Prof. McRuer Featured in Broadcast on Poet Adrienne Rich

 

Recently Prof. Robert McRuer was interviewed by "Pushing Limits," a radio show by and for people with disabilities produced by KPFA in Berkeley, California. The show airs twice monthly in the Bay Area and is available as an online broadcast.

The segment in question, which is available for listening here, focused on influential American poet Adrienne Rich, who died at age 82 last month. Both before and after her death, Rich was heralded as a ground-breaking poet for whom art and political consciousness and conviction were ineluctably intertwined.

In the segment in question, Prof. McRuer talks about Rich as a lesbian feminist poet who also contributed work that was foundational for a generation of disability studies scholars. McRuer's own groundbreaking book, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability, bases its influential coinage "compulsory able-bodiedness" on Rich's 1980 essay "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," originally published in the journal Signs but available here through Google Scholar.