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Inaugurates a new field of disability studies by framing disability as a minority discourse rather than a medical one, revising oppressive narratives and revealing liberatory ones. The book examines disabled figures in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron Mills, in African-American novels by Toni Morrison and Audre Lorde, and in the popular cultural ritual of the freak show.

Tabla de contenidos provista por Syndetics

• Preface & Acknowledgments(p. ix)
• Part I Politicizing Bodily Differences(p. 1)
• 1 Disability, Identity, and Representation: an Introduction(p. 5)
• 2 Theorizing Disability(p. 19)
• Part II Constructing Disabled Figures: Cultural and Literary Sites(p. 53)
• 3 The Cultural Work of American Freak Shows, 1835-1940(p. 55)
• 4 Benevolent Maternalism and the Disabled Women in Stowe, Davis, and Phelps(p. 81)
• 5 Disabled Women as Powerful Women in Petry, Morrison, and Lorde(p. 103)
• Conclusion From Pathology to Identity(p. 135)
• Notes(p. 139)
• Bibliography(p. 173)
• Index(p. 191)

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CHOICE Review

This short but important book is the first literary-critical work to address "disability" as a category of identity in American literature and culture. Rejecting the dominant notion of disability as disease or misfortune, Thomson (Howard Univ.) shows how disability is "not so much a property of bodies as a product of cultural rules about what bodies should be or do." The author draws on feminist theory as well as sociological and anthropological work on stigma and aberrance to argue that disability--like race, gender, nationality, and sexuality--is a socially constructed category that defines the "normal" by embodying its opposite. A theoretical introduction precedes three chapters: a helpful, illustrated historical account of "freak shows" in Victorian American culture; an analysis of conventions used in sentimental novels by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rebecca Harding Davis, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps to enlist sympathy and reform on behalf of disabled persons; and an explication of more "liberatory" representations of disability in texts by Ann Petry, Toni Morrison, and Audre Lorde. This is a well written and provocative beginning to a conversation about disability that is long overdue among scholars in literary and cultural studies. All academic collections. R. R. Warhol; University of Vermont

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson is Professor of English at Emory University, where her fields of study are disability studies, American literature and culture, feminist theory, and bioethics. Her work develops the field of critical disability studies in the health humanities, broadly understood, to bring forward disability access, inclusion and identity to communities inside and outside of the academy. She is the author of Staring: How We Look and the editor of Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body .