The paradox I am/within: Tripping in/towards Hope through a Gendered Disabled Poetics

Abstract

“The paradox I am/within” is from a poem I wrote during the first year of COVID after sitting with the bad feelings of an enduring and anxious present. The enduring nature of these feelings demanded I return to the poem as a sustaining practice and method of what Couser (2016) terms disability life writing, through which to assess: In what ways can a gendered disabled poetics bear the messy and detached histories of embodied difference? How can “hope” be generated in/out of despair? I proceed by offering the poem that titles this paper to discuss how it registers the hopeless paradoxes that neoliberal culture has made central to disability. Next, I share poems that attend to my feminized disability experience, inviting the reader to assess the discomfort of exposure. I then invoke the trip as a force of disruption and generator of hope, enabling me to engage more closely with Muñoz’s (2009) theory of hope. This paper is an experiment in poetic theorizing about the messiness of disability and the need for hope.

Keywords: Embodied difference, critical disability, disability poetry, hope, precarity