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Workshop: Cynthia Barounis (WUSTL) & Julie Elman (Mizzou)

In this seminar, we will be discussion two works-in-progress: Cynthia Barounis's "The Biopolitics of Camp" and Julie Elman's "The Disability Politics of Zootopia: Mobility, Choice Feminism and the Rehabilitation of the Police." Coffee and pastries will be served. To confirm attendance and receive a copy of the essays, please contact mmicir@wustl.edu. 

Cynthia Barounis is a lecturer in the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis where she teaches courses in queer theory, masculinities, and feminist disability studies. Her book, Vulnerable Constitutions: Queerness, Disability, and the Remaking of American Manhood, is forthcoming from Temple University Press.  In it, she explores the influence of sexual science on twentieth century American literary culture. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in GLQWomen's Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Visual Culture, the Journal of Modern Literature, and others. Her current book project uses crip theory and biopolitics to revisit the camp aesthetic. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Illinois at Chicago. 

Julie Passanante Elman received her Ph.D. in American Studies from the George Washington University in 2009. She is currently Assistant Professor of Women's & Gender Studies at the University of Missouri. She previously served as Lecturer of Television Studies/Media Theory at University College Dublin (Republic of Ireland) and Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow of Gender and Sexuality Studies in New York University's Department of Social & Cultural Analysis. Elman’s research focuses broadly on disability studies; feminist and queer theory; science studies; and U.S. media and cultural history. Her monograph, Chronic Youth: Disability, Sexuality, and US Media Cultures of Rehabilitation (Social & Cultural Analysis Series, NYUP, 2014) shows how the representational figure of the teenager became a cultural touchstone for shifting notions of able-bodiedness, heteronormativity, and neoliberalism in the post-sexual liberation era. By analyzing how adolescence increasingly became represented as a disability, the book reveals how the teenager became a lynchpin for a US culture of perpetual rehabilitation and governmentality. She is currently working on a second monograph, Wearable You: Technology, Our Bodies, Ourselves, a cultural history of wearable technology that examines how disability, race, class, gender, and sexuality shape cultural ideas about the relationship among technology, health, and good citizenship.