Syracuse University School of Education doctoral candidate Jersey Cosantino G’23 has been awarded the 2024 Trans/Gender Variant Caucus Award from the National Women’s Studies Association. They will accept their award at November’s NWSA Annual Conference in Detroit, MI.
“This prestigious award is a testament to Jersey’s scholarship and dedication to trans and mad studies,” says Professor Michael Gill.
The NWSA award committee notes that their submission—“From Disavowal to Avowal: Cultivating a Mad Trans Studies via an Intergroup Dialogue Praxis”—”offers an original, grounded approach to reconciling and co-theorizing the fields of trans studies and mad studies. With deep analytical attention to the ways that the foundations of trans studies precluded madness, [this] paper is an exciting corrective that considers both fields in tandem and argues for the necessity of Mad Trans Studies.”
In addition to a bachelor’s degree in English and Studio Art from Wellesley College (2009) and a master’s degree in High School English Education (Grades 8-12) from Lesley University, Jersey holds certificates of advanced studies in Women’s and Gender Studies and Disability Studies from Syracuse University. They are Consulting Editor of the Journal of Queer and Trans Studies in Education and Co-editor of the International Mad Studies Journal.
About Jersey Cosantino’s Doctoral Thesis
“Resisting Pathologizing Discourses: (Re)claiming Mad, Neurodivergent, and Trans* Narration via a MadTrans* Studies1 Oral History Method(ology)” explores how Mad (a reclaimed socio-political identity for individuals with mental health conditions and labels of mental “illness”), neurodivergent, and neuroexpansive2 trans and gender nonconforming individuals narrate their evolving sense of gender in relation/resistance to pathologizing diagnostic discourses3.
This research contends with grapplings such as how pathologizing diagnostic discourses influence narratives of self-identification4., becoming, and identity formation; how these individuals navigate the intersections between Madness, neurodivergence, neuroexpansiveness, and transness, including in educational5 and trans affirming health care contexts6; and how narrations at their identity intersections might facilitate new un/gendered worlds, discourses, imaginaries, and futurities.
Notes and Glossary
Written by Jersey Cosantino
- Developing an innovative Madtrans oral history methodology for recording, poetically transcribing, analyzing, and archiving narratives of multiply marginalized individuals, my research contributes to the co-creation of a new, cross-disciplinary field of Madtrans studies that brings together fields of Mad (short for madness) studies and trans studies. Learn more in the first issue of the International Mad Studies Journal, especially Costa and Ross (2022) “Mad Studies Genealogy and Praxis” and Cosantino (2022) “Now Don’t Say We Didn’t Warn You: A Poetic Meditation on the (Im)Possibilities of Mad Trans Time.”
- See Ngwagwa “NeuroexpansiveTM Thoughts.” A coinage of Kassiane Asasumasu, neuroexpansive is a “rejection of the term ‘neurodivergent’ and the ideology that undergirds it.”
- See Madness Network News “Definitions.” Because experiences of neurodivergence and mental health conditions have long been used to discredit the validity of trans individuals’ knowledge of their gender identity and expression, many trans narratives have been forced into sanist and ableist scripts—constraints rooted in settler colonialism, white supremacy, eugenics, nationalism, and anti-Blackness.
- As a queer, Mad, trans, and Autistic scholar who is white and, more specifically, a white settler, with education and citizenship privileges, my research centers the subjectivities of Mad, neurodivergent, and neuroexpansive trans individuals whose lived experiences and narratives have been historically silenced.
- See Cosantino (2022) “A Mad Trans Educational Scholar’s Letter to the Ablesanism of the Research Community” Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature, 16. “It is from this space of embodied / ideological, / methodological, / and pedagogical reckoning / that I question / what it means / to be a Mad trans researcher / within an academy that relies so heavily / upon the primacy of rationality, / logic, and access / to a particular form of / validated Truth …”
- See Cosantino, J. “Hauntings of Longing: A Mad Autoethnographic Poetic Transcription.” Disability Studies Quarterly, 41 (2021). A poetry collection that explores my grapplings with my Mad and trans identities within the curative, diagnostic, medical model discourses of the medical industrial complex.
You can explore Jersey Cosantino’s work by visiting their Google Scholar page.