From Flesh to Rock: Challenging Life/Nonlife Binaries with Crip Theory

Orientação: Clara Keating e Mara Pieri

Programa de Doutoramento: Estudos Feministas

Financiamento: FCT

Committed to social and ecological justice this thesis aims to challenge life/nonlife binaries sedimented in Western imagination. Informed by crip theory, it brings the concepts "animacy" (Chen, 2012) and "geontopower" (Povinelli, 2016) into conversation with artistic works by N.K. Jemisin, Berlinde de Bruyckere, Jessie Darling, and others. As a particular mode of disability studies that reconsiders historically shaped formulations of dis/ability and ab/normalcy from a situated perspective, crip theory offers both an analytical tool and a method that assumes the dis/abled body that writes: crip authorship (Mills & Sanchez, 2023). Whereas animacy "activates new theoretical formations that trouble and undo stubborn binary systems of difference", such as life/nonlife dichotomies, geontopower highlights how rock - mostly perceived as solid material, inert, and 'up for grabs' - in fact sustains, shapes, breaks. This dissertation argues that cultural objects and anti-hegemonic writing fractures and erodes sedimented concepts - cripping rock.