Education Commons^™

On Being Transminded: Disabling Achievement, Enabling Exchange, Anne Dalke, Clare Mullaney

Literatures in English Faculty Research and Scholarship

We write collaboratively, as a recent graduate and long-time faculty member of a small women’s liberal arts college, about the mental health costs of adhering to a feminist narrative of achievement that insists upon independence and resiliency. As we explore the destabilizing potential of an alternative feminist project, one that invites different temporalities in which dis/ability emerges and may be addressed, we work with disability less as an identity than as a generative methodology, a form of relation and exchange. Mapping our own college as a specific, local site for the disabling tradition of “challenging women,” we move to larger …