Kelly Fritsch

Carleton University · Department of Sociology and Anthropology

Challenging the undesirability of disability is a shared responsibility that requires us to imagine disability differently. In order to imagine disability differently, we need to understand how the neoliberal hegemonic social imagination—key to processes that create good disabled and able-bodied neoliberal subjects—works to curtail who is perceived...

This article explores how disability as a political identity emerged alongside the neoliberalization of social relations and the boom in the life sciences. This has had lasting consequences for the ways in which disability is mobilized in contemporary neoliberalized biocapitalism, including how disability has become differentially included through...

Drawing on the institutional history of the sperm bank and legacies of eugenics, we consider how spectrums of risk simultaneously constrain and expand possibilities for disability justice. We do so by examining the discourses surrounding US-based Xytex Corporation sperm bank Donor 9623, described as the ‘perfect’ donor but later discovered to have...

As disabled people engaged in disability community, activism, and scholarship, our collective experiences and histories have taught us that we are effective agents of world-building and-dismantling toward more socially just relations. The grounds for social justice and world-remaking, however, are frictioned; technologies, architectures, and infras...

The “Bio” Politics of Matter and Mattering for Feminist Engagements with Biosocial, Biocultural, and Posthuman Embodiment - Volume 33 Issue 4 - Kelly Fritsch

This chapter addresses how dominant cultural discourses of disabled parenting, especially disabled mothering, re-enforce disability as located in an individual body. It begins by mapping out the extensive social barriers faced by disabled parents. Next, in tracing out the narrative accounts of disabled mothers appearing in popular media, it shows h...

This article argues that strong policy frameworks are required to support the health and well-being of sex workers, disabled people, and disabled sex workers. Through an examination of the context of sex work in Canada, we articulate the flaws of sex work criminalization and the persistent barriers that criminalization creates. Our analysis of the...

This article addresses a theoretical and methodological intervention in support of inclusion for girls with disabilities in Vietnam. Drawing on an internationally collaborative project, Monitoring Educational Rights for Girls with Disabilities in Vietnamese schools, we critically engage the politics of inclusion and exclusion of girls with disabili...

The International Symbol of Access (ISA) produces, capacitates, and debilitates disability in particular ways and is grounded by a happy affective economy that is embedded within neoliberal capitalism. This production of disability runs counter to the dismantling of ableism and compulsory able-bodiedness. In charting the development of the modern w...

p>Critical theorist Theodor Adorno is rarely considered as a philosopher of the body. The body which leaks, desires, rages, and lusts is seemingly disjointed from the dry and dense writings that often characterize Adorno's work. As bleak as this description of Adorno’s writings may be, however, the body is both central to his critique of modernity...