Rocky Mountain Review

While both the queer and the disabled body have been marginalized for their supposed incoherence and even immorality, Riva Lehrer’s creative non-fiction essay, “Golem Girl Gets Lucky,” and Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues (1993) evince how these qualities are universal to all embodiment. Through these works, I destabilize the myth of the autonomous self and initiate a particularized study of queer/crip kinship patterns, improvisatory systems of connection that adhere and reform across bodily and/or psychic scars. Thus, scars become not only evidence of wounding, but also new surfaces on which to develop community and intimacy within systemic violence and oppression.