Crip/Queer Studies @ the George Washington University

"The primary idea was to address 

an emerging interest in intersectionality studies – 

the ways in which we all occupy 

multiple identities"

David Mitchell
The GW Hatchet

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Recently, the GW Hatchet did an article,
"English professors combine areas of study 
for new specialization" by Chase Smith, 
on the emerging area of Crip/Queer studies 
in the George Washington University English Department.
I was interviewed and briefly quoted in the article.
Here is a more complete version of what I said.

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The value that Crip/Queer studies at the George Washington University has in the wider academic community was perhaps most clearly evidenced for me as I was preparing to leave GWU after completing a Masters Degree. At that time, I was fortunate and privileged enough to be accepted into substantial Ph.D programs, any of which I would have been immensely gracious to attend. It is this bounty of offers that drew my attention back to GWU. In some of the correspondence I received inviting me to join the university, it was mentioned that they wanted someone like me, doing what I do. They had no one else. Thinking this over, I found that they may very well be right. 

Indeed, what we do here at GWU is in many respects unique, or at least rare - too rare. Universities offer a bounty of gifts that no student can repay, but GWU offers a unique combination of resources and mentorship that cannot be found anywhere else - what we call our Crip/Queer Studies. In the end, I chose to go to GWU for my Ph.D because I am a unique scholar, with a unique project, and the unique programs at GWU, especially in Crip/Queer and Medieval Studies, creates a unique convergence of opportunities that I want to grow in and further throughout my career.

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What characterizes myself, my project, and Crip/Queer studies is not only an attention to the uniqueness of particular persons but the movement that turns from individual to collective struggles. It is not unheard of to have centers for Disability Studies and LGBT Resources, but often the premise of these programs is the policing of borders around identity categories. There are critically important issues and violences that stick to our bodies with the glue of identity and this should never be underestimated. However, identity can too often work by turning away from the shared experiences of those who are not recognized as sharing an identity. Too often, for instance, transgender is left out of the considerations of LGBT activist groups because the issue of gender is often handled separately from the issue of sexuality (which has become the focus of the organization). 

Likewise, to use the same example, transgender is rarely considered a part of the disability rights movement, despite the shared experiences with social mechanisms of diagnosis, treatment with drugs or surgery, and a history of alienation, stigma and incarceration. In academia, in part propelled by the work of the scholars here, the words Crip and Queer signify not merely a more elastic collection of experiences but a methodology that critiques identity as itself a part of the mechanisms of social control. Rather than close off the conversation, Crip/Queer studies embraces the collective struggle of the Trans, the Crip and the Queer with countless other marginalized modes of living.

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As a transgender woman completing her Ph.D with a dissertation on transgender in the middle ages, GWU's Crip/Queer studies area offers the unique resources and support systems that make my scholarship possible. Any time you enter into careers where your community and your area of work are underrepresented or unrepresented, there are bound to be countless roadblocks as people find it difficult to even imagine the possibility of your existence within the field. The choice to come out as transgender and transition occurred to the sound of countless doors closing - relationships I would never have, conversations I would never hear, jobs I would never get. 

The unlikeliness of finding work only compounded when I made the decision to pursue the study of transgender in the middle ages, a time and area of research, many too readily assume, in which discussions of transgender has no place. One of the first investments GWU's Crip/Queer Studies offered me was to open the door to give me entrance into a shared academic space. It does more than imagining the possibility of a more inclusive and diverse social project, it makes continued investments in students, faculty, staff, and programming to make those possibilities into a reality.

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In particular, it is worth noting a few features of GWU's Crip/Queer studies area that make it a fantastic resource. First, the quality and diversity of the faculty in the Crip/Queer area of study makes GWU a powerhouse that supercharges intellectual energies not only here, in the US, but transnationally. Students of Prof. Robert McRuer and Prof. David Mitchell travel abroad to places like the Czech Republic and Germany to experience the living material cultures of crip and queer subjectivities past and present. They also attract scholars from around the world to visit to give scholars at GWU perspectives on issues of race, religion, gender, sexuality, and disability that are otherwise difficult to get in and around DC. 

This influx of academic resources are none the more evident than in the Disability Studies conference hosted at GWU every couple years, where the University becomes a magnet for the critical work of leading scholars from around the world. The coursework provided by the Crip/Queer faculty and graduate students widen the discussion of medieval, early-modern, american, and british, post-colonial literatures to include often elided topics. As a result, the unique scholarship being produced from the undergrad level, to the Ph.D, to the faculty are demonstrating in quantifiable and unquantifiable ways the invaluable products of hosting a Crip/Queer studies group at the University.

