At the Wesleyan Student Assembly’s (WSA) April 17 meeting, several WSA members challenged the placement of Professor Claire Potter’s Critical Queer Studies Colloquium under the new Disability Studies course cluster. Their concerns and the manner in which they were expressed, however, have been met with charges of implicit homophobia and ableism.
Approved by the Educational Policy Committee (EPC) earlier this month, the Disability Studies course cluster currently includes 11 courses for next year, including Potter’s AMST 201 Junior Colloquium: Critical Queer Studies. According to the course’s description on WesMaps, the course will provide students with a theoretical understanding of Queer studies and explore its centrality to fields such as Disability Studies.
WSA representative Syed Ali ’13 said that several representatives were concerned that the inclusion of Professor Potter’s course might confuse and offend students, both current and prospective, who may not understand the connection between Disability Studies and Queer Studies. Several critics, according to Ali, wished for the name of the cluster to be changed.
However, members of Wesleyan Students for Disability Rights (WSDR) were bothered by what they saw as a lack of knowledge of the issue on the part of the WSA.
“The conversations and comments were very ableist and showed a real lack of prior understanding and thought to issues of disability,” WSDR member Ariel Schwartz ’12 said. “Queer Studies is not included because WSDR students or professors have any notion that identifying as queer is a disability.”
Potter said that she had been unaware of the events of the meeting until receiving an email from WSA President Micah Feiring ’11, which included several anonymous comments from representatives. Potter said that she was troubled by the comments of the WSA members, as well as by their anonymity.
“It’s really homophobic and ableist,” she said. “These critics should have raised these questions privately with the faculty and should educate themselves better about the field because, in reality, Queer Studies and Disability Studies, as they are practiced as academic fields, speak to each other constantly.”
Potter added that she was troubled not by students’ decision to challenge faculty about a curricular choice, but by the way students undermined the work of WSDR. Schwartz, along with fellow WSDR member Allegra Stout ’12, lobbied for the cluster and collaborated in creating it, as well as helped the faculty meet the requirements set by the EPC.
“What I find most troubling about this is students who have not taken the trouble to educate themselves are challenging the authority of other students who have taken the trouble to educate themselves and do this work,” Potter said. “This course is essential to understanding Disability Studies.”
WSA Academic Affairs Chair Arya Alizadeh ’13, agreed that the critics should have taken the time to better understand the issue before raising it.
“If you at look at something and are, upon first glance, offended by it, you’re not necessarily doing the community any good if you haven’t checked it out to see what it is,” Alizadeh said. “I think that the faculty’s view was that the students who are going to be offended by this really don’t know what they’re saying when they’re offended, and they should really look into what Disability Studies is.”
As defined by the official cluster description approved by the EPC, Disability Studies explores the way people are categorized as able-bodied or disabled and suggests that disabilities are created by societal factors rather than bodily difference.
According to Schwartz, this means that, for example, a student in a wheelchair is rendered disabled not by their physical impairment, but by societal factors and norms such as the lack of wheelchair ramps in many public buildings.
WSA President-elect Zachary Malter ’13 said that the concerns of the Assembly members were not meant to express opposition to the cluster, but to promote understanding.
“It was just students feeling like this may be something that makes some students uncomfortable, so we just wanted to bring that to people’s attention and have a discussion about that,” Malter said.
According to the cluster’s faculty advisor Margot Weiss, many institutions offer academic programs in the field of Disability Studies. Syracuse University, for example, has been teaching Disability Studies since the early 1970s and currently offers degrees, both graduate and undergraduate, in the discipline.
Potter said that she does not believe that the name of the cluster should be changed.
“Disability Studies is a field and the field has its parameters outside of Wesleyan,” she said. “You can’t take a field and move it inside Wesleyan and change the parameters and change the definition and still say that’s what you’re doing.”
Potter also emphasized that Queer Studies goes beyond simply examining the choice to identify as sexually queer.
“Queer Studies is not primarily about gay, lesbian, transgendered, or bisexual people,” she said. “It’s not about identity politics. It’s about thinking about what constitutes the normal and [challenging] that. That is the central theme of Disability Studies.”
Ali said that it might be beneficial to include a description on WesMaps to make the connection between the two fields clear.
Potter objected to this suggestion and said that there is no need to single out Disability Studies as it pertains to Queer Studies.
“I don’t see students asking for a description of what History or Economics is,” she said. “I think that students really need to ask themselves how is it that they locked onto Disability Studies and Queer Studies as an appropriate object for their critique.”
Alizadeh said, however that this is something that the EPC, on which he sits, is considering for all clusters.
Malter said that he was in favor of any resolution that would promote a greater understanding of the issues.
“The more opportunities to raise understanding and consciousness about this, the better,” he said. “There may be an especially high level of ignorance about these fields and I am in favor of anything that would allow students to better understand these nuanced issues.”
According to both Alizadeh and Schwartz, the debate that the meeting sparked illustrates the need for a Disability Studies cluster.
“One of the things that arose from this is that people don’t know enough about Disability Studies,” Alizadeh said. “On one hand, it is the burden of these student activists to educate the community, but the student representatives of WSDR made a very valid point—they host a number of different forums every semester and very few students come to them.”
Potter said that she would invite students to continue the debate in the classroom.
“I would like to see the students who are critics of these courses actually take them,” she said. “If you want to come to the classroom, do the readings and argue, that would be great too.”
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