Anger can be a crippling emotion when we are forced to consider the limitations of our body. Perhaps no one else can better testify to this predicament than people with disabilities who routinely hear jeers and jokes about the assistance they depend upon to do things that able bodies take for granted. But what if anger could transform into a seed that nourishes people with disabilities to grow legs to walk on, pass through the crowd, and demand to be seen much like Moses at the Red Sea. This episode explores the regenerative potency of anger alongside two women with disabilities who also identify as punk: Adina Burke and Francis Stewart.
Adina Burke is a punk musician and a poet. The Hat Box Collective, a collaboration with Evan Koch of the WARSAW Band, is a series of poems with distortions of the guitar to accentuate the coupling of two seemingly antithetical emotions: anger and empathy. Adina is also the author of A Bird’s Eye, her inaugural publication which was followed by Wheelchairs, Whips, and Bondage Tape: A comprehensive guide to fucking, disability, and falling in and out of love poetically. Lastly, Adina is a Jew who reminded us that Moses was disabled. Our second guest Dr. Francis Stewart is the Implicit Religion Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Bishop Grosseteste University in Lincoln England and a pioneering figure in the study of punk and religion. She is the author of Punk Rock is My Religion: Straight Edge Punk and Religious Identity and presently working towards the publication of her second monograph on punk women in her homeland of Northern Ireland.
You can support our guests by immersing in their publications. We also highly encourage you to consider purchasing the Hat Box Collective. For directions, simply click on this link.
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