This panel shows how a formalist approach to disability enables this more capacious understanding of disability as a category. To do so, panelists bring together disability studies and a recent turn in literary criticism towards a “new formalist” method – as conceptualized in Caroline Levine’s Forms (2015) – in order to grasp both the possibilities and constraints that a variety of forms afford. Moving beyond the anti-formalist tendency to valorize the “stumbling” or “short-circuiting” of form in response to disability – in David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder ‘s Narrative Prosthesis (2000) and Ato Quayson’s Aesthetic Nervousness (2007), respectively – offers disability studies a method for explaining how forms (both aesthetic and social) act in the world, traumatizing us at times and affording caring at others. This panel, then, contributes to the theme of “Working Conditions” as it shows how literary forms shape and are shaped by material conditions.

Danielle K Nelson will begin this panel by critiquing the tendency towards formlessness. Danielle takes up the sexist, ableist assumptions that drive the reader’s desire for closeness with the subject of biography. She argues that biography’s domineering presence in critical engagement with Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf – writers whose archives are punctuated by trauma, depression, illness, and suicide – blurs together art and life, artist with icon. Such a blurring of the aesthetic and social leads, for Danielle, to an erasure of disabled subjectivity.

Christina Fogarasi will then provide a methodological starting point by offering a critique of how trauma has been formalized. Christina identifies – in Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) – the formal devices of the “trauma aesthetic:'' analepsis, repetition, and narrative fragmentation. She argues that these formal features shut down the complexity of disabled subjectivity by repeatedly returning us to an originary traumatic event without offering a complete rendition. Christina illuminates how such forms offer a temporality – a mythic origin – that undermines conceptions of disability’s banality, chronicity, and omnipresence.

Ajitpaul Mangat will develop this methodology by analyzing the competing affordances that the forms of whole and network offer to those in need of care. Ajitpaul shows how – in Anne Boyer’s The Undying (2019) – the network form of friendship affords “inventive forms” of care to those (including single mothers like Boyer) constrained by the “enclosure of family” from legally receiving care. He emphasizes – through a comparison with Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals (1980) – how these forms transform over time: the bounded whole of the hospital room - now unavailable to women like Boyer who receive “drive-by mastectomies” - once afforded Lorde the ability to foster her network of woman love.

Sarah Orsak will conclude this panel by theorizing care as a method that disability scholars might take up in their analysis. Sarah formulates this method by reading Robin Coste Lewis’ epic poem, “Voyage of the Sable Venus” (2015), through crip of color and Black feminist theorizations of care. She reads the form of the poem as refusing to spectacularize the bodies of injured Black women. This poem models, for Sarah, how disability scholars might also employ techniques of care in their scholarship on racism and disability, accounting for disablement without reproducing such violence.

Ultimately, this panel – which moves from trauma to care, critique to illustration – shows how attending to form opens up attention to power. For instance, Ajitpaul will consider how the deteriorating working conditions of care workers are leading those who provide care to form networks with those who receive care. The goal of this panel is thus not just to articulate a method for reading with care, but also to consider how conditions constrain and enable the work of our forms. The exploratory nature of our topic will promote discussion – with presider, Tammy Berberi, ensuring that at least fifteen minutes remain – among the attendees who will be encouraged to consider further applications of this method.