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A Queer Confessor to the Masses: On Matthew 19:12

"For there are eunuchs 

who were born that way from their mother's womb; 

and there are eunuchs who were made eunuchs by men; 

and there are also eunuchs who made themselves eunuchs 

for the sake of the kingdom of heaven"

Gospel of Matthew 19:12 

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In a previous post, Eunuchs for the Kingdom,

I examined how Matthew 19:12 opens up the ontology of transgender bodies

from a medical and social trans identities to an instrumental use.

Here, I examine how the same passage may be redeployed

for the purposes of a critical trans politics 

that reaches across difference and periodization.

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Queer Confessor to the Masses

To be marked as Transgender is to become a storyteller. Stories and histories are inscribed on our bodies from all directions. It is a common occurrence, seemingly about a 50/50 chance, when I am traveling in public, that someone will come up to me and begin telling me a story from their life. Whether I am on a bus, train, or airplane, the scene seems to replay itself in strikingly similar ways. Often I am reading a book or listening to music, when I notice that a person is standing very close to me and looking in my direction. Usually they appear to be a cis-gendered, able-bodied, heterosexual male and they have a look in their eyes like they have something they crave to tell me.

"What?" I ask, leaning in after they say something almost inaudible. They speak up a little louder but not enough to be readily heard by others around. "I just wanted to say," they begin, "I've seen you around." That's probably true. While as a trans-woman I am fairly passable as a cis-woman, to the passenger looking for something interesting I often seem to provide a puzzle on their ride to wherever they are going. I am tall, strong bodied, a deep voice, and with a queer butch edge to my otherwise femme demeanor. It's hard not to notice when I've been noticed. The frequency with which people don't merely sneak glances, but boldly stare was shocking when I first transitioned. In any case, I am used to people noticing me, for better or for worse.

What follows in these interviews is perhaps surprising: without even telling me their name or asking for mine, the unexpected traveling companion proceeds unprompted to tell me a story from their life. At first this trend confused me. If they had been staring at me, interested, puzzled, one would suppose they would come at with prying questions. Instead, what I end up receiving from nominally my cis-gendered, straight visitor is a tale of their queer escapades: the halloween they cross-dressed, their secret fetish for women's underwear, the party at which they kissed another man for the first time. Sometimes I follow up with questions: how did that make you feel? What style cut do you like to wear? Would you do it again? After a short-while, having shared their story, they leave. In the end, the encounter was more about them than about me.

"I'm like a queer confessor to the masses," I tell my friends afterwards. Like a priest, I am approached by strangers who tell me their queer/trans transgressions against the hetero-normate ideal around which they orient their lives.  In a sense, simply by listening, I am handing out pardons for their heterosexuality and masculinity. They approach my body as though it is some relic or confessional where they can whisper their secrets in safety then walk away back into their straight world, unburdened by a past that is no longer locked inside them. I become a figure of that abject past, a dark hole where they can safely dispose of the parts of them that they don't want to be seen in the light of the present day. Psychoanalysts, like Slavoj Zizek, Lee Edelman, and Will Stockton, argue that the desire and disgust of the queer body derives from their symbolic representation of the nothingness, the lack, the death-drive at the heart of all desire. God and the soul are likewise read as signs of the Lack par excellence. In this way, being queer and being a confessor (a stand-in for the big Nothing) are overlapping positions in the social imagination. 

Yet approaching the transgender body through the hermeneutics of psychoanalysis covers over lived bodies. The desire, lack and nothingness in concern is not the trans body in question, but the person who marks us, turns us into metaphors for their own subject formation. I think of Alison Kafer's encounters with devotees, summarized in her essay "Desire and Disgust," where nominally cis-gender able-bodied heterosexual men look on her as a fetish for their own desire about amputation. Despite holding her up as something holy, a sacred relic to be devoted to, their desire runs on and turns into disgust. Her body becomes a symbol of the lack and the nothingness inside the devotees, as my body does for those who come to confess their queer sins. The history of her life and mine is an interruption in the story that appropriates the body of the other. This is the body-sized hole in the devotees' and psychoanalysts' narratives: our lives either don't matter or are unspeakable. We are conscripted to serve as sites of devotion and confession for the public's stories, histories, and formations but we are denied the ability to claim our own.

