MAP Cesar Chávez Day Lecture: Andrea Pitts (UNC Charlotte)

Information on how to participate in this virtual event will be added closer to the event date.

Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s writings and life place her somewhat precariously within discussions of both American Philosophy and disability studies. Yet, to borrow a concept from Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (2011), it is precisely due to the “misfit” character of Anzaldúa’s career-long activism, coalition building, and writings, that she is an important figure to analyze within these areas of study. Accordingly, to place Anzaldúa’s work in relation to American philosophy and disability critique, I turn specifically to several key concepts from Anzaldúa’s oeuvre that center questions of embodiment, illness, and colonial history in a manner that, I argue, add resources to a queer crip critique of the ablebodied heteronormativity of institutional medicine across the Americas.

SPEAKER BIO

Andrea Pitts (they/them) is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. Their research interests include women of color feminisms, critical prison studies, and decolonial theory. They are the author of Nos/Otras: Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Multiplicitous Agency, and Resistance (SUNY Press August 2021), and co-editor with Mariana Ortega and José Medina of Theories of the Flesh: Latinx and Latin American Feminisms, Transformation, and Resistance (Oxford University Press 2020) and Beyond Bergson: Examining Race and Colonialism through the Writings of Henri Bergson with Mark Westmoreland (SUNY Press 2019).