Encountering the Blank Page: Improvising through Illegible Movements of Mad (Not)Doings
Jose Miguel Esteban
Disability Studies Quarterly12/10/2025·DOI·Read paper
Abstract
Through this piece, I struggle through the question of what it might mean to embody a mad methodology. Describing my choreographic encounters with a blank page, I reveal the narratives of failure through which my depressed gestures and anxious movements can be made legible as the not doing of academic expectation. And as I engage in a repetition of those gestures of failure, I interpret a performance of not doing that forces me to let go of the legibility through which I typically make sense of my movements as a scholar. As this piece increasingly fragments into a space of illegibility and non-sense, I come closer (but never quite get) to accessing the methodologies through which we might embody the fugitivity of mad study.
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