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In Cultural Locations of Disability, Sharon L. Snyder and David T. Mitchell trace how disabled people came to be viewed as biologically deviant. The eugenics era pioneered techniques that managed "defectives" through the application of therapies, invasive case histories, and acute surveillance techniques, turning disabled persons into subjects for a readily available research pool. In its pursuit of normalization, eugenics implemented disability regulations that included charity systems, marriage laws, sterilization, institutionalization, and even extermination. Enacted in enclosed disability locations, these practices ultimately resulted in expectations of segregation from the mainstream, leaving today's disability politics to focus on reintegration, visibility, inclusion, and the right of meaningful public participation.

Snyder and Mitchell reveal cracks in the social production of human variation as aberrancy. From our modern obsessions with tidiness and cleanliness to our desire to attain perfect bodies, notions of disabilities as examples of human insufficiency proliferate. These disability practices infuse more general modes of social obedience at work today. Consequently, this important study explains how disabled people are instrumental to charting the passage from a disciplinary society to one based upon regulation of the self.

Tabla de contenidos provista por Syndetics

• Preface(p. ix)
• Introduction: Cultural Locations of Disability(p. 3)
• Part I Dis-locations of Culture
• 1 Masquerades of Impairment: Charity as a Confidence Game(p. 37)
• 2 Subnormal Nation: The Making of a U.S. Disability Minority(p. 69)
• 3 The Eugenic Atlantic: Disability and the Making of an International Science(p. 100)
• Part II Echoes of Eugenics
• 4 After the Panopticon: Contemporary Institutions as Documentary Subject(p. 133)
• 5 Body Genres and Disability Sensations: The Challenge of the New Disability Documentary Cinema(p. 156)
• Part III Institutionalizing Disability Studies
• 6 Conclusion: Compulsory Feral-ization(p. 185)
• Notes(p. 205)
• Works Cited(p. 217)
• Index(p. 237)

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CHOICE Review

"Disability" presumably means lacking one or more abilities that so-called "normal" or "abled" individuals have--normality being subjectively defined. In that sense, everyone is disabled in one respect or another, although for most, that disability is never recognized. Cultural locations of disability are "cultural spaces" for disabled citizens, and include charity enterprises (characterized as confidence games), housing for those designated as feeble minded, research on the disabled, sheltered workshops, and documentary films on the disabled. These locations, then, represent a devaluing of the disabled and, according to the authors, work against their interests. That is, the disabled are seen as a minority needing help. The authors (both, disability and human development, Univ. of Illinois at Chicago) see this book as a history of thinking about disability and treatment of the disabled, with the implicit hope that an understanding of that history will lead to a demise of the pernicious aspects of the cultural locations. However, this reviewer finds this to be an irritating book, all too often ponderously and obscurely written. What is meant, for example, by the "interactional space between embodiment and social ideology"? Such writing diminishes the book's value. ^BSumming Up: Optional. Graduate students/faculty. D. Harper University of Rochester

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Sharon L. Snyder and David T. Mitchell are faculty in the Department of Disability and Human Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago. They are the authors of Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse , and editors of The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability ; Eugenics in America, 18481945: A History of Disability in Primary Sources ; and The Encyclopedia of Disability .