Following the lead of activist and disabled writer Alice Wong, this panel “creates a

dialogue” and is, of itself, “an intimate act bringing us together across space and time”

(Disability Intimacy xx). It therefore invites papers engaged in the long genealogy of literary,

visual, and historical representations of a frequently overlooked, or gainsayed, symbiosis: that is,

between intimacy, broadly defined, and the disabled or “defective” bodymind in the early

modern archive. This might include considering how disability sparks desire, enhances pleasure,

generates trust, or brings characters together in close-knit formations. It might mean fleshing out

how disability has a queering effect that structures represented relationships in nonnormative

spatial and temporal terms. Or it might involve examining crip ancestry, disability ancestry, and

one’s affective—maybe downright personal—relationship to the “mad” or halting figures of

Renaissance texts, as well as to the period’s crip artists.

Embracing the possibility of disability intimacy encourages us to build on work that has

long grounded early modern studies—on such topics as affect, voice, authority, and unruly

embodiment—while pushing in new directions too. Allison Hobgood began clearing several of

these paths in Beholding Disability, by exploring the “fraught terrain that is the disabled body

when it is simultaneously a sexual body,” and by “invit[ing] conversation about that juncture”

(108), while Elizabeth Bearden’s recent Crip Authority likewise insists on the importance of

building—and sustaining—“disability community.”

To continue this much-needed conversation, we seek papers that reconceptualize the

premodern body through various forms of disability intimacy; that challenge longstanding ideas

of somatopsychic difference as both undesirable and undesiring; that engage with conceptions of

disability as gain, rather than a lack or failure of signification; or use Renaissance models for

engaging with the cultural past to interrogate its lasting influence on understandings of the

closeness various bodies can and cannot achieve. We welcome transhistorical, transnational,

translingual, and comparative approaches, and interdisciplinary work that dialogues with

material understandings of the body, humanistic approaches, critical theory, or recent critical

interventions in disability studies.

Those interested should submit to Pasquale Toscano (ptoscano@vassar.edu) and Alani

Hicks-Bartlett (alani_hicks-bartlett@brown.edu, by July 15, 2026:

1.) paper title and abstract (200–250 words);

2.) a brief CV (no more than 2 pp.);

3.) a <100-word biography with institutional affiliation and contact information.