Librarianship and Disability at the Performative Turn

Natalia Kapacinskas, Teaching and Learning Librarian, University of Houston Libraries

For much of my time as a student in universities, what I knew of my professors and peers in higher education could be characterized as aggressive wellness, conveyed through both an absence of visible or acknowledged illness or disability and through health’s cultural shorthand: granola, 5Ks on weekends, kale salads. As someone whose chronic illness and disability predates nearly her entire memory, this experience of higher education as a place where successful scholarship was produced by healthy, well, and abled individuals taught me that I would need to pretend to be all of those things in order to be intellectual. When I started teaching students of my own in a library setting, I became increasingly uncomfortable with all the pretending; I worried that students would think that I, too, had merited a place in higher education due to aggressive health. So, I started trying to perform my disabilities in the classroom in small ways: wearing a medical device visibly, bringing emergency supplies with me to class. Moving from student to teacher and from pretending at wellness to performing chronic illness felt simultaneously right and unsettling to me. I still have trouble negotiating which parts of myself I want to perform in the classroom. These internal negotiations brought me to reading about “the performative turn” in cultural studies. With a different meaning than the word performance as used to indicate theatricality or falsity, performance in the context of the performative turn sees reality as continually constructed and revised by human activity (Bachmann-Medick 73-96; Wikipedia). As Judith Butler suggests, referencing the socio-cultural construction of gender, “one is not simply a body, but . . . one does one's body” (Butler 521). I have since been pondering whether the performative turn is a useful theoretical lens from which to examine librarianship and disability. My research on this matter is still absolutely in-progress, but my proposed paper will be asking this question. I am interested in understanding how librarians with disabilities or chronic illnesses may (or may not) enact or embody those realities, and what meanings those performances of (dis)ability create. Given that academic librarianship has been seen as a profession that reproduces the realities of scholarship and higher education (see Shirazi and Wade for just two examples), whether and how librarians perform disability and chronic illness has implications not only for ourselves, but also our profession, students, and campuses. Including the rapidly-increasing recent scholarship on disabled library workers with voices from critical disability studies and the disability justice movement, my research will certainly acknowledge that while draw on my own experiences as a chronically ill and disabled librarian, the experience of disability, chronic illness, and (in)accessbility or discrimination are personal, intersectional, and muti-factorial, and multiple perspectives are always necessary. In the time between now and the Library Research Forum will be to ask: Is this model helpful, or interesting, or even harmful? What are the limits of this theoretical standpoint? I will welcome feedback and ideas about this in-progress project during the Forum.

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