I presented as part of a roundtable on editing with an ethos of care during COVID-19, along with my co-editors for the Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics special issue, Ruth Osorio and Jessie Male. We tried to write our interwoven talk with an ethos of care as well, attending to each other’s labor and focusing on articulating different aspects of our editorial process (as first-time editors, no less!).
Access copy of my talk below.
Carework and Editing During COVID: Reflections on Being a Disabled Guest Editor
Vyshali Manivannan, Pace University – Pleasantville
Modern Language Association Conference, San Francisco, CA
January 8, 2023
Hello! I’m Vyshali, and I co-edited two recent special issues of the Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics on Carework and Writing During COVID. I live with fibromyalgia and myalgic encephalomyelitis, or chronic nomadic pain, chronic fatigue, and permanent malaise exacerbated by physical and cognitive exertion. These chronic illnesses fluctuate in intensity and unpredictably affect the rhythms of my academic life and my ability to think, write, and engage in service activities. I require adaptive working environments. Anti-ableist acceptance and accommodation of my fluctuating capacities. Workflows and deadlines that operate on crip time, a temporal flexibility that Alison Kafer describes by saying, “Rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds.” The signifiers of my disabilities—massage therapy tools, portable mobility aids—are intermittent, so these access needs are often treated as superfluous and disconcerting.
To my additional misfortune, I’ve spent more years than not skillfully performing and navigating the professorial role and academic expectations, unintentionally sowing doubt about the accommodations I really need. “Real” academics are presumed capable of what Mel Chen calls a “wholeness of grasp” regarding classroom instruction, research output, and the executive function needed for leadership roles, committee service, and editorial work. We aren’t supposed to have access needs. As I’ve been told many times, a bodymind like mine has no place in academia.
Thus, for the most part, I mask my conditions as much as possible, even minimizing their severity when I do disclose; and thus, I’ve had to get used to turning down opportunities to collaborate on time-sensitive academic endeavors that are likely to expose me as too slow and tired from pain and brain fog to keep up with other people’s timelines.
Scholarly journal publication timelines in particular are especially unforgiving. Authors are expected to strictly adhere to the deadline even though editors typically don’t begin reviewing submissions immediately. I’ve submitted papers on time only to wait months for requests for revision with an extremely tight turnaround, no extensions permitted. Once, I told the editor of a SAGE Publishing journal I needed more time due to a fibromyalgia flare-up, and I was told to respect the deadline. Another time, I was sent a revision request days before an online publication was scheduled to go live, and I was lightly chastised by the editor when I said that I couldn’t make the necessary changes on such short notice. In both cases, left with no choice, I had to power through if I wanted the publication and CV line, despite making myself sicker.
My experience aligns neatly with the accounts of other disabled academics. As with extensive conference travel or all-nighters, I believed the work of scholarly journal publishing was beyond me.
When Ruth first approached me about proposing this special issue, I loved the idea. I might have been skeptical about getting involved except for her initial framing: “I have a pitch for you, and I make it totally understanding that you are busy and stressed and in pain and dealing with so much. So please please please feel very comfortable saying ‘nope!'” Ruth has known about my disabilities for years, and we both engage in disability studies research and advocacy, so I was able to explicitly and honestly describe my capacities and constraints. I warned that “I may be in need of time and support in ways even I might not expect, depending on what my treatment options become” as I was undergoing new medical tests and treatments; that I was trying to finish my dissertation; that I was, consequently, low on spoons. By the time we had officially decided to move forward with the special issue, we’d already had a robust discussion about our access needs and what our strengths were—for instance, I was confident in my ability to edit, copy-edit, and draft feedback but acknowledged my spotty executive function, while Ruth was confident in her organizing and administrative abilities. By communicating openly with each other, we developed a sense of how to support one another. As Ruth noted in our Twitter DMs, “makes me think we could make a good partnership. I handle outreach/organization/emails, you take a lead on the writing part as time/body/spoons allow (with me helping out of course). No matter what you decide, I got your back!”
