SE02 E05: Bonus episode: Misfits with Corinne Lajoie
S02E05: Bonus Episode: Misfits with Corinne Lajoie
[theme music fades in]
Anna 0:20
there's the… I was leaving the big but for you, but I can take…
Kristin 0:24
… leave the but and go right to Corinne… But!…
[theme music continues]
Corinne 0:30
Welcome to thinking bodies, a feminist philosophy podcast.
Anna 0:35
Western philosophers have separated the mind and body, and here on thinking bodies, we are pulling on the threads that have always held them together. To do this, we crowdsource voice clips to discuss works in feminist philosophy that deserve more attention. Our podcast collages with these clips as a feminist DIT experiment.
Kristin 0:52
That's right. This is a Do It Together podcast, sharing the sounds of feminist philosophy.
[theme music plays continues]
Contributors 1:00
Joel Michael Reynolds
Hi, I'm Joel Michael Reynolds.
Rhea Ienni
Hello, my name is Rhea Ienni. I go by Rhea, and my pronouns are she, her.
Emily R. Douglas
My name is Emily R. Douglas.
[theme music continues]
Kristin 1:12
[excited] Corinne is back!
Anna 1:14
I'm so glad.
Kristin 1:15
Yes!
Corinne 1:16
[warmly] Hi, everyone. I'm so happy to be back.
Kristin 1:21
Corinne, our listeners know you. They know you specialize in philosophy of trust from our Season 1 episode on “Trust and Antitrust.” But you also work in ethics, feminist philosophy, and the philosophy of disability.
Corinne 1:34
That's right. Feminist philosophy of disability is kind of the second research thread that's been part of my work for some time. And maybe just another little update. So since that last episode, I'm just a few days away from starting a new postdoc. So I'll be a postdoctoral researcher with the School of Physical and Occupational Therapy at McGill University, working on a really cool applied ethics project. And I also have a joint appointment as a postdoctoral researcher with the Canada Research Chair on Epistemic Injustice, an agency housed in the Philosophy Department at Université du Québec à Montréal.
Anna 2:15
Amazing. That's all wonderful. And we love that episode on trust and antitrust so much. So we're so excited about this one.
[theme music fades out]
Kristin 2:24
Yes, another really important article.
Corinne 2:26
Yeah, I'm really excited about today's article. So I wanted to bring to the podcast a 2011 article by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson titled, “Misfits, A Feminist Materialist Disability Concept.”
Kristin 2:42
“Misfits,” so good! Anna and I, we're definitely both familiar with it.
Anna 2:48
And there are more articles in feminist philosophy than we could ever hope to cover. And so I'm so happy that we get to read “Misfits” together with you, Corinne. This is amazing.
Kristin 2:59
Yes. And this makes me think about our recent experience. Like, Anna and I went to a conference. We taped a live episode there, so stay tuned for a live recording…
Anna
Mm-hmm!!
Kristin
… But we get asked sometimes how we choose articles. And it feels like a good topic for the three of us, since the three of us had a chat about this article before, thinking about, you know, thinking about it as a selection.
Anna 3:27
And there's a lot of feminist philosophy of disability. This article is one of many amazing, excellent choices. And so, yeah, it's kind of nice to talk about how we came to this choice. How did you come to this choice, Corinne?
Corinne 3:40
Well, we've been talking about this a little bit in preparation for the episode. And I was saying that “Misfits,” Rosemarie Garland-Thomson's “Misfits,” has been kind of living inside of me for some time. I mean, I remember first reading this a really long time ago when I wasn't familiar. I wasn't very familiar with feminist philosophy. And I was certainly not familiar at all with philosophy about disability and philosophy of disability. And so this is one of Rosemarie Garland-Thomson's many great articles and a really important one, I think, for the field. But as you were saying, I mean, there's so many, there's so much great work coming out, especially in the last maybe 10, 15 years at kind of the intersection of feminist philosophy and philosophy of disability. And there's new work that's coming out now that is also really important and interesting, including work by some of our contributors for today.
Anna 4:33
Yes! yep.
Kristin 4:35
Yes, which is so cool. So I was going to just sort of float with you to a kind of theory about how sort of these articles find their way on the.
Anna 4:46
[seriously] Okay, theory. Let's do it.
[Corinne and Anna laugh]
Kristin 4:49
Okay. Okay. Maybe not a theory theory, maybe an explanation. Maybe let's… let's call it the “seeds of a theory.”
Anna 4:55
Yes.
Kristin 4:55
Okay. So the process is part happenstance.
Corinne 4:59
Hmmm.
Kristin 5:00
You know, who can we get to contribute? Who is willing to guest produce? Who has the time? Who's available? You know, and then what they suggest, right? And that they want to read together with us.
Anna 5:12
Yeah. And there are just sometimes just factors that kind of come together that we can't anticipate.
Kristin 5:18
Yeah. But that's, that's not just it, right? There's webs of recommendation happening in conversation. So we were just at this conference and, you know, I'm sort of like floating things to see what people, what people are interested in to see, you know, "Oh, we might do an episode on this. What do you think?" You know?
Anna 5:36
[recalling the conference] It's like, yeah, you… you were testing the waters. I… I could… I could, hear you testing the waters.
Kristin 5:45
… and, and I'm, and I'm, and I'm watching to see how people react and go, "Oh, I love that one." Or, "Oh, I remember that one." You know? So, so here comes my theory.
Anna 5:54
[expectantly] Okay… here it is…!
Kristin 5:55
The podcast is like a mixtape,
Anna 5:58
Oh! yeah!
Kristin 5:58
right?
Anna 5:59
Yeah.
Kristin 6:00
It's like, I remember making this mixtapes, right? And you have an imagined person that it's for and you want them to go through a kind of journey. So it's like a curated variety. It's based on other recommends, right? And sometimes things you're more familiar with, sometimes things you're less familiar with. There's like varying levels of connection, but like something emerges, like an experience emerges through that variety.
Anna 6:24
So like, I'm just thinking a mixtape… [thinking] a mixtape generally isn't greatest hits. Like it's…
Kristin 6:31
no.
Anna 6:32
… it's not a soundtrack. It's kind of a vibe and an experience. And also, we like, I often made mixtapes for, like, people I really liked and loved and cared about and wanted to maybe connect with.
Kristin 6:51
Hmm. [thinking]
Anna 6:51
So like, I'm just thinking about, yeah, that's a really nice way to put it. And the other thing is that it's not authoritative, right? It's completely DIY. D.I.T., with the music you’re using, I guess.
[Kristin and Corinne laugh]
Kristin 6:58
Yes.
Kristin 7:04
Yeah, it's not random. Well, I mean, some of it could be, but like, we don't know what people are going to say. So the clips are kind of right. But we have, you know, one plan for next season. I, you know, I've not read, uh, like even one of the articles for next season, I haven't read it at all, but everyone at the conference was telling me, this is a must read, this is a must read. So I'm like, “okay! I will!”, you know, if someone is telling you this is a great song, you're gonna go listen to it, right?!
Anna 7:32
I really like this theory, or this seed of a theory! Well, and like, even the two pieces that you brought, Corinne, um, make sense together, thinking about your work in feminist philosophy, disability and institutional trust. But the pieces are also, like, really different. But there's a kind of through line, but there's also variety, which is really cool. And I think in keeping with Kristin's theory or seed of a theory.
