Jess (Jesse) Waggoner
Assistant Professor of Gender & Women's Studies and English
Biography
Jesse 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, was published in Summer 2026 in New York University Press’s “Crip” Series. 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:
Books:
Black Crip Modern: Race, Gender, and the Roots of Disability Consciousness, New York University Press, July 2026
Articles:
“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 105: Intersectional Approaches to Disability Studies
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)
Black Crip Modern: Race, Gender, and the Roots of Disability Consciousness
Waggoner, J. Black Crip Modern: Race, Gender, and the Roots of Disability Consciousness. NYU Press, 2026.
Black Crip Modern uncovers how early twentieth-century Black writers, artists, and activists laid the groundwork for modern disability consciousness. Under Jim Crow, Black disabled citizens were excluded from social services and medical reforms, even as racist violence, carceral surveillance, eugenic logic, and exploitative labor conditions deepened disabling experiences. Through literature, film, photography, and personal testimony, Black modernists registered these compounded injustices and articulated new ways of thinking about illness, impairment, and care.
Engaging the work of figures such as Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Wallace Thurman, Pauli Murray, Langston Hughes and Marita Bonner, Jess Waggoner traces how Black cultural production challenged both white supremacy and ableist ideals of progress. In their writing, Waggoner finds an early “Black crip modern” consciousness—one that rejected eugenic reform, critiqued racialized caregiving hierarchies, and envisioned collective care grounded in feminist and anti-carceral principles.
In conversation with contemporary disability justice movements, Black Crip Modern reveals how Black thinkers and artists forged a disability politics before it was formally named. By assembling these overlooked histories of Black ill and disabled life, Waggoner reframes the foundations of disability studies and insists that Black cultural production has always been central to the struggle for bodily autonomy, access, and justice.