This video transcript is formatted to comply with PDF/UA standards. Indisposable: Chapter 2 In Indisposable: Structures of Support After the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act), a Ford Foundation Gallery exhibition curated by Jessica A. Cooley and Ann M. Fox, leading artists and scholars address the lived experience of disability today and the urgent questions of this moment where pandemic and demands for racial justice intersect. This video transcript captures #QuarantineLooks: Embracing the Fabulously Mundane, an event that took place on November 18, 2020, featuring Sami Schalk and Jina B. Kim, and hosted by Ford Foundation Gallery director Lisa Kim. Transcript begins. LISA KIM: Good afternoon. My name is Lisa Kim. I am a Korean American woman with shoulder-length, straight black hair. I’m wearing pink glasses, a cream-colored shirt, and a white, ceramic-bead necklace. I’m coming to you today from the Hudson Valley in New York, on land that is the ancestral home of the Mohicans and Munsee Lenape. Welcome to the second installment of our multipart, online exhibition, Indisposable: Structures of Support after the ADA. This exhibition was curated by Jessica Cooley and Ann Fox, who are behind the scenes with us today. You can meet Jessica and Ann on the home page of our exhibition on our website and hear their exhibition explanation and hear a hello from them. Our shift from gallery to online programming for this exhibition gave us the opportunity to invite artists, writers, scholars, and performers to envision and create new work— work intended to be shown in this space and shared and broadcast to your screens. We kicked off the exhibition series in September with the beautiful film by Alex Dolores Salerno, examining the intertwined commodification of youth and wellness and the disabling effects of colonialism. For today’s event, we bring you joy—joy in the time of quarantine and lockdown as shared by Sami Schalk, how pleasure, agency, pride, and joy can spread more joy. In this spirit, I’m happy to have MK Czerwiec the “Comic Nurse,” join us today to live- illustrate the event. You’ll have a peek at her progress during a comfort break later on in this hour, and after the event all of MK’s illustrations will be available to you to download. We also want to celebrate your quarantine looks and hope that you will join us at the end of the event by turning on your cameras and joining the short Zoom screen party. We’ll be rolling out the next series of online events and projects over the first half of 2021, so please stay connected with us for future events. 1 A critical component of this and all of our events is access. Access exists as a form of radical care interwoven into the production and conceptual workings of the art selected for this exhibition and how we work within this technology. We invite you to attend from a space that makes your body feel the most comfortable and receptive to the central idea of the event: that joy begets joy begets joy. If you cannot stay with us for the full hour, please know that the event is being recorded and will be posted on our website. To aid in your viewing experience today, if you are on a computer, we recommend watching in “Gallery View” mode so you can see all of the speakers, the visuals, and American Sign Language interpreters. Our ASL interpreters today are Gloria Vargas and Michael Barrios. We also have real-time live closed- captioning. For live closed-captioning, click on the “Closed Captions” button at the bottom of your screen. We also have David Linton providing audio descriptions to MK’s illustrations. To access audio descriptions, click on the “Interpretation” button at the bottom of your screen and choose the “English” channel. Please feel free to comment and communicate with us through the Q&A and chat box functions at the bottom of your screen. And for any technical questions, please email [email protected]. Now, to give you a little roadmap for the hour, we’ll have introductory remarks by Jina B. Kim followed by a screening of Sami Schalk’s video essay #QuarantineLooks: Embracing the Fabulously Mundane, followed by a conversation between Sami and Jina, during which we’ll have a five-minute comfort break and then we’ll come back to conversation and have time for Q&A, then our closing party. Our event moderator and emcee today is Jina B. Kim. Jina is an assistant professor of English language and literature and of the study of women and gender at Smith College. She specializes in feminist disability studies, women-of-color feminisms, queer- of-color critique, and contemporary ethnic US literatures, with an emphasis on feminist- of-color writing and cultural expression post-1968. Prior to joining Smith College, she was