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This recounting of early years of training in linguistics, queer theory and feminism around the time of the 1996 Berkeley Women and Language Conference examines the role of simultaneities and resonances in the formation of a critical, productive if still inchoate transdisciplinarity. Such a transdisciplinarity managed to thrive in and around institutional delimitations; it owed a great deal to the inevitability of tensions in the affective politics of scholarship, a somewhat underattended dimension of intellectual life in the university. Ao revisitar anos iniciais de meus estudos em linguística, teoria queer e feminismo que ocorreram concomitantemente ao Berkeley Women and Language Conference de 1996, este artigo examina o papel de simultaneidades e ressonâncias na formação de uma transdisciplinaridade crítica e produtiva, embora rudimentar. Tal transdisciplinaridade vingou em e ao redor de delimitações institucionais; e deve muito à inevitabilidade das tensões na política afetiva da academia, uma dimensão pouco examinada da vida intelectual na universidade.

In this paper I would like to bring into historical perspective the interrelation of several notions such as race and disability, which at the present moment seem to risk, especially in the fixing language of diversity, being institutionalised as orthogonal in nature to one another rather than co-constitutive. I bring these notions into historical clarity primarily through the early history of what is today known as Down Syndrome or Trisomy 21, but in 1866 was given the name 'mongoloid idiocy' by English physician John Langdon Down. In order to examine the complexity of these notions, I explore the idea of 'slow' populations in development, the idea of a material(ist) constitution of a living being, the 'fit' or aptness of environmental biochemistries broadly construed, and, finally, the germinal interarticulation of race and disability – an ensemble that continues to commutatively enflesh each of these notions in their turn.

This article examines concepts whose strictly medical applications have only partly informed their widespread use and suggests that demonstrably shared logics motivate our thinking across domains in the interest of a politically just engagement. It considers exchanges between the culturally complex concepts of 'toxicity' and 'intoxication', assessing the racialised conditions of their animation in several geopolitically--and quite radically--distinct scenarios. First, the article sets the framework through considering the racial implications of impairment and disability language of 'non-toxic' finance capital in the contemporary US financial crisis. Shifting material foci from 'illiquid financial bodies' to opiates while insisting that neither is 'more' metaphorically toxic than the other, the article turns to address the role of opium and temporality in the interanimations of race and disability in two sites of 19th-century British empire: Langdon Down's clinic for idiocy, and China's retort on opium to Queen Victoria. The article concludes with a provocation that suggests yet another crossing of borders, that between researcher and researched: 'intoxicated method' is a hypothetical mode of approach that refuses idealised research positions by 'critically disabling' the idealised cognitive and conceptual lens of analysis.

This essay suggests that thinking, and feeling, with toxicity invites a recounting of the affectivity and relationality—indeed the bonds—of queerness as it is presently theorized. Approaching toxicity in three different modes, I first consider how vulnerability, safety, immunity, threat, and toxicity itself are sexually and racially instantiated in the recent panic about lead content in Chinese-manufactured toys exported the United States. This analysis, while seeming at first to hover somewhat outside queerness, is completed in the next section, where I interweave biopolitical considerations of immunity into an account of the peculiar intimacies and alienations of heavy metal poisoning, rendered in the first person. The essay ends by suggesting that the queering and racializing of material other than human amounts to a kind of animacy. Animacy is built on the recognition that abstract concepts, inanimate objects, and things in between can be queered and racialized without human bodies present, quite beyond questions of personification. Theorizing this animacy offers an alternative, or a complement, to existing biopolitical and recent queer-theoretical debates about life and death, while the idea of toxicity proposes an extant queer bond, one more prevalent today than is perhaps given credit. Such a toxic queer bond might complicate utopian imagining, as well as address how and where subject-object dispositions might be attributed to the relational queer figure.

The contributors to Crip Genealogies reorient the field of disability studies by centering the work of transnational feminism, queer of color critique, and trans scholarship and activism, showing how a white and Western-centric narrative of disability studies enables ableism and racism.