Cripping the Norm: Disability, Power, and American Culture - Detailseite

This course reveals how disability operates as a discursive apparatus that produces, regulates, and maintains cultural understandings of normalcy, deviancy, and embodied difference. Through cultural studies and cultural history methodologies, we interrogate how systems of racialization and heteropatriarchy operate through cultural institutions from education to immigration, where assumptions about "normal" bodies, intelligence, behavior, and achievement naturalize ableist frameworks. This seminar investigates how the category of disability has been deployed through what Foucault terms "biopower" to regulate populations, with particular attention to how these constructions shaped immigration policy, educational segregation, and institutionalization in American history.

Students will develop theoretical tools to analyze how ableism operates systemically through various social, cultural, and political policies and practices, while also exploring how disability communities and activists have resisted normative violence through cultural production, community building, and radical pedagogies. The course combines theoretical texts with cultural artifacts including literature, films, and policy documents to unveil both the oppressive and liberatory potentials of disability in American culture. While centered on American cultural contexts, the course engages in crucial transnational analysis through comparative study of German disability history and contemporary disability culture in Berlin, including visiting site such as the T4 Memorial. This comparative framework allows students to understand how different educational systems have historically approached disability, and how current inclusive education movements operate across national contexts.