Brady Forrest
Brady James Forrest is currently adjunct faculty in the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Georgetown University where they specialize in transdisciplinary approaches to visual culture, fine art, and literature informed by trans/queer theory, critical disability studies, and critical race theory.
In 2024, they received their PhD in English from George Washington University with area specializations in Crip/Queer Studies and American Literature and Culture. While at GW they co-organized the 2018 Composing Disability Studies Conference and co-founded and led the Department of English Crip/Queer Reading Group.
Forrest’s current book manuscript, tentatively titled An Attunement to Quiet: Crip Feelings, Queer Intimacy, and the Trans Gaze, proposes and analyzes an archive of feeling containing cultural artifacts which, when considered not through the couple or dialectic form but through the nuptial, evidences the way minoritized people build and sustain social life worlds through affective social bonds rather than identitarian ones. Through its readings of nuptials the project identifies three minor modes of sociality around which these affective bonds coalesce—crip feelings, queer intimacy, and the trans gaze—and the ways each formation possesses the potential to sustain minoritized communities facing interlocking ideologies of anti-Black racism, settler colonialism, and cisheteropatriarchy as seen in dominant modes of sociality—white affect, the nuclear family, and the male gaze. In turn, each minor mode of sociality provides the ground to rethink relationality and power centering shared affective positions rather than identity categories. From this construction and analysis of the social world the project ultimately asserts quiet as an undergirding structure of feeling that turns away from ideologies sustained by property ownership, the category of the human, and settler sexualities and towards the affective worldbuilding potential of eroticism, incommensurability, hapticality.
Their article “Crip Feelings/Feeling Crip” considers the slipperiness of identity and affect as organizing logics in representations of psychiatric disability in visual culture and queer studies scholarship was published in the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies’ Special Issue on Disability and Emotions Ed. David Bolt (2020). Their manuscript “A Transcrip Theory: Intimacy, Embodiment, and the Trans Gaze in Leo Xander Foo’s Photography” is under review for the Trans[]Crip Special Issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly Eds. J. Logan Smilges & Slava Greenberg. The manuscript considers the imbricated nature of gender, disability, and pathology as a way of recontextualizing disability studies within trans studies.
Forrest has presented work at the American Studies Association Annual Meeting, the Mezipatra Queer Film Festival, the Museum of Popular Culture Conference, the DC Queer Studies Symposium, the Northeast MLA Annual Convention, Reaching Out MBA Annual Conference, the Critical Ethnic Studies Association Conference, and the Center for Culture and Disability Studies at Liverpool Hope University.