Artist to Artist Workshops
Disabled Erotics
Ages 18 and up
October 14–November 4, 2025
6–8pm EST, Tuesdays, Virtual
Crip Gimp by Mae Howard, 2023
Instructor
Mae Howard and June Kramer
Pricing
Tiered Pricing: $45, $120, $220, or $320 + $30 registration fee
Dates
14 October - 4 November
Back by popular demand!
Disabled Erotics examines the tension between BDSM and kink as liberatory practices and their enmeshment within the prison and medical industrial complexes. This class will explore histories of key figures in kink scenes such as Bob Flanagan, Sheree Rose, Audre Lorde, and Sheila Courser, read sections of Alice Wong's new Disability Intimacy, and engage with Amber Jamilla Musser's book Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism, specifically the chapter on Bob Flanagan and Audre Lorde. Students will create week-long pain journals inspired by Flanagan's 1995 text Pain Journals and engage with Audre Lorde's Uses of the Erotic through a creative project highlighting sensation other than sight. Through this class, students will think complexly about touch, intimacy, eroticism, kink, and BDSM in ways that combine the political and the personal.
This class will be held online on Zoom.
About Mae Howard & June Kramer
Mae Howard’s interdisciplinary approach extends across research-based, participatory, and collaborative projects. Calling upon lineages of disabled labor economies, Mae is interested in the embodied, fleshly, and material enmeshment of BDSM, the medical industrial complex, leather histories, biopolitics, and debilitation. Howard received an MFA and Certificate in Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies from The University of Pennsylvania. They are an alumna of the Whitney Independent Study Program and have recently completed residencies at BricLab (Brooklyn, NY), ACRE (Steuben, WI), Picture Berlin (Berlin, DE), Activation Residency (Woodridge, NY), Pocoapoco (Oaxaca, MX), BAX Arts (Brooklyn, NY). Their work has been screened and exhibited at Dia Chelsea (New York, NY), GHOSTMACHINE (New York, NY), Westbeth Gallery (New York, NY), Vox Populi (Philadelphia, PA), Atelier Gallery (Philadelphia, PA), Automat Gallery (Philadelphia, PA), Ingrown Gallery (Chicago, IL), tête (Berlin, DE), and gr__und (Berlin, DE). Howard has taught, given lectures and participated on panels at the Migros Museum (Zurich, CH), Max Planck Institute (Berlin, DE), KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin, DE), Pratt University (New York, NY), Dia Art Foundation (New York, NY), Brown University (Providence, RI), Smith College (Northhampton, MA), University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA), and Abrons Arts Center (New York, NY).
June Kramer is an organizer, leatherdyke, stutterer, and abolitionist.
About
Disabled Erotics is presented as part of Artist to Artist: a class series by Abrons Arts Center and The School of Making Thinking.