Travis Chi Wing Lau is Assistant Professor of English at Kenyon College. His research and teaching focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and culture, health humanities, and disability studies. Alongside his scholarship, Lau frequently writes for venues of public scholarship like Lapham’s Quarterly, Public Books, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. His poetry has appeared in Barren Magazine, Wordgathering, Glass, South Carolina Review, Foglifter, and The New Engagement, as well as in two chapbooks.
Authors | Travis Chi Wing Lau
Articles on Amodern by Travis Chi Wing Lau
THE CRIP POETICS OF PAIN
This essay considers how my experience of living with scoliosis-related disabilities and chronic pain has shaped my own poetic and scholarly practices. Through readings of contemporary disability poetry, disability theory, and interdisciplinary frameworks in pain studies, I argue that disability poetics offers the formal means of reimagining pain beyond unsharable, unknowable pathology. I make a case for crip poetry as cripistemologies of pain: literary speculations on more collective ways of knowing through pain and its embodied sensations that expand pain’s cultural imaginary. Such cripistemologies of pain can intervene in the larger crises of pain like the opioid epidemic by imagining new forms of compassionate care for those living with pain.