Kristin 7:57
Yessss!!! My theory.
[Anna & Kristin laugh]
Corinne 8:01
Absolutely. And I think it's interesting, the kinds of collections, like the things you can bring together on a mixtape. So I'm thinking of this article, which is really considered it's kind of a cornerstone for feminist philosophy of disability, but it's also travelled beyond philosophy. And it's influenced work in disability studies and feminist and queer theory and critical design studies and literary studies. Um, so I think that's also really interesting is like where, where the songs on the mixtape can take you, right? Because I think if people enjoy today's episode and enjoy, um, the misfit article, then there's so much more work to discover even outside of philosophy.
Kristin 8:40
Totally. Like the, I like to think of the theories, then they're like traveling, like taking, you know, like a mixtape on a road, they're going and they're finding…
Anna 8:48
Oh, yeah. [chuckles] Okay! The metaphor is expanding!
Kristin 8:53
Well… where are you listening to your mixtape?!
Anna 8:55
Yeah, no, that's right. Yeah, that's exactly right.
[all laugh]
Corinne 8:57
Continuing with the mixtape metaphor…I think that it's interesting because Garland-Thomson in this piece is remixing a bit with a word that's kind of already in the vernacular. So the concept that's at the heart of the paper is the concept of misfit, which she transforms. In this piece, she transforms it into a critical concept, partly because of how the word itself is interesting. So misfit functions both as a noun, right? It can be used to designate an outcast, a person who's unsuited or unsuitable. Um, but misfit is also a verb, right? It means to fit badly or to fail to fit.
Anna 9:43
Yeah. So yeah, so misfit is something that you are or could be, and also something that happens to or involves you in some way.
Corinne 9:53
Precisely. So misfit evokes a kind of identity, and I think the concept of identity is kind of woven through the piece, as we'll see, but it's not a fixed identity, right? It's something that's dynamic because of this kind of action verb component.
Anna 10:07
Yeah.
Kristin 10:11
Hmm. Yeah. I wanted to start us off with a bit of a longer quotation, but I think this is going to set this, set the scene really well: “Fitting and misfitting denote an encounter in which two things come together in either harmony or disjunction. When the shape and substance of these two things correspond in their union, they fit. A misfit, conversely, describes an incongruent relationship between two things, a square peg and a round hole. The problem with a misfit, then, inheres not in either of the two things, but rather in their juxtaposition, the awkward attempt to fit them together. When the spatial and temporal context shifts, so does the fit, and with it, meanings and consequences.” Unquote.
Anna 11:05
Yeah, that's so cool. So you become misfit through misfitting, or maybe like through the experience or the act of failing to fit in a particular space at a particular time. Someth like that. So interesting.
[music fades in]
Kristin 11:24
Who are misfits? What kinds of environments create misfitting?
Anna 11:31
Where and when do you fit in or not? What kinds of emotions or costs accompany how or when you fit or don't?
Corinne 11:43
Can misfitting be re-evaluated? What kinds of creative engagements or learning experiences can misfitting give rise to? And how is the concept of misfit a feminist concept?
Anna 12:02
Maybe even let's back up.
Kristin 12:04
Yeah! I really like this last question. Because I think disability has been important in different embodiments, tracking oppression, gender, race, and otherwise. But it's not always sort of really straightforward what the relationship is between sort of philosophy and disability or feminist philosophy and disability.
Anna 12:27
And, I mean, I think in philosophy, one of the things that many people have noticed over a long time, is that philosophers have ignored bodies in general and as such have disabled bodies. But as a result, have often, sort of, excluded disabled people. And that’s sort of odd when we think about it, except that disability isn't often included as part of sort of more broad-based cultural thinking in Western or Euro-American contexts. That's also been the case in feminist philosophy. And so, the assumption of a sort of body is part of philosophical thinking. The assumption of normative minds in certain interesting ways are part of philosophical thinking. And that extends to feminist philosophy in interesting ways.
Kristin 13:20
Well, I was thinking too about, you know, feminist philosophy itself, critiquing sort of a dominant understanding of what a good body is. If that central concept has to do with that body being male, we're also then not thinking about how those bodies are considered to be able bodies, right? A normative gender assumes ability…
Anna 13:44
Yes. Right. Yep.
Kristin 13:44
… to achieve that in a certain way.
Anna 13:47
Yep. And we can think about, I mean, if we just think about sort of what counts as, um, masculine, but also what counts as human and our sort of normative ways of thinking about that. This involves, um, able-bodiedness and a certain kind of able-mindedness. And I think one of the interesting things that I always find about feminist philosophy – this is, um, sort of how, uh, how I, uh, think about feminist philosophy – is that it's not really about, um, women so much as, um, thinking about women or thinking about people who are normally excluded gives us a method or a way coming at, questions about, um, the things that we normally encounter in philosophy. Um, and so we can think about, feminist philosophers as starting with sort of, um, women and femme folks as misfitting, the general overall humanness, but of course that, that idea of misfitting can expand outwards in all sorts of ways that it absolutely needs to do.
Corinne 14:54
I love this connection with, uh, with feminist philosophy. And as you were saying this, where I thought you were headed was also, um, I love this, this idea of, of method, um, because one way that I sometimes think about feminist philosophy is how do the people who feel like they don't fit in this field think about the field they're in…
Anna 15:14
Just so. Yep.
Corinne 15:14
… and this includes, and this includes certainly, uh, women and femme-identified people, but it also includes, you know, uh, non-white people and queer people. And so how does being a misfit, um, kind of, kind of allow you to see and to experience and to do philosophy differently, [Anna agreeing] um, because of the body you're in, but not because of the specificity of that body itself, right? But rather because of this kind of misfit, right? Um, but rather because of this kind of misfit that you experience in a particular environment, which is, you know, the kind of white male-dominated field of academic philosophy.
Anna 15:59
Exactly. Exactly.
Kristin 16:00
Yeah, and I think it's important to specifically identify for philosophers how, a lot of work about autonomy, agency, you know, the faculties, intelligence – all these ways that we've distinctly marked what it is to be human as being a being of philosophy, being a being who contemplates – is itself a way of often siphoning off what a good way of thinking is, right? Which itself is kind of saying, uh, what a good mind is or what the right kind of mind is like, what that mind, how that mind thinks. So, you know, philosophy is really implicated in a lot of, uh, you know, exclusions around disability and ableist sort of bodily hierarchies that, you know, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson coming into this conversation is really important.
Anna 16:57
Yep.
Kristin 16:58
Yeah, so maybe what we should do is, you know, we've all experienced moments of not fitting in. [Anna emoting and encouraging throughout] I had an example, just even from the conference that we were just at, um, which is just, like, overhead lights, especially fluorescent lights, just do not work for my work for my body. Like, sometimes, yes, but usually, no, you know, it's everywhere, um, and I just think about how that affects people in, in ways that aren't seen, but that are really impacting the body. So, like, no one is going to see my head. Right? No one is going to see the way that, like, I'm starting to, like, fade out, and, uh, you know, closing my eyes isn't helping, you know, all these things. And so, you know, it's kind of, it's, it's impacting everyone, but who's the body that we've put these lights in for is someone who it's not affecting?
