Not journal but tactic. The Red Wheelchair excavates disability culture from its embedded habitus in the productions of dominant culture: using enabled texts, a disability-inflected guerilla authorship, and original prose and poetry, TRW interrupts and intervenes. A hybrid of celebration and protest, TRW foregrounds disability culture and aesthetics where it has always already been: everywhere.

The Proper Other & Cyborgnationalism

Contemporary culture constructs the prosthetic as fetish object, promotes the cyborg as a technique of interpellation. Under cyborgnationalism, the person with a disability becomes an advance scout, normalizing the terrain of bodily supplementarity in order for dominant culture to occupy it. This section contains an essay-via-quotations, as well as an original personal essay that recounts an experience in the prostheticist's office.

This Canon Is a Weapon

Poems proceed from cultural productions that preceded them. In the spirit of Keith Negus’s concept of cultural production as composting, poems in This Canon Is a Weapon hail from canonical anthologies of (mostly) American poems and fiction, but each has been enabled by recombinant editing, a literary and cultural find-and-replace meant not to erase the past productions but to problematize new questions by re-encoding existing systems with new variables, the unstable signs of bodily abjection and alterity. This Canon Is a Weapon relies on citationality and utopian plagiarism as poetic devices that perform homage to the preceding works and gesture toward future ones.

Speak, Cripple

The poems in Speak, Cripple represent a range of original poems meant to foreground disability without reverting to tropes of pathos or triumph, to present a(n inter) subjectivity mediated by physical difference and the manners in which that subjectivity inflects a range of belief, activities, and interactions.

A Note on Method, Art & Design

This project deploys many enabled texts, reconfigurations of previous texts with an overtly anti-ableist language and sensibility. Some keywords have been replaced; some syntax has been dismodernized. The substrate-texts have been selected for their intellectual rigor, their importance to theoretical knowledge about agency, subjectivity, the body, and other topics importance to the project.

Granting that people with disabilities tend to be unhomed by dominant culture, iconography and design for the project appropriates some elements from the Zapatistas, who hailed people with disabilities in the 6th Declaration of the Selva Laconda, as a sign of solidarity in the grand intergalactic encuentro:

We are inviting all indigenous, workers, campesinos, teachers, students, housewives, neighbors, small businesspersons, small shop owners, micro-businesspersons, pensioners, handicapped persons, religious men and women, scientists, artists, intellectuals, young persons, women, old persons, homosexuals and lesbians, boys and girls - to participate, whether individually or collectively, directly with the zapatistas in this NATIONAL CAMPAIGN for building another way of doing politics, for a program of national struggle of the left, and for a new Constitution.