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The Castration of a Salesman

Every so often, however, the screen between the person sharing their story and me comes up, as the projection of nothingness or restoration begins to fade away and we are able to encounter each other as two vulnerable bodies with our own scars and histories. One instance where this moment of contact erupted occurred as I was on a train from Chicago to Washington D.C. in the winter a few years ago. At first, the scene resembled the usual script point for point. I was sitting in the observation car reading a book on the history of castration when an elderly gentleman was suddenly looming over me. "I've seen you around," he began. I put down my book, leaving my forefinger on the page, and nodded, wondering if this would be a long exposition. He looked me up and down, then looked at my book, with the title "CASTRATION" in bold print on the side and pointed. "I saw what you were reading," he said, "and I have a story for you." Once again I nodded and tried to wait patiently as a pregnant pause filled the space between his slow words. "Is it alight with you if I tell you later?" he asked, hesitantly. "Sure," I told him, "I'll be here all morning." He shuffled off and I returned to my book, expecting not to see him again. He seemed to have lost his nerve.

About two hours later, I was shocked out of footnoting a page by the man's sudden reappearance in the seat across from me. He was in the process of unfolding a notebook and a mechanical pencil. I consolidated my workspace and tried not to seem too surprised as I welcome him back. "I needed to write things down," he explained. "You see, I have this *condition* that makes short-term memory quite difficult for me," he went on, emphasizing the word "condition" in a lower voice. "I've found I need to write down what I want to say or else I tend to wander off or repeat myself." As he told me this, he clicked the pencil and checked off the first item on his notebook. Glancing over at his notes, I surmised that I was in for long story and moved to get more comfortable in my seat. Recollecting the story the man shared with me is difficult both because of its content and the form in which it was told. The events he shared with me were fragmented and suggested an unspoken association rather than proceeding as a targeted and linear narrative. At first I tried to discern how one vignette unfolded into the next or what the point of it all was supposed to be, but soon I surrendered my internal editorializing. After all, he was not putting forth an argument but sharing his life with me. 

What can be articulated is that he was once a traveling salesman, peddling roofs with his partner around the southern United States for the decades after World War I. He had been raised mostly in various boarding schools and relished telling me about the various boyhood companions he had. How many of them went with him into the war, he never said, but admitted that after he returned from active service he missed many of them dearly. When he was back in the States, he married quickly and soon got into selling roofs on the recommendation of a friend. The sales-trips would last weeks at a time, as his partner and him drove from town to town, staying in hotels along the way. These were the best years of his life, he told me, taking a break from checking off points on his list and getting very quiet as he looked down at the table. These intermissions became more and more frequent as he elaborated on the flow of their sale's pitch, the types of roofs they sold to customers across the country, and the adventures they had traveling from place to place. Then suddenly his story broke off again. I wasn't sure how many years had past or where he was in the country (or how much time had passed or where we were in our train-ride either for that matter), but halting in the middle of describing how his partner and him were trying to fix their car during one of many breakdowns, he looked up at me with tears in his eyes and went quiet.

"I'm sorry," he said dabbing his eyes with an old and soiled handkerchief, "I can't say any more about that." Shifting the story again to another time, apparently some time much later in his life, he mentioned that his wife was very happy when he came off the road, after which time, he never saw his partner. What his life at home was like was even harder to discern, as his voice had become shaky and the pauses turned from interruptions or turns in the narrative to a part of the mode of his speech. Whatever happened, working close to home and his wife, seemed to feel like a long fallow period of his life. Something had been lost. Something he would not name, except to say, jumping back to the previous stage of his story without transition, "we never did anything, my partner and I. We couldn't." Looking over at my books on castration, he pointed with the knuckle of his forefinger and told me, "but after it was over, I thought of Matthew 19:12, and that's when I came so close to doing THAT." He put down the notebook again, put his hands folded upwards in his lap and stared down at them. "I couldn't do it," he stammered, making it even harder to understand what "it" was in this context. "I wanted, I wanted, but I couldn't," he continued, "and cutting it off seemed like the only answer."

This time the narrative broke apart and never returned. I offered a few soothing words with sympathetic eyes. The old salesman had fallen into pieces. We sat together for some time in relative quiet, him adjusting himself and me nodding in affirmation. "Sorry," he said, beginning to put away his notebook, "when I saw you and saw your books, I thought..." He looked out the window for a while, seemingly uncertain how to proceed. "It's okay," I told him, "thank you for sharing that with me." "Can I ask you for one last thing?" he concluded, "can we pray together?" This request, like much of what preceded it, caught me completely off guard. Hesitantly I probed what he meant by that. Extending out his hands, he took mine, and finished by asking for God to look over us and guide us on our way. "Amen," I uneasily echoed with him as he picked up his things and left the car. 