Anna 17:53
That's right. Yeah. And there, that's a nice example because the space, um, the physical space, is the issue for the body. But, of course, the space, the physical space, is made according to certain kinds of social assumptions [Corinne and Kristin agree] and kept in place for certain kinds of social reasons. But one of the things we can see there is, like, light can change, we, we can do that, and, uh, changing your sensitivity and, frankly, lots of people's sensitivity, to things like overhead, fluorescent lighting, that's, like, that's not as easy. And yet, right, your, your body is the one that bears the brunt of that, the misfit.
Corinne 18:34
But, in fact, I mean, what's interesting is that in that moment, your experience of misfitting is kind of not noticeable to outsiders, as you're describing. But, in fact, maybe the overhead lights aren't working for a lot of people in that room, right? And everybody's kind of feeling the weight of the misfit. And if we just shifted to some really good mood lighting for academic conferences, then suddenly everybody would be feeling much, um, much better. [Kristin and Anna respond] So, I think it's interesting, this element of, like, what experiences of misfitting become apparent and how might some forms of, like, misfit recognition happen, right?
Kristin 19:10
Yeah, and I was thinking, too, like, uh, conferences are, are really trying, a lot of them are really trying to find ways to become more accessible. And one of the things they're doing is, is a quiet room. And I'm, I will in a dark room.
But, but, but of course, again, this, there's no universally sort of accessible way to make room, right? I think one of the interesting things about misfitting is it brings forward this idea of disability, not in a generic way, right? There is no general disabled body, no homogenous disabled body, right? Misfitting brings up this idea of the dynamic encounter. You know, it's an encountering, in a space.
[music plays softly]
Anna 19:58
So, yeah, and I mean, it might not be as easy as turning off the lights. We might need to, right, um, work with a variety of, um, people's needs and that, that can be really interesting work.
Joel Michael Reynolds 20:10
All across the world today, and all across history, the dominant understanding of disability is that it's some fact or feature of an individual's body or mind. What is it to be disabled? It means something is wrong, or at a very minimum, different, with an individual bodymind. One of the most profound, deepest, and in some senses, simplest insights from disability studies is that that view is simply indefensible. Disability is not a fact or feature of some individual's body or mind. It's a relationship between individual bodies, and also groups of bodies and minds, a relationship between those bodies and minds and an environment, a context, a set and setting. One of the things that is so important about Rosemarie Garland-Thomson's essay, “Misfits: A Feminist Materialist Disability Concept,” is the way that she takes the 50-plus years of research across disability studies, and also the research and work done by disability activists dating back even farther, and articulates it in a way that crystallizes that insight, and crystallizes it so palpably that when you read the piece, it's impossible for your understanding of disability – if you have that common sense view – it's impossible for it to not be changed. Many of the moves she makes, whether it's engagement with feminist literature on vulnerability, whether it's any number of the moves she makes, are all each extremely important in an academic sense. But in some ways, really the heart of the piece just is this profound… exploration and articulation that what it is is to speak about abilities and disabilities is always one way of speaking about the fit or misfit between people and their environment. And that insight is so rich, I think, because it goes against common sense because it goes against decades and decades, and in some cases, centuries, right?, of views in in the academy and also elsewhere. And yet it's so, [chuckles] I don't know how else to put this, it's so correct. It's just, you know, well, once you see it, you can't unsee it, that that really is a more accurate and apt way of understanding the meaning of disability.
[music plays softly]
Kristin 23:03
I really think this is interesting: “It's impossible for your view not to be changed” reading “Misfits.” It reminds me of our first episode, "Being Dismissed," where we talked with Alexis Shotwell about how the idea that emotions are sort of elicited if they have uptake and you can't sort of have them in the same way without that. And Alexis was saying, once you see it, you can't unsee it, as well. Like it's so there's something to this sort of like this critical engagement of reading, like you can't hold the common sense view anymore.
Anna 23:40
Yeah, and maybe we can ask about, uhm, what the sort of quote unquote “common” or “dominant” view of disability is.
Kristin 23:47
Hmm.
Anna 23:47
We might notice that it's often something that, uhm, involves, right?, something going wrong with someone's body or mind. So there's a sort of, uhm, a way of orienting around deficiency or lack, but maybe this is also a good place to bring in the social model of disability, because Garland-Thomson's work gets misconstrued, uhm, I think, to thinking only about environments.
Kristin 24:12
Right. Like if we just built environments perfectly, then there'd be no disability.
Anna 24:17
Right. It's just social or something like that.
Corinne 24:20
Absolutely. Uhm, so maybe we can give audiences a really brief introduction to the social model, which is a framework that was originally developed by disability activists in the 1970s. And then it was further theorized in the eighties by scholars like Mike Oliver, but also many, many others.
So in 1976, this activist group in the UK that called itself the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation. So the UPIS for short, they publish a short, 24-page pamphlet titled fundamental principles of disability.
Kristin 24:59
Oh!
Anna 25:00
Yeah, we'll link that in the show notes and it's really worth knowing about, but it's also really worth reading if you're into that.
Kristin
Yeah! And even if you’re not! Read it.
Anna
Yeah! Read it! Yes!
Corinne 25:10
A great short little manifesto that is a protest against the medical model of disability.
So, often the contrast is between the social model and the medical model. And this is because the social model emerged as this really profound critique of the medical approach to disability. So the medical model informs the common sense view that Joel mentions in their clip. So the idea that disability designates something that is going wrong with someone's bodymind and that needs fixing.
Anna 25:44
Right. I love the term “bodymind,” this way of refusing the separation of our minds from our bodies. So bodyminds have a kind of, well, they have a kind of kinship with thinking bodies.
Kristin
Mmmm!!
Anna
But I just wanted to clarify. So the medical model… the medical model is that view that… well, it comes from medicine. So medicine's often about identifying something that's wrong and then trying to fix it.
Kristin 26:10
Yeah.
Anna 26:11
Right. Like that's sort of what we do in medicine.
Kristin 26:13
Yeah. My thumb hurts. Why does my thumb hurt?
Anna 26:16
Yeah.
Kristin 26:16
And help me make it hurt less, please. And it's pretty good at that for some things. Right. You know, for some things.
Anna
Yeah, for some things!
Kristin 26:23
For some thumbs.
Anna 26:24
Yeah! For some thumbs! Um, but then, the things that human beings live or experience are considered in that way, right?, through that lens: “I'm going to look for a problem and then try to fix it,” we inevitably sort of get the idea that from the start, there is a problem and it needs fixing. And not everything medicine can do is about fixing. Or as Eli Claire says, curing. Not everything needs curing. Sometimes our thumbs can hurt less and sometimes they can't. But we can still have supports that medicine might be able to provide.
Corinne 26:57
Yeah. And so one of the really important insights in the UPIS's pamphlet or manifesto, is that they claim that, and here I'm kind of loosely quoting them, they claim that it is society which disables physically impaired people. So the idea is that individuals have impairments. So the UPIS focuses largely on physical disability, as their name indicates, but we can also think of speech impairments, auditory impairments, neurological conditions, and so forth. Right? And all of these impairments, they create variations in appearance and bodily functioning. But the social model claims that those impairments don't necessarily become disabling, right? They become disabling in a society that excludes disabled people from participation.
Anna 27:52
Right. Yeah, and it's not like impairment is an easy concept here either, like, as a status of the body, because, right?, what we consider to be impairment involves how we investigate, how we work, what we think is important or quote-unquote “normal” and all that kind of stuff.
