Spanish & Portuguese, Dartmouth College
Author of Teatro y Cultura de
Masas: Encuentros y Debates (2010) and
Freak Performances: Dissidence in Latin American
Theatre (2018)
Session 2, 09:15 - 10:45 am Recovering
Historical Bodies
Madeleine
Mant,
“Betwixt sea and shore: merchant marine
bodies in 19th-century St. John’s, Newfoundland”
Maren Jonasson, “Exhibiting
the varied body as a means of support. Nordic encounters with
extraordinary-bodied itinerant performers ca. 1860–1910”
PUBLIC: 11:00 am– 12:15: pm Workshop
Inhabiting the
Body: Gut Botany: A poetry/performance by Petra Kuppers
"Gut
Botany charts my body / language living on Indigenous land as a white settler
and traveler," Petra Kuppers writes in the notes of her new poetry
collection. Using a perfect cocktail of surrealist and situationist techniques,
Kuppers submits to the work and to the land, moving through ancient fish,
wounded bodies, and the space around her. The book invites the reader to
navigate their own body through the peaks and pitfalls of pain, survival,
sensual joy, and healing. "The collection
embraces inclusivity and entanglement; nothing and no one here functions in
isolation. Kuppers invites readers to consider their own somatics: what is it
to be in this body, here, now? At turns beautiful and provocative, Gut Botany
is a tonic against loneliness.” Addie Hopes: Books about Caring, from a
Distance.
PETRA
KUPPERS is a disability culture activist and a community
performance artist. Her third poetry book, the ecosomatic Gut Botany
(2020), was named one of the top ten poetry collections of 2020 by the New York
Public Library. She is also the author of the queer/crip speculative short
story collection Ice Bar (2018). She is the Artistic Director of The Olimpias,
an international disability culture collective; teaches at the University of
Michigan and at Goddard College; and co-creates Turtle Disco, a somatic writing
studio, in Ypsilanti, Michigan. https://petrakuppersfiction.wordpress.com/
Tea/Coffee
Hour Casual meetup: 12:30-1:15pm
Session 3, 09:15 - 10:45 am Spectacle
and Consumption
David
Adelman, “Can You Lift Your Legs?”: Visualizing Disabled Sexuality on
Netflix’s Special
Niki
Casady, “Marketing Smallness: Negotiating the Image of Smallness”
Raye Hendrix, “Deaf Spectacle: Precarious Confrontations of (De)facement in
Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic”
PUBLIC: 11:00 am– 12:15 pm
A Faux
Memoir: Sex Work/Disability/Fetish/Capital by Amber DiPietra
Amber
DiPietra is a poet, performance artist, bodyworker, and
organizer for disability and sex worker rights. Her book Waveform, with
collaborator Denise Leto, came out from Kenning Editions in 2011. Other
writings have been published in anthologies such as Poetry and Work (Palgrave)
and Beauty Is a Verb: the New Poetics of Disability (Cinco Puntos). Her
one-woman show, the “Opposite of Evolution Dance Studio” premiered at the Tampa
International Fringe Festival in 2018. She is a founding member of two
social justice collectives; the Tampa Bay Area chapter of the Sex Workers
Outreach Project (2013) and the Disability and Sexuality Access Network
(2016). Find out more about her work at thebodypoetik.com
FINAL
Tea/Coffee Hour Casual meetup: 12:30-1:15pm
Support for this event was provided by a grant from the
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Co-Hosted by New College of Florida; John and Mable
Ringling Museum/Tibbals Collection; University of Winchester
