The 2023 Presidential theme notes, “Literary and cultural theory identify transformative methods of counteranalysis.”Keeping the “counteranalysis,” “powers of interpretation” and “radical rewriting” in sight, this panel will address the following question: How does disability emerge in or relate to methodologies, care practices, and survival strategies in South Asia and South Asian diasporic literature in response to historical processes of casteism, patriarchy, ageism? Cristina Visperas states there are "limits of seeing and naming disability in subjects who have been at the margins of its theorizations and field-building” (2019). Thus, the work of this panel is to tell stories of the people from the margins. As a result, we see theorization about the intersectionality of gender, age, caste, masculinity, and disability at home and work. Anita Ghai argues, "In a culture that valorizes perfection, all deviations from the perfect body signify abnormality, defect and distortion. Conveying feelings of inability and uselessness, disability epitomizes 'failure', and gets conceived of as a personal tragedy" (2002). While mentioning some of the existing scholarships on disability studies, this panel creates some new dialogues and discussions, partly through the mention of the health humanities, and contributes to critical disability studies.

Debashrita Dey and Priyanka Tripathi, through their discussion of Anuradha Sarma Pujari’s Jalsobi- In the Shadow of Light (2018) and Anuradha Roy’s Sleeping on Jupiter (2015) intend to locate how identity gets lost and subjectivity is altered in the women characters suffering from Alzheimer's disease. Drawing on Merleau- Ponty’s theoretical notion of "body-subject," they try to decode the idea of 'personhood' that remains sedimented in the habits of the body despite the experience of disablement. The 'disabling' socio-cultural structures of society also intercept the aged beings inflicted with cognitive impairments from expressing their subjectivities and endows them with a sense of burden-hood. The elderly women in this context encounter a 'double loss' as they are silenced on sexageist and disabled parameters which strengthens the narrative of incapacitation and deprive the demented being of selfhood.

Bassam Sidiki argues that while the social sciences have been engaging with caste for some time, analysis of the relationship between caste and health in the burgeoning fields of health humanities and disability studies has remained almost nonexistent. He examines Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance (1995) and Mohammed Hanif’s Our Lady of Alice Bhatti (2011), showing how each of these texts deploys the metaphor of “contamination” to depict caste prejudice while also showing, in turn, how caste discrimination suffered by characters in these novels leads to their disabilities. It is imperative that health humanists and scholars of disability, especially those working in a global frame, pay attention to literary and cultural representations of caste. This paper also addresses this lacuna by bringing disability and "crip theory" (McRruer 2006), often centered in the Global North, in conversation with postcolonial literary studies of South Asia. Scholars such as Clare Barker (2011) and Anita Ghai (2015) have made significant contributions to postcolonial or decolonial disability studies, but how can the consideration of caste, in addition to race and gender, further illuminate how disability is lived and represented in the unique South Asian context?

Pujarinee Mitra focuses on the segment titled “Oil of Vitriol” from Mira Nair’s Ladies’ Coupe (2001). This segment pivots on the complex relationship between disability, care, and masculinity. At the same time, disability has been exhaustively featured in discourses on masculinity and queerness because disability is seen as being dependent on someone else's ability, of being helpless, which challenges certain notions of masculine prowess normalized in society. Mitra is interested in presenting the concept of ‘disabling’ as it features in Nair’s story. What kind of gender politics are at play when care acts like cooking and feeding are utilized to disable a patriarchal family structure instead of upholding it? What kind of challenges does such a different way of disabling pose to masculinities in the domestic space?

The topic is extremely timely, and the call for papers generated a good deal of interest, so we included four panelists and three excellent papers. The panelists will maintain time strictly so that there is a 15-minute discussion period at the end of the session.

This panel is a collaboration between Disability Studies and the South Asia and South Asian Diaspora Forum. The abstracts have been vetted with the help of Dr. Maren Linett, Professor of English and Director of Critical Disability Studies at Purdue University and a member of the Disability Studies forum.