Corinne 28:10
Yes. And, the disability-impairment split has been criticized by several scholars in the wake of, um, the social model's kind of original theorization of it, right? The idea being that, the UPIS kind of creates this category called “impairment” that sort of, um, in Shelley Tremain's words, like, “renaturalizes the body,” right? So, um, sure, we have all of these variations in functioning, but how do we determine what impairments are? It's not like impairments themselves are these natural kind of facts of the body. So there's a lot of really rich discussions of the, the disability-impairment split, but I think it's still a kind of helpful heuristic to, to understand this. And also, I mean, it really matters the examples that we choose because of course there is no generic disabled body. So the UPIS is very focused on physical disability. And that's been another kind of sore point, um, for some later critiques. Um, so the most common example that's offered, I think, to illustrate the social model is the example of a person in a wheelchair who encounters a flight of stairs. So the social model would say that the wheelchair user who is physically impaired is disabled by the fact that the building does not have an elevator rather than because she doesn't walk.
Anna 29:29
Right, right.
Kristin 29:30
Mmm. Yeah, that's so interesting. But I was also thinking about how, uh, people might use the elevator because going up the stairs is too tiring. So, you can do it, right?
Corinne & Anna
Yeah.
[sounds of book pages flipping]
Krisin
So the medical model is telling us there's something wrong with the body that needs to be fixed, the social model is saying that the way we have this built environment is… uh, sort of… is… ha! I'm trying not to use “misfit” [laughs]
Corinne 30:03
[laughs]
Kristin 30:04
… the social model is saying that, the disability is a product of how we've socially arranged ourselves. It's the world, it's the world as we've built it.
Anna 30:14
Yes.
Corinne 30:14
So one way to connect, right, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson's discussion of misfit to the social model might be to say, “disabled people encounter misfits because the world is not built to accommodate them,” she says that misfits occur “when the environment does do not sustain the shape and function of the body that enters it,” and disabled people often encounter environments that don't sustain or support the way their bodyminds function or that don't provide them with what they actually need to participate in the world.
[music plays softly]
Rhea Ienni 30:54
So, I think the concept of misfit is so rich because it contains both identity, right?, “I am a misfit,” and also the moment of an active experience of discord, rupture that can happen between oneself and the material world. And I'm especially interested in thinking about the many ways in which misfit is experienced, and why some moments of misfit are taken more or less seriously, or not even registered as moments of misfit at all.
So, for example, there is the widely referenced scenario of a wheelchair user not being able to gain access to a building that has no ramps. This is a very striking, and I think easy for most people to grasp, scenario of, “okay, this space is not built with that body in mind.” However, I would argue that there are a lot more types of misfit that more often go unnoticed and or are taken less seriously, right? Misfit does not necessarily mean you cannot access a building or situation at all. It could mean that you may be able to get your access needs met, but you are often uncertain about whether you'll get those needs met. And, unlike able-bodied people, you have to constantly explain and justify your experiences and needs to other people who [smiling] may or may not get it in order to even have a chance at access. I think a really good question is, do you get the privilege of going through a situation on autopilot? And if the answer to that is no, I think that you can safely say that likely there's some degree of misfit. I think Desiree Valentine in particular does a really great job of describing these types of moments, specifically in her work “Shifting the Weight of Inaccessibility: Access Intimacy as Critical Phenomenological Ethos.” She illustrates that thinking about access as just “did this person get into this space and receive some sort of access?” misses the disproportionate emotional and logistical burden that accompanies navigating situations that are not built with your embodied existence in mind. And I think her work really emphasizes that issues of fit or misfit are not limited to whether you get into the space, but also what it costs you to get there.
Similarly, I think Annika Konrad's work on “access fatigue,” a term which she coined, really shows that issues of misfit extend to and include the thousand little complications, extra explanations, checking to see if this place does X for access issues. Right? Constantly educating people on why you need this or that. And it is exhausting and harmful to have to do this. As a disabled person, I have often not gone to events, even though they could have in theory been quote unquote “accessible,” just because I knew it would be so much work to make it accessible and the amount of effort required, simply was not worth it.
In my own work, I really look at the burden that is put on disabled people when on the level of institutions, we're forced to justify and prove the validity of our disabilities and access needs, and even the emotional toll around family and friends and even strangers when we're expected to always account for why we have to move through the world this way, why we have certain needs. When really, [chuckling] the world should have to account for why the world is only set up for a very narrow conception of bodies.
Coming back to the idea of misfit, I think a really good question to ask is when you go to an event, can you trust that things are generally going to be accessible for you already? Or do you have to do the extra labor of making a phone call and doing research to make sure you can even attend? If you have to put in more labor than other people to have your access needs met in a situation, that is, I would argue, still a moment of misfit. And it is a harm to take seriously because that extra labor and burden is itself another barrier to access and overall well-being and flourishing.
[music plays softly]
Kristin 35:40
Rhea says, ”it's not limited to whether you get into the space, but also what it costs you to get there.” And that's so cool because, yeah, and also the other thing she said was about expecting your embodied existence, which is kind of really pointing to this bigger sense of what it is to be a person moving through the world, right? It's not just about sort of maybe measurements or materials or... It's also about what it is for you to have to get there, what that experience is like for you to have to call or to be sitting in an uncomfortable chair through an event or, you know, those kinds of things.
Anna 36:28
Yeah.
Corinne 36:28
Yeah, I love that Rhea brings in Annika Konrad's work on access fatigue. And so Konrad's work in that article in particular is based on interviews with blind and visually impaired people and on their descriptions of the risky, she calls it “risky,” rhetorical work that is involved in getting non-disabled people to actually participate in access and take your needs seriously. And as Rhea beautifully puts it, this type of work, you know, is really fatiguing, hence the term access fatigue coined by Konrad. And so sometimes when you weigh the pros and cons, you just decide it's not worth the effort.
Kristin 37:12
Hmm. Yeah, there's a misfit, not just in the relationship between your bodymind and the space, but maybe in the conversations you're having to have about access. Right? In the ways that it's like having to ask for something you need is like psyching yourself up and possibly just getting shot down anyway, you know.
Anna 37:31
Yeah.
Kristin 37:33
And also then once maybe there is access, having to behave in the right way, a scripted way around being grateful and thankful and not asking for too much and not being too much and sort of being accommodating.
Anna 37:48
Yes. Yeah. That.. that makes me think, too, about hospitality, too, and what that means.
Not just about what's provided or expected, but about the idea that it can be possible to expect that unexpected things might happen at events or in your home or just when you're out in the world, so that we can be prepared for and even welcoming of that. Last time we were talking about the “loving eye,” this idea from Marilyn Frye. And it strikes me that while the language is ableist there, the idea is that we “wait and see what comes up.” So we're curious about what needs might be and how we can meet them. And we can do that as collective work, as a kind of curiosity about the world and one another and ourselves.
Corinne 38:37
I love that curiosity about the unexpected. And it makes me think of the idea of having your needs be anticipated. And some needs can be anticipated. We can we can try for that. But also being kind of welcoming… towards the unexpected, those with unexpected needs, those with unexpected body and the kind of unexpected things that will happen when people get together.
Anna 39:06
Yeah.
Corinne 39:06
So, just going back to, the social model and how Rosemarie Garland-Thomson's notion of misfit relates to it, one part of the social model that's faced some pushback is, the idea that if impairments become disabling in an inaccessible world, this sort of suggests disability might disappear in a world that would be perfectly accessible.
