The Queer Aut of Failure

Abstract

I, a Mad, autistic, multiply-disabled person, began my PhD in Cultural Studies in September of 2020. I started to make my home in graduate school during the COVID-19 pandemic, fully online, and I've excelled, calling into question normative assumptions of in-person socialization, education, and collaboration as superior to their virtual counterparts. In this article, I reflect on the cripistemic pedagogies of failure that facilitated a neuroqueered and transMaddened transition to Zoom-based graduate life. I will also consider email, text messages, and video calls as equalizing mediums in which both formal and fugitive spaces can open for queercrip collaboration across borders, timezones, and access needs. Lastly, I will tell the stories of technological 'failures' that I have experienced—miscommunications, failing internet, time delays—as generative possibilities rather than indictments of a non-normative learning. Necessarily imperfect and rife with humorous, intriguing, and profoundly human failures, as well as surprising and generative openings, pandemic education has ushered in new queercrip, transMad, ways of knowing and teaching that have uniquely benefitted me. Far from a circumscribed or lacking educational landscape, I argue, post-COVID academia is filled with pedagogical and epistemological openings, holes through which new disabled and Mad scholars, myself included, can make ourselves a beautifully imperfect home space. I invite you inside.