Alexandre Baril, Ph.D.
Pronouns: he/him
Alexandre Baril, Ph.D. in Women’s Studies, is an Assistant Professor at the School of Social Work at the University of Ottawa, specializing in diversity, including sexual, gender, (dis)ability, and linguistic diversity. Alexandre Baril’s interdisciplinary training combines ten years in philosophy/ethics, a Ph.D. in Women’s Studies and two postdoctoral fellowships in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Wesleyan University (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council/SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship), and in Political Science at Dalhousie University (Izaak Walton Killam Postdoctoral Fellowship).
He has published articles in journals such as Hypatia: Journal of Feminist Philosophy; Feminist Review; TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly; Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture & Social Justice; Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies; Annual Review of Critical Psychology; Medicine Anthropology Theory; Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies; Canadian Journal of Disability Studies; Disability & Society; Recherches féministes; Enfances, familles, générations: Revue interdisciplinaire sur la famille contemporaine; and Recherches sociologiques & anthropologiques.
His intersectional research places gender, feminist, queer, trans, and disability/crip studies in dialogue with the sociology of the body, health and social movements.
Cripping Trans Studies and Transing Crip Studies: Transness and Disability
Keynote - Wednesday, 12.09. 16:00 - 17:00 ZHG 011Quantitative studies about trans communities, while not focused on disability, nonetheless show that rates of disability and chronic illness are much higher in trans communities than in the general population. In their US survey of more than 27,000 trans participants, James et al. (2016: 57) show that 39% of respondents were living with a disability or chronic illness. A Canadian study of more than 400 trans participants showed that 55% of respondents were living with a disability or chronic illness (Bauer et al. 2012: 10). However, while the number of trans people living with disability is high, theoretical literature on this topic remains scarce and no empirical research has been produced to specifically interrogate the intersections between transness and disability and cisgenderism/transphobia and ableism. The two questions at the heart of my presentation are: Why is the overlap between trans and disabled experiences and embodiment unthinkable? Why is the experience of transness so often excluded from the disability category? I argue that there is heuristic value in theorizing transness and disability from an intersectional perspective and in mobilizing theoretical frameworks produced in critical disability/crip studies for trans studies. To do so, I first review how scholars in health and disability studies historically theorize two main models of disability: medical and social. The medical model interprets disability as an individual problem to be cured, while the social model presents ableist society as the cause of disabled people’s suffering. I argue that similar paradigms have been used to examine trans realities. Following feminist disability scholars and queer crip scholars who demonstrate the limits of both models and argue for more complex approaches to understanding disability, I then explore a socio-subjective model of disability and apply it to trans issues. This socio-subjective model takes both social oppression and subjective experience into account to describe the complexity of disabled and trans people’s intersecting realities.
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