​I am at work on my first academic book, entitled The Social Worlds of Care: Filiation and Affiliation in Disability Life Writing, which explores how disability life writing – by authors ranging from Audre Lorde and Anne Boyer to Essex Hemphill and Sarah Schulman to Eli Clare – represents the struggle to foster more expansive forms of social care during an era marked by the neoliberal privatization of care within the bounded family. I develop the concept of “affiliation” from the work of Edward Said to show how individuals with disability have been able to survive under neoliberalism by compensating for the loss of "natural" familial bonds through the construction of relations belonging to culture and society.
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