As we embarked on writing, inviting, reviewing, and compiling our special issues, we adopted a disability justice mindset, practicing care, vulnerability, and interdependence. We invited a third co-editor, Jessie Male, to join our editorial team to better distribute the labor. We worked on crip time. As my—really, our—capacities fluctuated, we adjusted our expectations regarding our work output and timeline. With Ruth, Jessie, and the journal’s chief editor Christina, I had what Mia Mingus calls access intimacy: “that elusive, hard to describe feeling when someone else ‘gets’ your access needs.” I didn’t have to apologize or over-explain. Whenever I was caught off-guard by a flare-up, or if brain fog hindered me from reviewing and writing feedback, I apprised my co-editors, and we swapped obligations and pushed back deadlines accordingly, with the understanding that I’d resume working when I was able and that I would do the same for Ruth or Jessie as my capacities allowed. We applied this same system to our authors, telling them, explicitly, that we worked on crip time, accommodating their access needs and temporalities as much as we could.
Carework was the theme of our special issue, but a disability-centered approach to journal publishing means, in part, creating systems founded on the same. Editing these special issues—120 pieces—was an immense amount of work. The kind of work that, ordinarily, I’d need to do non-stop no matter what to meet internal and external deadlines. Our editorial team’s prioritization of carework and access intimacy through frequent judgment-free check-ins and mutual aid meant that, instead of aiming for survival on a wing and a prayer—the bare minimum in academic endeavors—I could actually flourish.
The ability to tell my colleagues, without shame and with an expectation of support, “I’m in too much pain to do this right now,” or “I’ve got post-exertional malaise and need to lie down, can I try to do this the day after tomorrow?” liberated me to care for my bodymind and contribute to the best of my ability—better than if I had to force myself to power through pain and fatigue. To read, make acceptance decisions, comment, and edit, I didn’t need to create bathroom workstations, bed workstations, foam-roller-on-a-yoga-mat workstations. I didn’t need to push through a flare-up until I was vomiting from pain, as with that SAGE article. I didn’t need a steady diet of OTC painkillers just to get through, because I didn’t need to just get through. I could disclose my needs at any time and receive support. I could Zoom with my co-editors in bed in my pajamas or on the floor on spiky massage balls, without shame. I could fumble through thinking aloud and explain, without shame, that I was having a brain fog day. I took the time I needed. We delayed our internal and external deadlines as needed. When the ability to concentrate returned to me, I went through a round of copy-editing in three days because I could without incurring extra pain, and was therefore happy to do it.
Writing and editorial work isn’t easy, and disability, grief, trauma, and carework commitments further complicate our processes. Fibromyalgia, ME/CFS, and other comorbidities mean that I swing from being easily absorbed in deep focus, detail-oriented work—like line-editing the creative-critical mixed-genre pieces we received; or, recognizing that it’s easy to enmesh our identity in our writing, compassionately phrasing feedback on so many essays about death—to being incapable of reading, writing, or even sending formal emails communicating my incapacity. At every step of my academic career, I have been reminded that I can’t keep up, but very little is an emergency in academia. Over the years, I’ve attempted to sneak my contingent ways of being, knowing, and doing into academic publications. I hid the real extent of my disabilities until the pandemic exposed me as a high-risk individual. The sicker I get, the more difficult it is for me to engage in service and the knowledge-making endeavor the way academia wants me to. Juggling a calendar of inflexible deadlines. Remaining “always-on” for last-minute, allegedly urgent work. Unlimited spoons and the time of chronology rather than chronicity. If a shift in acceptable scholarly publishing norms admits the contributions of people like me who are ordinarily excluded from such work or service, then why can’t we make space for it?
Editing these special issues demonstrated what I always suspected: that there are more accessible ways of doing academic work and service. Our special issues overtly tackled the norms of academic scholarship, and in our dealings with each other and with our authors, the norms of scholarly journal publishing. We honored different temporalities and access needs in our editorial work, as another reference point in the trajectory of such work that can be referenced by future editors and authors with unruly bodyminds or circumstances, who hope to further break down these norms.
Works Cited
Chen, M. Y. (2014). Brain fog: The race for cripistemology. Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, 8(2), 171-184.
Kafer, A. (2013). Feminist queer crip. Indiana University Press.
Mingus, M. (2011, May 5). Access intimacy: The missing link. Leaving Evidence.
