Re-setting the Table: Academic Ableism, Precarity, and Teaching Stein in the Pandemic

It was September 24, 2020, and my "Gender and Care in Modern US Poetry" class had just had a tough conversation. For the first three weeks of the semester, the students had been remarkably engaged. But something shifted as we moved into week five. My carefully conceived arc from eugenic modernism to the "crip" poetics of Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons fell flat. I stopped