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Children of the Knife

I call myself a queer confessor to the masses in circumstances such as these, but in this case, when parts of the exchange were the closest  I've ever come to performing a rite of Reconciliation, I did not feel like I had just undergone a ritual, sincere or farcical. It was, however, a return or a rebinding of a community brought together not by a feeling of wholeness or restoration, but of shared fragmentation of our bodies, stories, and pasts. It is a community defined not necessarily by any particular embodiment or identity. A reductive reading of the salesman's story would be to describe him as a gay man, even a repressed gay man. Yet he is not heterosexual either. In the end, he never confirmed or denied his castration. He never uttered the word eunuch or transsexual to describe either him or me. 

Yet on this journey he saw me as a sort of kindred with a shared association to the cutting off of body parts with whom he could share his story. What brought us together, across difference in time periods and modes of articulating ourselves was a shared relation to what Judith Butler calls "sharp technologies" (Doing Justice to Someone). Real or imagined, material or metaphorical, present or past, the power of edged devices has formed us. We are discursively children of the knife.

While the circumstances of becoming physical or metaphorical eunuchs may have pressed on us from outside, there is a sense through which we can "become eunuchs for the kingdom" in ways that continue to challenge the sharp divides between oppressor and oppressed. Instead of being complacent in the disinterested exchange between those who read us as marginalized others who can bear the weight of their queerness, we can challenge each other with a radical vulnerability. 

I had sat down and expected that this man would be yet another passer-by in my life and yet through his willingness to make his scars bare to me, I became implicated in his body. By sharing a history that was slowly (through the force of time and neurological change) becoming taken from him, I became implicated in his story. By receiving the desire and suffering of castration from him, I became implicated in his liberation.

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Mad for Margery: Insanity, Creation & the Imago Dei

“Dixit Dominus ad eum: 
Quis fecit os hominis? 
aut quis fabricatus est mutum et surdum, 
videntem et cæcum? nonne ego?”

The Book of Exodus 4:11

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The following is a transcript of "Crip Christianity"

from the Re-Orienting Disability Seminar

at the Nineteenth Biennial Congress of the New Chaucer Society

in Reykjavik, Iceland 16 July 2014 - 20 July 2014

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In the seventy-fourth chapter of the Book of Margery Kempe, Margery asks God how she might come into His divine presence. In response, Christ “drow hys creatur unto hys lofe and to mynde of hys passyon that sche myth not duryn to beheldyn a lazer er an other seke man, specialy yyf he had any wowndys aperyng on hym. So sche cryid and so sche wept as yyf sche had sen owr Lord Jhesu Crist wyth hys wowndys bledyng” (Staley, 74.4178-4182). She asks to see the Imago Dei, the image of God, and is shown the disabled. Through the “lofe” and “mynde” of Christ, Margery comes to read lepers and the other unreasonable bodies of the Lazar Houses as images of God’s presence.

After the transmission of Aristotle’s texts during the twelfth century, there was renewed interest in Europe for classical philosophy. Evident in the work of scholastic theologians, such as Thomas Aquinas, Faith had to make room, as Reason became the measure of all things; including what it meant to be made in the image of God (Imago Dei). By the fifteenth century, the Middle-English word “Mad” had developed into two distinct but not incompatible concepts. The older meaning of “mad” was to be “made,” the state of being a creature in a process of creation with social contexts (OED). The newer meaning of “mad” was to be “uncontrolled by reason” or “carried away by or filled with enthusiasm or desire; wildly excited” (OED). Madness in the latter sense marked differences through exceptions rather than histories, then isolated rather than contextualized these differences from communion with humanity or God.

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Leprosy, Lust & Narcissism

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In Mad for Foucault, Lynne Huffer contends that neither madness nor rationality is a personal state of being but a social product. Huffer credits the development of the Lazar Houses, where lepers specifically and “mad” persons generally were isolated from civilization, propelling the idea of individual subjectivity and sovereignty by inscribing the association of internalized madness and exterior rationality. Reason becomes a byproduct of suppressing private “Unreason” within public thought and government. As such, madness is not the exception but the foundation for Reason. To dwell within the Lazar House or within madness allows for the possible resistance of lying bare the means by which common unreasonableness (e.g. desire, dependency) turns into exceptional thought. In other words, Huffer writes, madness reveals “thought thinking itself.” (103)

While adeptly critiquing the implications of the Lazar House and madness for later human social relations in the Age of Reason, Huffer’s Mad for Foucault does not account for how the workings of “madness” point towards a medieval past with critical, contentious relationships with God. While madness in the fifteenth century not only threatened disability in this life, but damnation in the life to come, with worldly isolation prescribing eternal confinement in Hell, I argue that the self-conscious work of madness in the Book of Margery Kempe not only challenges the rationality of the world but the cosmological order. 

