Tim Dalton's presentation, "The Third Time I Taught Myself to Walk," will examine the disability rhetorics of developmental milestones—in this case, “learning to walk,” as narrated in “Baby Race,” an episode of the Australian cartoon Bluey. Not learned so much as self-taught, and almost always performed with an audience in mind, “Baby Race” teases out three aspects of “complex embodiment” (Siebers) that disabled people bring to forward motion: its narrative potential, the limits and potentials of individual action within an ableist system, and the way in which forward motion is an autodidactic kinesthetic curriculum. For sick and disabled people in particular, he will argue, forward motion—especially forward motion that diverges from the norm—is performed for multiple audiences with a range of investments, assumptions, and expectations.

Moving further into the tangle of medical investments in the "normal" body, Alessandra Occhiolini’s presentation, “A Nervous System: The Ethics of Teaching Bodies,” will discuss two bodies that have been used by research institutions for display and didactic classroom use. Those bodies are the “Complete Dissection of a Human Cerebrospinal Nervous System (Known as “Harriet”)” – the isolated nervous system of Harriet Cole, once displayed at, and still held by, Drexel University, and the archived body of Susanna Potter, a disability rights advocate who successfully campaigned to be part of the Visible Human Project. Contrasting the two, Occhiolini will discuss how consenting bodies were for many years rarely “teaching” bodies. Susanna Potter is unusual in her determination to get her body “on the record,” and this strong consent and determination come out of a stand against a medical establishment who refuses to examine bodies like hers as they are not normal. In reading these histories, and her own experience as a medical body, Occhiolini proposes that the normal body emerges from a series of embodied traumas within the medical archives.

Finally, Sylvia Korman’s presentation “Publishers and Pharmaceuticals: Hacking the Body and the Archive in Confessions of the Fox,” will explore alternatives to the entangled institutions of the medical and the academic, as portrayed in Jordy Rosenberg’s novel, Confessions of the Fox. Rosenberg’s metafictive novel pits DIY surgical and archival work against the ideological apparatuses of Big Pharma and Big Academia, combined under the satirical aegis of the sinister P-Quad Publishers and Pharmaceuticals. The publishing and pharmaceuticals industries seek to curtail the joys of autonomous self representation and alteration. This paper seeks to take up Confessions’ proposed alternative: the potential for radical pleasure, when trans, disabled, and racialized groups take up their own scalpels and their own pens.

Each paper will take 15-18 minutes, as is standard for a panel with three presentations. The rest of the time will be used to facilitate audience discussion. Alessandra as presider will initiate the Q & A.

While autotheory is hardly new to queer and disability studies, or even queer disability studies (Eli Clare’s work in particular comes to mind), we do not pose autotheory as a solution to the history of a medical “body archive.” Paul Preciado’s “Can The Monster Speak,” serves as an inspiration as to how we might productively grapple with the limitations of autotheory as a genre demand in these fields of study, and in addressing a history of norming and violations from a medical establishment. Taking Sara Ahmed’s imperative to leave “queer graffiti” on the walls of academic institutions, we hope to scrawl new meanings over the imposed order of how the medical system “reads” the queer disabled body.