Shayda Kafai

• Doctor of Philosophy
• California State Polytechnic University

Musing for Puncta special issue "Critically Sick: New Phenomenologies Of Illness, Madness, And Disability."

This essay imagines mad femme politics as an intervention and as a strategy that moves disabled, chronically ill, and mad educators and learners toward collective access and liberation. Using personal narrative, femme theory, and mad studies as reference points, the essay explores how a queering of tenderness and vulnerability can empower and embol...

This piece of creative nonfiction explores how we can unlearn food as stigma and shame. It is a love letter to queer, fat community. Using queer as a verb, as a transformative opening, it imagines the liberatory and radical futures we can create when we queer our foods and the normative meanings of fat.

This paper explores the spaces that are opened when disabled folks crip beauty, when they trouble beauty norms that are inherently racist, sizest, ableist, and capitalistic. By using crip as both identity and verb, I will examine the modes of resistance that disabled folks engage in as a way to decolonize and reclaim their bodyminds from intersecti...

This piece frames Dese'Rae L. Stage's photography project about suicide attempt survivors Live Through This as a counter-storytelling archive.

Beauty can be expansive and rhythmic. Its standards can shift, stretching outward to include and honor all of our "bodyminds. " I stress can here because beauty is still imbued with overwhelming power and privilege. Despite our current feminist landscape of plurality and intersectionality, for most of us, beauty is still a place of restricted acces...

p> Sanity and madness have historically and culturally functioned as binary opposites, the former serving as a representation of normalcy, while the latter functions as shorthand for defect and abnormality. This essay examines the artificiality of this binary construction and offers the mad border body as an alternative. Informed by the works of...

Title(s): Unremitting Behavior, Voice for the Body, Sin-eater Shayda Kafai is completing her master's thesis at California State University Northridge, where she co-founded the Scribbling Poets, a group that brings nondisabled and disabled communities together through art (www.scribblingpoets.com). In the fall, she will begin doctoral work in cultu...