The implication that the mad were Imago Dei, made in the image of God, and that to go to a Lazar House was to enter into the presence of Christ turns the value system of rational society inside out. Subsequently, I contend that Margery breaks open of madness as being “mad,” i.e. both “made” and “unreasonable,” in the Imago Dei through the making of a spiritual treatise and comforting the poor and marginalized by entering into community, constituting an early form of liberation theology.

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The Brain & Four Humors

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With 135 instances, the creative use of the “mad” is the primary way the word is used in the Book. The story of “the creature” is a story of creation, with a litany of things “mad” for Margery or “mad” by her. A few such works include images of God (Staley, 30.1789), vows and prayers (3.270; 13.656; 27.1472; 33.1918; 41.2333; 43.2587; 52.2927; 54.3092; 66.3834; 76.4253; 76.4255-4256; 83.4754; 85.4962), seats (8.459), abbeys (84.4839), and money (23.1230; 37.2145). If Margery is, as she is called, a “mad woman, crying and roryng,” it is a madness enraptured with its own makings, reflecting the Imago Dei proposed by Thomas Reynolds’s Vulnerable Communion (Staley, 80.4589). The Imago Dei, Reynolds argues, is not the inscription of God’s Reason, but the revelation that the “mad” are also makers: “To be created in the image of God means to be created for contributing to the world” (177). In this way, this image serves as a call for “mad” creatures to imitate God in Creation, “The Imago Dei is a Imitatio Dei” (175).

The power to create may beg the question the Lazar House attempts to answer: what is the goal of creation? The demand for an end is essentially a product of Reason. The end serves as the rational justification for the work of creation. When Reason is the standard measure, assessing all things in terms of reasonability, only the reasonable serve as sufficient tools or products. The Lazar House is one such attempt to determine whether or how one contributes to the world. It then isolates the “mad” as those bodies operating beyond Reason’s ability to understand or govern. The problem with this is that reason becomes what G.K. Chesterton calls a “perfect circle” (21). By rejecting all that does not fit into itself, “what a great deal it leaves it out ! ”  (Chesterton 21). “No conditioned reason exists,” determines Reynolds, “that could justify or account for the fact that we are loved into being” (175). Anything or everything may turn out to be unreasonable.

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Black Bile & Melancholy

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If Reason is not the standard of Creation but the product of denying its “madness,” then the Imago Dei is unreasonable in its totality. Creation’s unreasonableness, argues Bruno Latour, is seen in the surprising existence of all we cannot account for or justify.

"Modernists believe they make the world in their image just as God made them in His. This is a strange and impious description of God. As if God were master of His Creation! As if He were omnipotent and omniscient. If he had these perfections, there would be no Creation... God too, is slightly overtaken by His Creation, that is, by all that is changed and modified and altered in encountering Him. Yes we are indeed made in the image of God, that is, we do not know what we are doing either. We are surprised by what we make." (Latour 287)

As a metaphysical sign, the Imago Dei does not govern but creates and revels in madness. Creation in this sense testifies against Reason. “No Creation” is reasonable because it is a closed loop. A self-sufficient perfection does not need to create. Our surprise in what is mad testifies that the Imago Dei is not Reason alone, but the work of creative community.

If the Imago Dei makes and makes without reason, it is most reflected by co-creative “madness” and not self-governing reason. The Book acts as such a self-conscious Imago Dei, opening and closing with descriptions of its making, proudly proclaiming, “this boke was mad” (Staley, 17.873; 89.4245). This recursion deepens in the only two instants in the Book where madness explicitly means unreason. The Book quotes the Pryke of Life’s author confessing to being “ovyrcome thorw desyr, begynne for to maddyn, for lofe governyth me and not reson… thei seyn 'Lo, yen wood man cryeth in the stretys,' but how meche is the desyr of myn hert thei parceyve not” (Staley, 62.3638). Likewise, Margery admits that “crying and roryng” for God makes her a “mad woman” (80.5489). In both cases, the writers testify that their madness arises from acts of making that exceed reason. The Book is a mad machine, “thought thinking itself” but one that gestures beyond the image of a “mad woman,” through devotional acts mad for the Imago Dei (Huffer 103). The Book, draws us to glimpse God’s “madness” making itself.

