Disability Works

Patrick McKelvey is Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre Arts at University of Pittsburgh

"Disability Works puts before us histories that will quickly become indispensable for scholars and general readers, narrating how vibrant queercrip imaginaries have long looked beyond rehabilitation and indeed beyond work, imagining and performing ways of being-in-common that speak back to compulsory able-bodiedness. The histories that McKelvey documents provide us alternative, critically queer, and generatively disabled maps for moving forward. The demands of productive citizenship have rarely been felt as strongly as they are at this moment. In this context, the crip imagination that the book documents is a refreshing reminder that another world is possible." (Robert McRuer, author of Crip Times: Disability, Globalization, and Resistance) "McKelvey takes disability history in a radically new direction by placing theater at the heart of U.S. disability politics since 1960. Tracing the lives and afterlives of government funding for disability arts, Disability Works brilliantly—and unexpectedly—calls attention to performance as a tool of vocational rehabilitation. As the government has tried to put disabled artists to work, telling them how to act, those artists have subverted the rehabilitative approach to disability. From the National Theatre of the Deaf to Alvin Ailey's American Dance Theater, McKelvey brings new archives, new works, and new crip aesthetics (such as "bureaucratic drag") to the field of disability studies." (Mara Mills, New York University) "Bringing queer analytics and crip critiques of work together with performance theory and meticulous archival analysis, Patrick McKelvey offers a rigorous exploration of the rehabilitative ethos structuring relationships between disability and performance in the postwar US. Disability Works is an outstanding example of interdisciplinary political economic analysis: an essential cultural history of the ways governmental institutions deployed theatrical initiatives as crucial infrastructure supporting this rehabilitative ethos, as well as of activist artists who both appropriated and disidentified with the norms of that ethos. Essential reading." (Judith Hamera, Princeton University) "McKelvey's book offers something engaging for multiple theoretical and practical audiences. His book is a deep archival dive using crip theory methods and aims. He weaves his analysis through a commitment to Black disability politics and performance and queer performance. He gives disability theater historians a rich set of examples and texts over which to muse. These threads weave together to make McKelvey's piece a key text for performance studies scholars and classrooms." (Text and Performance Quarterly)