a Consortium for Faculty Diversity postdoctoral fellow at Mount Holyoke College in the program in Critical Social Thought. She is currently at work on a manuscript tentatively titled Dreaming of Infrastructure: Crip-of-Color Imaginaries after the 1996 US Welfare State, which examines political and aesthetic engagements with public- dependency discourse in the literary-cultural afterlife of US welfare reform. I’m so pleased to have Jina take us on this journey with Sami and #QuarantineLooks for the next 45 minutes or so. Thank you all for joining us online and enjoy the show. JINA B. KIM: Thank you, Lisa. So, my name is Jina B. Kim, and I am a Korean American woman with a mullet. I’m wearing big, wire-rim glasses, white, plastic chain earrings, a white mesh turtleneck with an eye pattern all over it, and a rust-colored, cropped cardigan with the same eye motif. I’m Zooming with you from Nipmuc and Pocomtuc land, also known as Northampton, Massachusetts. And it is my greatest pleasure to introduce Dr. Sami Schalk, a brilliant queer feminist scholar and someone who I am also very lucky to call my friend. I’m going to start with Sami’s official bio, talk a little about our personal connection, and introduce the amazing video that Sami created for this occasion. 2 Dr. Sami Schalk is an associate professor in the department of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses on disability, race, and gender in contemporary American literature and culture, especially African American and women’s texts. Dr. Schalk’s first book, Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction, was published by Duke University Press in 2018. Dr. Schalk’s work has also appeared in a variety of journals, such as Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, Journal of Modern Literature, Journal of Popular Culture, Girlhood Studies, and African American Review. So, I first met Sami at the 2015 Society for Disability Studies conference, where she saw me give a paper and she asked a fabulous question that instantly cemented our friendship. Over the years, we have been co-conspirators and collaborators in our intellectual lives and have also very much connected over our shared love of fashion as well as our commitments to joy and pleasure, even in the midst of crisis. We are co- authors, with an article titled “Integrating Race Transforming Feminist Disability Studies,” out in the latest issue of Signs. At conferences, back when those were actually a thing, we always found the nearest hot tub-pool combo, went out of our way for delicious meals and cocktails, and modeled our conference looks for each other before going out to slay the general public. Under pandemic times, we always boost up each other’s quarantine looks across all social media platforms. Dr. Schalk teaches me every day that being fabulous is a discipline and one that we need to exercise on a regular basis. Given our friendship, it was, of course, such a pleasure to watch this video, QuarantineLooks—hashtag QuarantineLooks—excuse me—Embracing the Fabulously Mundane. The following video essay by Sami Schalk is a slideshow of Sami’s social media posts, documenting her colorful clothing, hair, and makeup. We joined Sami on a photo shoot of her #QuarantineLooks, dressing up in floor-length gowns and sparkling face masks while tackling everyday tasks, such as taking out the garbage or going to the supermarket. We’re also lucky to see some of the many glittery Doc Marten pairs that Dr. Schalk collects. So, without further ado, I would love to start the video, #QuarantineLooks: Embracing the Fabulously Mundane. [The video begins with synthesized drum beats from the song “Homebody” by Miss Eaves, which plays in the background throughout the video.] SAMI SCHALK [voice-over]: #QuarantineLooks: Embracing the Fabulously Mundane. In March 2020, facing lockdown alone in Madison, Wisconsin, I was isolated and deeply depressed. To combat my depression, I began creating daily hair, makeup, and outfit looks that I posted on my social media accounts under the hashtag #QuarantineLooks. As friends and followers commented on how seeing my daily looks brightened their day during a difficult and scary time for many people, I realized that the looks were not only about making myself feel good but also about connecting with people during a time where I was very isolated and at times quite unwell emotionally. 3 I mostly took the photos using my phone, a Bluetooth clicker, and a tripod. But twice during the lockdown, I worked with local, disabled, queer photographer Sam Waldron to do FaceTime photo shoots, as well. For these photos, I would set up my phone on a tripod and pose with Sam’s direction while she took screenshots that she edited into beautiful images.