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Blood & Hyper Sexuality

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The difference between the circular logic of Reason and madness’s recursion is critical. Reason functions by maintaining the exclusivity of what is inside and outside its parameters. It is fundamentally conservative. Madness functions by the creation of difference (i.e. that which is not reducible to the terms of what is already known to exist) and so affirms what Huffer calls “co-extension” (29). Madness turns back on itself but always includes more than it had. The encounter of these differences fundamentally breaks open new possibilities for co-creation, how things are mad and what they may make. In this way, madness extends creative opportunities through co-liberation.

Turning again to Margery’s prayer for God’s presence, readers stand witness to how the Imago Dei in the “mad” bodies of the Lazar House inspires acts of liberation. Receiving her revelation, Margery “went to a place wher seke women dwellyd whech wer ryth ful of the sekenes and fel down on hir kneys beforn hem” (Staley, 74.4292-4193). Margery challenges the exclusionary logic of the Lazar House by crossing its threshold with a gesture of community. Seeing madness from the inside, Margery offers no rational answer to the woman’s ills, but remains with her, “Comfortyn hir” (74.4204).

Coming from the Latin, “comfort” means: “to strengthen (morally or spiritually); to encourage, hearten, inspirit, incite” (OED). Comfort is an act of community making, as the pre-fix suggests the strengthening be done “together, together with, in combination or union” with others (OED). “Comfortyn” incites a collective act “To confirm, corroborate” our togetherness (OED). By comfort, Margery confirms that they are “mad” together and “steryd hem to mekenes and pacyens” as corroborators in the Imago Dei (Staley, 74.4196). Comfort heartens madness as community making that defies the limits of reason. “Creative power,” writes Reynolds “is essentially a relational power.” (180).

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Phlegm, Rage & Apathy

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The encounter with the madness of the Imago Dei breaks a barrier for Margery that prevented her, like the walls of the Lazar House, from finding comfort. “In the yerys of werldly prosperité,” Margery regarded “no thyng mor lothful ne mor abhomynabyl …than to seen er beheldyn a lazer” (Staley, 74.4186-4187). The Book uses “abominable,” according to a biblical hermeneutic of pathologized bodies or acts, as in the Book of Leviticus and elsewhere, to mark things excluded from the community. It aligns the logic of exclusion with “worldly prosperite,” suggesting that the Imago Dei could not be present until she accepts her own madness. Only then could she find and give comfort.

Rather than committing an act of charity, where Margery remains fundamentally separate from the leper, the Book emphasizes the likeness of the “seke women” (Staley, 74.4192). The likeness of their sex reveals further likeness in their madness. According to humoral science, the women were already impaired by the inconstancy of their sex. This is compounded by the likeness in their minds. Margery finds herself most drawn to a woman “labowryd wyth many fowle and horibyl thowtys, many mo than sche cowde tellyn” (74.4201-4202). Subject to visions of her own, the woman Margery ministers to mirrors herself in body and action, “a mad woman, crying and roryng” (80.4588-4589). Entering the Lazar House, Margery not only finds comfort for the leper, but for herself.

The drive to comfort does not excuse the violence and isolation governing madness but seeks co-creation and co-liberation by a communal sharing of strength (physical, social, spiritual). Disability, writes Reynolds, marks how all things are mad “contingent in an open universe subject to elements of unpredictability, instability, and conflict” (177-187). As things are formed as disabled, they get pushed to the margins, but the Imago Dei of the Book of Margery Kempe gives a call to seek each other and make a co-creative community. Instead of being mad in isolation, we become mad for each other.

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Yellow Bile & Ego-Centrism

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Works Cited

"com-, prefix." OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2014. Web. 3 June 2014.

"comfort, v." OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2014. Web. 3 June 2014.

Chesterton, G. K. "The Maniac." Orthodoxy. Ed. Sheridan Gilley. South Orange, NJ: Chesterton Institute, 2008. Print.

Huffer, Lynne. Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory. New York: Columbia UP, 2010. Print.

Latour, Bruno. ""The Slight Surprise of Action"" Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999. Print.

"mad, adj." OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2014. Web. 3 June 2014.

Reynolds, Thomas E. Vulnerable Communion: A Theology of Disability and Hospitality. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2008. Print.

Staley, Lynn, ed. The Book of Margery Kempe. Kalamazoo, MI: Published for TEAMS (the Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages) in Association with the U of Rochester by Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan U, 1996. Print.

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