Brady Forrest
Brady James Forrest is 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.
Informed by a transdisciplinary approach to trans/queer of color critique, feminist disability studies, and critical race theory, Forrest's manuscript in progress, Confounding Nuptials: Crip Feelings, Queer Intimacy, and the Trans Gaze, reimagines the bounds of trans, crip, queer sociality through the nuptial form. The project proposes a collection of nuptial pairs across fine art, visual culture, and literature as they confound hegemonic structures to argue that rather than being illegible or unrecognizable, these pairs are rich sites producing new onto-epistemological potentialities. The potentialities explored in the project—crip feeling, queer intimacy, and the trans gaze—veer from common sense rooted in the category of the human and the concept of property to instead coalesce around the embodied sense making of eroticism, incommensurability, and hapticality.
Their article “Crip Feelings/Feeling Crip,” which considers the slipperiness of identity and affect as organizing logics in representations of psychiatric disability in visual culture and queer studies scholarshisp was published in the Disability and the Emotions Special Issue of Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies. Their manuscript "Transcrip Study: Affect, Pathology, 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.