Kristin 39:33
Yup.
Corinne 39:33
And so what many disability scholars have, have kind of argued is that, you know, disability experiences are just so diverse and there are many disabling experiences. Um, so experiences of pain or hallucinations or sensory issues that just won't disappear completely or magically when we build ramps or add interpreters or even create accessible furniture or create dark spaces or quiet spaces, right? All of those things help and they're extremely valuable. The point is not that accessibility isn't crucial. It's that disability isn't pure social construction. And so it doesn't disappear or dematerialize, right?, when we create access.
Kristin 40:19
Yeah. And that's sort of like this outer limit of the social model, right? Is that it's like, you know, there's also just sort of the body pushes back. Because the misfit is this kind of, we'll go back to the title, a feminist materialist disability concept. And that really contrasts with social, I think, or interacts with social, right? So I think we need to get into materialism.
Corinne 40:44
[chuckling] Turning to you, Anna.
Anna 40:45
I'll, I'll try, I'll try. Okay. So this is a bit of a hard one in this context because Garland-Thomson is using that term “feminist materialism,” um, in a different way than you'll find if you Google it. And yet she's using it in a way that many of us absolutely do use it. so feminist materialism is and was, or can be a way of describing feminist thinking that takes up Marxist ideas. There's a lineage back to that, but it's, uh, extended from there. So here, Garland-Thomson's thinking with Karen Barad, whose book is called Meeting the Universe Halfway, which is really interesting for thinking about misfitting!...
Kristin 41:23
Hmm!
Anna 41:24
Um, but Barad reminds us that things exist outside of, as they say, quote,” language or other cultural kinds of representations.” And so I always think of craft stuff. Like, I can knit with a lot of different materials, yarn, metal wire, I can even knit with VHS tape. I've done that. But I can't knit with just anything at all. Right?
Kristin 41:46
That's right.
Anna 41:47
Um, it has to be the right kind of material because knitting is a particular kind of activity.
Kristin 41:52
Hmm! Maybe the material has its own kind of agency?
Anna
Yeah!
Kristin
The matter… It matters... The matter matters… Comes to matter.
Anna 42:01
The matter matters! Actually, yeah! This is, this is exactly… this is exactly the language that Karen Barad uses. So things matter and there's mattering and they mean both that something comes to matter, like comes to be important to us in a certain way, that, there are things that matter does and that particular matter, uh, does. So, Barad is a physicist, so they can't help but notice that matter has agency.
Kristin 42:22
Whoa. [impressed]
Anna 42:22
Yeah. [agreeing] And what that amounts to is that we don't just act on material stuff. [excitedly] Matter exists and shifts without us and when we engage with it, the products of those engagements emerge out of the specific ways that a particular human being or particular human beings and specific parts of the material world co-constitute one another. And this is why the, the language of “material-discursivity” happens here. So it does have to do with how human beings approach and understand things. Um, but it also is, right?, deeply material.
Kristin 42:58
[thoughtful] I'm thinking about just even like the social model, having this distinction between sort of impairment and then disability. And I was thinking about it analogously with the sex-gender distinction, where we sort of have like a useful distinction, but it is good for beginning thinking through something.
Anna 43:27
Yeah.
Corinne 43:28
Mm-hmm.
Kristin
But once we start to really apply or use it, it kind of falls apart in various ways. So…
Anna 43:29
Yeah. Holding them… [breaking in] holding the material and the social or the discursive too far apart doesn't work. [Corinne and Kristin agreeing] So we need a “material- discursive,” hyphenated.
Kristin 43:39
Yeeeah.
Corinne
Mm-hmm.
Anna 43:40
Yeah. And so if we think about misfitting in particular, as a materialist concept, we can notice that, uhm, [excitedly] it's not just an outcome of our thinking or language or conceptual constructions, but also of our material constructions… So misfitting, I think here, is importantly a matter of material arrangements. And that includes the person who is also already material, right? Persons are not abstract things. So… I think, uhm, Garland-Thomson's emphasis on the materialist part of this thinking, refuses to hold the dualism between the stuff that we think about and the world that is physical, and it refuses to sort of privilege those thinking parts, right? The rational, the non-physical, the stuff that in philosophy is normally thought to be the most important stuff.
Corinne 44:36
Mm-hmm. And that absolutely is, I think, that's a feminist philosophy move, right? I've been thinking about Sara Ahmed's notion of “sweaty concepts.”
Anna 44:45
Yesss!
Corinne 44:47
Which already, when you think of this expression, I mean, it's wonderful to think that concepts might have, you know, be these kind of sweaty, breathing bodies!
Anna 44:56
Yes! Be sweaty!
Corinne 44:57
Um, but she, she talks about sweaty concepts as, like, these concepts that emerge from descriptive work, right?, and specifically the experience, or describing the experience of, for example, she says, how it feels to inhabit a black body in a world that assumes whiteness. And here we might say, you know, that misfit is also a kind of sweaty concept because it emerges from descriptions of this kind of rupture or disjunction, um, between two things in the world.
Anna 45:27
Yeah… I… love the term “sweaty concepts.” And I also think about the bodies that are trying to make the concepts as being just…[chuckling] right?!... requiring a lot of effort. And there's also, I mean, I think we can just name that there's a lot of feminist philosophy that sort overprivileges the non-material stuff in the form of thinking about the social or about the ways that ideas or concepts are constructed sort of at the cognitive, about how those emerge and how they operate. And all of that work is really, really important! But…! There's a big “but” there!
Corinne 46:03
Yeah. Disability or misfitting is not just conceptual or a matter of how we talk about things, right? [Anna and Kristin agreeing] Though it is often also a product of those things. But disability is a matter of how we can move, live, be, do in some really concrete material ways.
Anna 46:23
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And there's like, there's a lot to say about this. But I think for our purposes we can notice there are really specific material ways in which all bodies have to live… and live the specific ways that bodyminds have to navigate and negotiate between material living, and between the material and living in material space time. So when we pay close attention to that part of human life and the world, different things, and still highly conceptual things, but different things show up. And so when when we pay attention in ways that start from the knowledge that people live various forms of oppression and ease, which feminist philosophy does, then we get something like feminist materialist thinking. Something like that.
[sound of pages turning]
Anna
So we can think back to the quote, maybe from the top of the episode that you read, Kristin, about, fitting and misfitting, so I'll just quote part of that again. Quote: “the problem with a misfit inheres in the juxtaposition between things, the awkward attempt to fit them together,” so that, quote, “when the spatial and temporal context shifts, so does the fit, and with it meanings and consequences,” end quote. So Garland-Thomson uses the image of the relationship between a square peg and a round hole. [questioningly] I wondered if we could talk that through.
Corinne 47:44
Yes, let's talk about that image… One sort of issue with this image might be that, um, you know, you have this square peg in a round hole, and it seems, what this seems to suggest is that both have a fixed shape. Like, you're a peg, you have this stable shape contour, and you either fit or misfit in a hole whose shape and contours are also fixed.
Kristin 48:10
Huh.
Anna 48:11
Yeah, I think that's what I was thinking about. Yeah.
Corinne 48:13
But of course, as we've been discussing, you know, both bodies and environments aren't fixed, and so perhaps my shape kind of changes or takes on a different meaning when I'm hanging out with a group of disabled friends than when I'm teaching in a large auditorium or swimming in a body of water, right? So what I need in order to experience a fit changes too.
