Davy Knittle (he/they) is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania. Davy works at the intersection of the environmental humanities, queer and trans theory, and critical race studies. His work has appeared recently or is forthcoming in WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, and Planning Perspectives. He is a reviews editor for the poetics journal Jacket2, and curates the City Planning Poetics talk and reading series at the Kelly Writers House.
Authors | Davy Knittle
Articles on Amodern by Davy Knittle
THE DISABILITY POLITICS OF BLIGHT
Grappling with Urban Cure in Brenda Coultas's “The Bowery Project”
This essay applies Eli Clare’s discussion of the “ideology of cure,” which Clare links both to human bodies and to non-human environments, to the gentrification of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. I identify how ableist body-scale ideas of cure shape the lives of marginalized urban residents as they are applied to urban areas in the process of transformation. Taking Brenda Coultas’s 2003 work of documentary poetics, “The Bowery Project,” as a case study, I identify how ideas of improvement and repair shape both the lives of disabled people in cities and the transformation of urban neighborhoods. I locate urban redevelopment as a key context for advocacy in pursuit of disability justice.