J. Waggoner

Joint Appointment:  English

J. Waggoner is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender & Women’s Studies and English at UW-Madison. 

Waggoner’s research and teaching interests span U.S. literature and culture, feminist disability studies, queer and trans studies, health activisms, and African American studies.

Their first book, Black Crip Modern: Race, Gender, and the Roots of Disability Consciousness, is forthcoming from New York University Press’s “Crip: New Directions in Disability Studies” series in Summer 2026. They are currently at work on their second project, Queer Ableisms and the Persistence of Cripqueer Life, which explores both unique forms of ableism within queer and trans cultures, and how disabled queer people have developed creative strategies of resistance.

Their research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Coordinating Council on Women in History, the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Smith College’s Sophia Smith Collections, the Modernist Studies Association, UW’s Institute on Research in the Humanities, and the American Association of University Women.

Select Publications: 

“Problem Girls”: Gender Nonconformity as Resistance in Early Disabled Feminist Life Writing. A/b: Auto/Biography Studies, 1–31. (2025) 

“We Belong to One Another: Disability and Family Making” in The Art of Flourishing: Conversations on Disability. Oxford University Press. Co-authored with Jina B. Kim, Sami Schalk, Joseph Stramando, Leah Smith, and Mia Mingus. Ed.  Liz Bowen, Joel Michael Reynolds, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, and Erik Parens. (2025)

“Race, Gender and Sanism: Remapping Feminist Genealogies of Madness.” Signs: A Journal of Women and Culture in Society. Summer 2022. 

“Dykes, Disability, & Stuff: Queer Ableisms and the Work of Cripqueer Print Cultures.” Feminist Studies. 49. 1. 2023.

Co-editor with Dr. Ashley Mog, “Special Issue: Visionary Politics and Methods in Feminist Disability Studies” for The Journal of Feminist Scholarship. Winter 2020.

“‘The Seriously Injured of our Civic Life’: Imagining Disabled Collectivity in Depression-era Crip Modernisms” for Modern Fiction Studies. Special Issue “Modernist Fictions of Disability.” Ed. Maren Linett. 65.1. Spring 2019.

‘“My Most Humiliating Jim Crow Experience’: Afro-modernist Critiques of Eugenics and Medical Segregation.”  Modernism/modernity 24.3 (2017): 507-525.

“‘Oh say can you __’ : Race and Mental Disability in Performances of Citizenship.” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 10.1 (2016): 87-102. 

“Cripping the Bildungsroman: Reading Disabled Intercorporealities in Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms.”Journal of Modern Literature 38.1 (2014): 56-72.  Special Issue on “Disability and Generative Form,” ed. Janet Lyon.

Courses:

Gen&WS 737:  Feminist Disability Studies

Gen&WS 343:  Queer Bodies

Gen&WS 340: Topics in LGBTQ+ Sexuality (Topic: Queer Locations: Space, Place and Desire)

ENG 350: Special Topics in Literature and Gender (Topic: Trans and Nonbinary Literature and Culture)

Gen&WS 370: Gender and Disability (Topic: Race, Gender and Sexuality in Ill and Disabled Lives)

Gen&WS 640: Capstone (Topic: Creating Kin, Radical Friendship, and Chosen Family)

ENG 350: Special Topics in Literature and Gender (Topic: Gender, Health and Waiting Rooms)