Anna 48:37
Mm-hmm.
Kristin 48:38
Yes. This is where this article for me gets so cool. Is this idea of this dynamic encounter, right? There's a dynamic encounter between flesh and world, both material, but both also subject to our understandings of that interaction, right? And this is where she has this beautiful quote, and I'm going to be using this. I know it. From Caroline Walker Bynum. How about how shape carries a story. Shape carries a story. And, you know, it really sort of shows that, like, it’s shape, but shaping. [Anna and Corinne agree] And so if shape carries a story, what's the story of that shape, right? There's so many cool questions that come out of that. So it's not just a peg. It's not just a hole… [laughs]
Anna 49:35
Right. Even if… even if at a given moment, I'm a square peg and there's a round hole, we can notice that those will be different or could be different, in a different moment of my life or of the world. So those can shape and shift, but at that moment, those things have come to be as they are. And so those things have a history or a story. Yeah, that's a really, really interesting idea.
Kristin 50:07
And, and I just want to tag one thing onto that is that the power of the concept “misfit,” I think Garland-Thomson talks about this at the end of the article, is that it, it kind of is wider than disability. Right? [Corinne and Anna agree] That all… and it… that paying attention to misfitting doesn't do everything, but paying attention to it shows us that all bodies contain contingencies.
[soft music fades in]
Corinne 50:35
Mm-hmm.
Kristin 50:35
And all bodies contain instabilities.
Emily R. Douglas 50:43
One of the things I would like to do that I don't think anyone has done so far in regards to this paper is to weave it in a bit to a popular culture example of misfits and misfitting. I'm thinking about the 1964 stop motion animation made by Videocraft um, called "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer." In which Burl Ives, as a snowman, narrates to us the tale of Rudolph as a misfit and his various experiences with misfitting. In this stop motion animation, Rudolph runs away from his home because of exclusion. He attempts a sort of prosthetic nose to hide his glowing red nose. And he comes upon this space that's called the island of misfit toys. Right? So "misfit" in most of our ordinary language becomes attached to specific bodies: to Rudolph, right?, as a subject, or to these various toys, and they are personified as misfits. We learn about an elephant who is a misfit because he has polka dots, a bird who is a misfit because they swim, a cowboy toy who is a misfit because he is riding an ostrich, right? Um, Garland-Thomson says, quote, "the performing agent in a misfit materializes not in herself, but rather literally up and against the thingness of the world." Garland-Thomson says, "the polka dotted elephant is not a misfit inherently. It is seen as not fitting in with the other elephant toys because of the environment and the rigidity of the norms of elephant toys. Part of what I find helpful about this is that it kind of points us toward how you become an agent or how you materialize. In the language of Foucauldian scholars in the language of the Foucauldian scholars, we would say this is a part of “subjectivation,” right?, becoming a certain type or a certain role of person, a certain kind of subject. It happens in this misfitting, in this coming up against things, right?. So Garland-Thomson emphasizes that misfit can lead us to gain subjugated knowledges, ways of knowing that are not available to the general public or are ignored or suppressed. And how those knowledges can lead us into, um, a kind of politicized identity. So part of what I think is going on here is that Rudolf embodies this moment of subjectivation where he's learning about himself. He's learning about his attempts to fit in, his attempts in fitting through a prosthetic black nose that doesn't glow. And he's learning as well through his encounter with this so-called island of misfit toys, right?, this community, actually, of misfits that have been able to find a place together. So while misfitting excludes him, it actually does allow him entry into a different kind of community.
[soft music plays]
Kristin 54:22
I [chuckling]... I'm gonna start with just, I love this idea. I love this idea of an island of misfit toys.
Anna 54:28
Yes. This is a really, really smart and beautiful example that Emily's giving us here. Yea. Also… [sighs] I don't know… I [pauses…]a I feel like, like, the island of misfit toys is maybe a good place for me. That, like, that resonates with me quite a lot!
[Kristin laughs and Corinne chuckles]
Anna 54:51
I feel like that might be a place that I could hang out. Yeah! But also just the materializing, the thingness of the world, Emily's talking about here and thinking about how one materializes is so compelling to me. I think a lot about the ways that we are persons and, you know, minds and all that sort of thing. But we're also always things in the world, for other people and other things.
Kristin 55:20
Yeah. And how being a misfit, right?, is itself a possible entry into community with other misfits.
Anna 55:32
Yes. Yeah!
Kristin 55:32
You know, actually, in the article talking about sort of like fitting and harmony, you know, we often talk about having a normative body. But actually, if you think about fitting as this kind of harmony, there's an anonymity to it. Unmarked, unrecognized, comfortable majority body. Right? And it's kind of, you know, we can see each other as misfits on the island of misfits together. Right? There's sort of an exile that we're sharing and not fitting the norm, but also just sort of being resourceful together. Right? An elephant or a cowboy or, you know, sort of what do these things need to look like on the misfit? They can look like anything on the island of misfit toys.
Corinne 56:21
This really makes me think, have either of you seen the latest Toy Story? Toy Story 5?
Anna 56:27
I have not.
Kristin 56:28
No, I… it's on the list, of course,
Corinne 56:31
It’s a funny, it's a very fun watch. Um, so the, the, the plot of this fifth Toy Story movie is that Bonnie, this young kid, she receives a tablet from her parents. They call it a lily pad. [Anna & Kristin laugh] Yeah, it's great. It's such, it's a really fun watch. Um, so as soon as she gets the lily pad, it immediately becomes like her favorite thing to play with. And of course, this causes her to neglect old toys, like the cowgirl, Jessie, who used to be her favorite. And so Jessie is just heartbroken and so preoccupied by the sudden change in her kid's life.
Anna 57:12
Oh, Jessie. And shout-out to everyone who feels empathy or whatever it is for inanimate objects. Poor Jessie. Okay.
Corinne 57:23
Yes! Poor Jessie! [feelingly] So the whole movie is staged as a kind of conflict between modern technology, like the interactive smart tablet, the lily pad, and then all of the toys. So the dolls, the slinky dogs, the horses, and the action figures, who are all fighting to stay relevant and loved, uh, to continue to matter, we might say, right? They're trying to figure out their place in this new technologically driven world. It's a really interesting commentary. And I think, I mean, as I was reading this piece, I was thinking, in this Toy Story movie, there is a kind of process of misfitting happening that is really clearly temporal. And that's always been part of the Toy Story franchise, right? Throughout all of the movies, there's always a story being told about toys that are being replaced, or that are worried about being replaced, or that are losing their place, right? Um, as children grow up and, and move on to, to new and, and, and different things. So I was thinking here about obsolescence, right? Which is the process of becoming out of date, of going out of fashion, or of no longer being useful.
Anna 58:32
Hmm.
Corinne 58:33
And how that describes a way of becoming a misfit, not only in place, but also quite clearly through time.
Kristin
Yes!
Anna 58:42
Yeah… So one day you're experiencing a fit, and the next day, you're not. And you've sort of become, I don't know, something that needs fixing, or lacking, or defective, by not keeping up with the times, or no longer being able to do what's expected of you. Which is also constantly changing, something like that?
Corinne 59:02
And there's this, you know, so Bonnie gets the lily pad, but what's really kind of funny and interesting is that throughout the movie, we also encounter all of these toy technologies that have quickly become outdated.
Anna 59:15
Right.
