David T. Mitchell

Sharon L. Snyder

Susan Antebi

Breaks new ground by exploring the limits and transformations of the social model of disability

Materiality, Biopolitics, Crip Affect

The Matter of Disability

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.

Cultural Locations of Disability

Reveals how depictions of disability in fiction serve an essential narrative function

Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse

Narrative Prosthesis

Theorizing the role of disabled subjects in global consumer culture and the emergence of alternative crip/queer subjectivities in film, fiction, media, and art

Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment

The Biopolitics of Disability

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

Brenda Jo Brueggemann

Images of disability pervade language and literature, yet disability is, as the volume's introduction notes, "the ubiquitous unspoken topic in contemporary culture." The twenty-five essays in Disability Studies provide perspectives on disabled people and on disability in the humanities, art, the media, medicine, psychology, the academy, and society. Edited and introduced by Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson and containing an afterword by Michael Bérubé (author of Life As We Know It), the volume is rich in its cast of characters (including John Bulwer, Teresa de Cartagena, Audre Lorde, Oliver Sacks, Samuel Johnson, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman); in its powerful, authentic accounts of disabled conditions (deafness, blindness, MS, cancer, the absence of limbs); in its different settings (ancient Greece, medieval Spain, Nazi Germany, the modern United States); and in its mix of the intellectual and the emotional, of subtle theory and plainspoken autobiography.

Enabling the Humanities

Disability Studies

Groundbreaking perspectives on disability in culture and the arts that shed light on notions of identity and social marginality

Discourses of Disability

The Body and Physical Difference

Disc contains: Electronic version of text (XML and ASCII).

Gary L Albrecht

Jerome Bickenbach

Walton O. Schalick, III

Collects over one thousand entries that provide insight into international views, experiences, and expertise on the topic of disability.

Sharon L. Snyder

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