Please join us for this lecture exploring queer sexuality and blind epistemology in Italian literature.
University of Washington Disability Studies Program presents
Speaker: Kate Noson
Title: “Other limits and other borders”: The Queer Country of the Blind in Gabriele Pedullà’s “Miranda”
Date: Thursday, October 22, 2015, 5:00pm
Location: Odegaard Library 220, University of Washington
Access information:
The room is wheelchair accessible. Please do not wear any scents. It has been confirmed that ASL interpretation and CART captioning will be provided. Contact Joanne with any questions (jwoiak@uw.edu).
To request another disability accommodation, contact the Disability Services Office at: 206.543.6450 (voice), 206.543.6452 (TTY), 206.685.7264 (fax), or email dso@uw.edu.
Directions:
Address: 4060 George Washington Lane Northeast, Seattle, WA 98195
Campus map: http://www.washington.edu/maps/#!/OUG
Abstract & bio:
In this lecture, Noson theorizes literary “transability” as an appropriation of disabled modes of being and knowing, to read Gabriele Pedullà’s story “Miranda” as an expression of anxiety regarding both queer sexuality and blind epistemology.
Kate Noson is Lecturer of Italian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where her fields of research are disability studies, modern Italian literature, and gender and sexuality studies.
Full description: At the intersection between disability theory, Italian literature, and gender and sexuality studies, in this talk, I theorize a literary form of “transability,” by which nondisabled characters temporarily appropriate a given impairment as a means to enlightenment, vis-à-vis the experience of “disabled” ways of being and knowing. The lecture focuses on Gabriele Pedullà’s short story, “Miranda” (2009), as one instance of this phenomenon, where Miranda’s blindness is portrayed as acting to cancel binary divisions, allowing a traversal between categories (male/female, animal/human, heterosexual/queer). The sighted Stefi understands Miranda’s “language” as one that necessitates corporeal contact, and thus, blindfolded, she simulates Miranda’s blindness, giving her access to a new mode of knowing that is grounded in the tactile as opposed to the visual. Inseparable from this epistemological shift is a sexual awakening – a relation that stems from a conflation of various types of “reading” – both literary and sexual. Embedded within Pedullà’s story is an anxiety about border crossings, which stand in for the boundaries between disabled and nondisabled, heterosexual and queer. The crisis of identity that ensues following Stefi’s experiment leads her to question the reality of her own experience, as well as the possibility of a blind or disabled mode of knowing.