Corinne 59:16
So what's interesting is how the lily pad is just the newest iteration in a long kind of string of technological toys that are, you know, one after the other becoming replaced. And so it's actually, there's a kind of message here about the impossibility of keeping up, right?
Anna 59:34
Yeah.
Kristin 59:35
Absolutely.
[sounds of pages turning]
Corinne 59:37
Another thing I'd like to pick up on before we listen to the rest of Emily's clip is a concept that they mention. So the concept of “subjugated knowledges,” which is a term that originates in the work of Michel Foucault.
Anna 59:50
Oh, right. So Garland-Thomson says, and I'll quote: “the experience of misfitting can produce subjugated knowledges from which an oppositional consciousness and politicized identity might arise.” End quote. So she’s working here with Foucault and also with, uh, Chela Sandoval, who describes “oppositional consciousness.”
Kristin 1:00:08
Yeah. And the idea here being that, in that dynamic encounter, right?, being a being of misfit, you then also have a perspective on society and how it works and how it operates that you don't get if you are in harmony. So when you're moving through the world and you have to make sort of mistitting – what Garland-Thomson defines as tactical navigations through space and time – in doing that and experiencing that and living that, you come to know the world differently. Right? But that's also not a sort of, uh, valued position also in that society. So what you have is you've created knowledges that are subjugated.
Anna 1:00:54
Right. [thinking]
Kristin 1:00:54
And so like on the Island of Misfit Toys, right, they know things how society privileges and operates in various ways that those who fit it well don't.
Anna 1:01:05
Don’t… and, um, can't, probably, in a certain way. Yeah, she's also saying that, um, misfitting can foster this awareness of social justice, which is something you can remain complacent about when you're always experiencing fits or fitting, right? You don't have to think about it. And so you, you don't.
Kristin 1:01:27
Yea.
Anna 1:01:27
Yeah.
Corinne 1:01:27
Mm-hmm. And through this newly cultivated awareness, you can also find other misfits. I'm thinking of how, you know, if you've been, the person who doesn't feel at home in a particular space, you might be better at spotting the other people who seem to be feeling the same way. And I think what's interesting about misfitting that, uh, the paper really draws out is that, um, mi involves this moment of alienation from a majority community.
Kristin 1:01:59
Yeah.
Corinne 1:01:59
And misfitting can be so lonely and so isolating and even so violent at times.
Kristin 1:02:05
Mm-hmm.
Corinne 1:02:06
The whole point is that you don't fit with others. But luckily, there are so many other misfits out there, right? There are all of these misfits out there on an island and maybe on many different islands. And once you find them, so much can happen. It can be really energizing. It's like Sara Ahmed's, uh, um, concept of the feminist killjoy, right? When you find other feminist killjoys, so much can happen. It's a life… she describes it as “a lifeline.” And so finding other killjoys is, she says, a feminist killjoy survival tip, right? [Anna & Kristin agree] That's how you get by is by finding other misfits.
[music plays softly]
Kristin 1:02:50
Yeah. Okay. Let's finish. I want to go back to, uh, the Island of Misfit Toys.
[Anna giggles]
Emily R. Douglas 1:02:56
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson is clear that she doesn't want us to fit in if it comes through the way of eradicating disability or mere assimilation. But she does seem to assume that creating fits where fits never existed is a good in itself. And I think part of that loses the power of misfitting. So in particular, I'm thinking about the example of the division in non-heterosexual communities between maybe queers who see themselves as embracing a history of freakdom and perversity and weirdness, compared to homonormativity, right? A sense of assimilation, a sense of “I'm not queer. I'm just gay. I'm normal. And I'm like you,” right? I think that actually, a kind of intersubjective relationship can happen where the other subjects who might see them, who might encounter them, learn about ways of misfitting, right? So as a very young, closeted queer person, you might look at these modes and see potential different roles you could take on. I think this is also the case for disability, right? When groups of disabled people get together and do crip takeovers of a local event, right? And they may come in with literal different embodiments, with different bodily needs. You may see someone sitting on the floor because there's no available seating. You may see somebody using mobility aids, right? These are sort of modeling potential ways to use misfitting. Not just to have a politicized identity, but to use the way that encounter happens.
So if I can come back for just a minute to the way that the stop motion animation Rudolph experiences things. After he's excluded from his home community, he travels to the island of misfit toys. Indeed, he is still excluded there. He's told he can't stay there because as a living being, him and his traveling companions are not the same kinds of things as toys. They're not the same kinds of objects, right? Even though the toys have subjecthood in the animation. But he learns a different way of being from them, right? He learns not only this kind of generic, happy, uh, gloss on being who you are, right?, despite all of the consequences. He also learns ways to be in community. His particular traits that make him misfit, his red nose, are really valuable.
Um, I think that the concept of misfit actually gives interesting resonances and frictions with disability justice movements. So I'm thinking in particular of some of the work of Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, especially their book Care Work, Dreaming Disability Justice, they discuss how even in instances when a fit seems to happen, say we make sure that an event has ramps, sign language interpreters, scent free policies, etc., we can fill out a checklist for fitting. And we can never guarantee that someone will fit. We also can't guarantee that there will be a true feeling or spirit of inclusion there. Right? So I wonder if there's room in and when we talk about fitting to actually talk about attunement, tuning in, as part of the work of fitting, right? Thinking about it beyond these most obvious kind of architectural or strategic answers. I also think that misfitting points us to all of these modes of crip wisdom that are already happening, right? Misfits, people who encounter misfitting, misfit moments, they require different ways of navigating and experiencing the world.
[music plays softly]
Anna 1:07:21
I love this language of attunement from Emily. The, the, the attunement is not just… to making spaces fit everyone or to minimizing misfitting.
Kristin 1:07:36
Yeah.
Anna 1:07:36
But also to allow misfitting to be productive in making more space or allowing more ways of living possible, or maybe just in, knowing, um, more and better if that's a goal. But, it makes more ways of being together possible. And I, I also think about the way that the attunement Emily's describing is, is really, skill-based and, and demanding.
But when we attune to misfitting and the possibilities that who misfit or are misfitting in a particular context, what those people already know exist without ignoring or trying to fix the misfit, the ways spaces are standardly used can also shift. So maybe, maybe I sit on the floor because it's more comfortable or safer for me. And then other people realize like, “Hey, actually, sitting on the floor is not only possible, it's actually pretty good in this context!” or whatever. And maybe next time I offer the floor as a place we might sit, for example.
Corinne 1:08:43
Yeah. So as Emily says, the goal is not only or always to create fits out of misfits, right? It can be to make misfitting more livable, maybe more, more joyful? I mean, I, I believe, you know, in working really hard to make spaces always as accessible as we can, but I also know from experience that even I can't always anticipate what I'm going to need or how my bodymind is going to respond to the places where I find myself.
Anna 1:09:15
Yeah.
Corinne 1:09:15
And we can either see that as a problem, right? Oh, like we were talking about earlier, like we can't anticipate everything. We can't anticipate everyone's needs and that's a big issue, or we can kind of recognize it as an unavoidable fact of life that we need to figure out together.
Anna 1:09:33
Yeah.
Kristin 1:09:34
And I think what I'm really taking away from what Emily said is sort of like, we think about fitting, but we should also think about sort of the spirit of, you know, and sort of how do we approach each other? Is it solidarity? Or is joyful inclusion or is it resentful inclusion? Like that really matters too, right?
Anna 1:09:56
Yeah.
Kristin 1:09:56
yeah, so there's, so yeah, Garland-Thomson talks a lot about misfitting as being something that's really also very productive, product of community, productive of new ways of being, right? There's this kind of resourcefulness that comes with misfitting.
Anna 1:10:11
Yeah, yea. And so there's, there's this knowledge yeah, resourcefulness, that we develop when we regularly misfit. And there are people very rarely have to develop it. In fact, as we were talking, I keep thinking like, “there are some people in the that I wish felt more misfitting more of the time because, there maybe are things that should misfit that don't currently misfit.”
[Kristin giggles]
Corinne 1:10:37
I think this is connected to a distinction that Garland-Thomson makes in the paper between, we've been using some of these terms. Essentially between “majority bodies” and what she calls “minority forms of embodiment.” And this is a category that includes, but it's not limited to, disability. She says, and I'm quoting, “The built and arranged space, through which we navigate our lives, tends to offer to majority bodies fits and functioning, and tends to create misfits with minority forms of embodiment, such as people with disabilities.”
Anna 1:11:12
Yeah. Hmm. [thinking] That's a really important distinction she's drawing, I think, between majority and minority bodies. Because she's not using those terms to indicate that majority bodies are just statistically more important. More prevalent or something like that. Majority bodies here are bodies that are expected. And so, built and arranged space is oriented around what the bodies of people who are expected need and want and can do and all those sorts of things. So, as such, they very rarely misfit the spaces that we all move through. Whereas minority bodies aren't expected, and so they regularly misfit. And so, um, white and thin, able-bodied, cisgender, and here English-speaking people, bodyminds that have both ease and power, even though they're precisely not at all the majority statistically. So, it seems like thinking about majority and minority bodies, kind of alerts us to the fact that we all depend on environments. And that's not special to disability or disabled bodyminds, right? Environments sustain us. But that makes me think of our field notes series, right? You need food at your conference! We are bodies. There's no thinking without bodies! But that also means that there's this really important question raised in the essay because we all misfit somewhere.
Corinne 1:12:32
It's certainly important to recognize what we might call the universality of misfitting. The fact that misfitting is something all of us can experience. But what makes misfitting a feminist concept, I think, is recognizing both the universality of it and, you know, the way that it's tied to the fact of human embodiment. There's this universal dimension, but there's also the specific, contextual, uneven ways that misfitting is realized in the world.
Kristin 1:13:02
Hmm.
Anna 1:13:03
Yeah. That's a really key insight from feminist discussions of vulnerability in recent and to, quote Garland-Thomson, “Vulnerability is universally inherent but it is a potentiality that is realized when bodies encounter a hostile environment and is latent in a sustaining environment." End quote.
Kristin 1:13:21
Hmm. Sustaining versus hostile environments.
Anna 1:13:25
Yes.
Kristin 1:13:25
Yeah. That makes me think about food again. Maybe we're getting to the end of it and we’re getting hungry!
Corinne 1:13:30
I think we’re getting hungry.
Kristin 1:13:31
I am. So, so misfitting, it's this experience that's potentially inherent in being a human.
Corinne 1:13:38
Mm. Mm. There is, I think, a crip feminist lesson here that has to do with interdependence. How can we fight for a world in which misfitting is not so costly and painful and lonely? When you're held solely responsible for the ways and the places that you don't fit and you're expected to be able to fit everywhere, what do you do with that? And what can others do when you experience that?
Anna 1:14:05
Yeah, throughout this paper and actually our conversation, we been talking about misfitting as a kind of individual thing, right? I'm misfitting here, you're misfitting there. Maybe the goal is to bring even more relationality into the picture and to, I don't know, think about it as something we do together.
Corinne 1:14:22
And this is an idea that is at the heart of the disability justice principle of collective access. Access is something we do and something that we only know how to do well when we do it together. So access is not something this kind of good that non-disabled people give to disabled people.
Kristin 1:14:43
“And then you are thankful for that access that I give to you!”
Anna 1:14:48
Yes. “You’re welcome!”
[all laugh]
Corinne 1:14:52
[thoughtfully] I think one good place to end would be with some words by disability scholar Margaret Price, who actually coined the term “bodymind” in one of her essays. And these are, this is something she writes in the conclusion to her wonderful book on crip spacetime. This is what she writes: “Gathering forces us to confront the dimensions of crip spacetime and find a way to inhabit it together. Often, this cohabitation is painful and messy. But the gathering itself is a refusal to be separated, and thus, a commitment to collective access. In crip solidarity, there is no meaning to a statement such as, ‘I’ll slow down for you.,’ because I and you have become we. We are going at a particular pace, or paying attention to something together, or hoping to be somewhere together.”
[music plays softly… transitions to theme music]
Kristin 1:15:59
What a lovely ending, what a lovely episode. Thank you, Corinne, for always bringing us so much to think about, so much to, sort of, enjoy, really. Sweaty concepts together.
Anna 1:16:12
You, um, you make a lovely “we.”
Corinne 1:16:16
So much fun. So glad to be here.
[theme music plays]
Anna 1:16:27
If you'd like to contribute, guest produce, or suggest pieces of philosophy for our next episodes, please go to our website, thinkingbodiespod.com. We're also on Instagram at thinkingbodiespod. We're very happy to do it together!
Our thanks to Joel Michael Reynolds, Rhea Lenni, and Emily R. Douglas, and also to Rosemarie Garland-Thomson for all of her work.
Kristin 1:16:41
Yes! And all of the references for what was mentioned on the podcast today, along with detailed descriptive transcripts, are all available on our website.
Anna 1:16:53
Our theme music is by Seth Makes Sounds and Joseph Pres. This podcast is funded by a University of Regina President's Research Seed Grant. Thank you so much to the Amplified Podcast Network for all of your mentorship and getting this podcast created, and to Ayodeji Ademola-Aleem for administrative support.
I'm Anna Mudde. I'm on the Lands of the Michif-Métis Nation and on the Lands of the Nehiyawak, the Anishinaabek, Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota peoples, which is also called Pile of Bones.
Kristin 1:17:22
I'm Kristin Rodier recording today from Amiskwaciwâskahikan, the homelands of the Plains Cree, the Woodland Cree, the Beaver Cree, the Ojibwe, and the Métis, also called Beaver Hills House.
Corinne 1:17:35
And I'm Corinne Lajoie recording from Tiohtià:ke, Montréal, on the unceded Lands of the Mohawk Nation, which are also a gathering place for many First Nations today.
[music plays]
[out take]
[after Corinne reads from Margaret Price: “... In crip solidarity, there is no meaning to a statement such as, ‘I’ll slow down for you.,’ because I and you have become we. We are going at a particular pace, or paying attention to something together, or hoping to be somewhere together.”]
Anna 1:17:22
[thickly, choked up] Ahhh, yeah…
Kristin 1:17:52
And I was just listening, thinking about all of us floating in a pool somewhere together.
Corinne 1:17:57
You know, Kristin, the first time I met you, we swam in the hotel pool at CSWIP?
Kristin 1:18:03
Yay! Really?!?
Corinne 1:18:04
Yeah! You led the movement.
Anna 1:18:06
Kristin always leads a pool movement!
Kristin 1:18:08
Yes. I will organize a pool party anywhere.
Corinne 1:18:11
It was amazing.
[theme music fades out]