Extraordinary Bodies - Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature

Twentieth Anniversary Auflage
ISBN: 978-0-231-18316-1
Verlag: Columbia University Press

Buch, Englisch, 224 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 666 g

Extraordinary Bodies is a cornerstone text of disability studies, establishing the field upon its publication in 1997. Framing disability as a minority discourse rather than a medical one, the book added depth to oppressive narratives and revealed novel, liberatory ones. Through her incisive readings of such texts as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron Mills, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson exposed the social forces driving representations of disability. She encouraged new ways of looking at texts and their depiction of the body and stretched the limits of what counted as a text, considering freak shows and other pop culture artifacts as reflections of community rites and fears. Garland-Thomson also elevated the status of African-American novels by Toni Morrison and Audre Lorde. Extraordinary Bodies laid the groundwork for an appreciation of disability culture and an inclusive new approach to the study of social marginalization.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Thomson, Rosemarie Garland

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literatursoziologie, Gender Studies
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft | Kulturwissenschaften Kulturwissenschaften
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Invalidität, Krankheit und Abhängigkeit: Soziale Aspekte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Preface to the Twentieth Anniversary EditionPreface and Acknowledgments I. Politicizing Bodily Differences1. Disability, Identity, and Representation: An Introduction The Disabled Figure in Culture The Disabled Figure in Literature The Gap Between Representation and Reality An Overview and a Manifesto 2. Theorizing Disability Feminist Theory, the Body, and the Disabled FigureSociocultural Analyses of the Extraordinary Body The Disabled Figure and the Ideology of Liberal Individualism The Disabled Figure and the Problem of Work II. Constructing Disabled Figures: Cultural and Literary Sites3. The Cultural Work of American Freak Shows, 1835-1940The Spectacle of the Extraordinary Body Constituting the Average Man Identification and the Longing for Distinction From Freak to Specimen: "The Hottentot Venus" and "The Ugliest Woman in the World"The End of the Prodigious Body4. Benevolent Maternalism and the Disabled Women in Stowe, Davis, and PhelpsThe Maternal Benefactress and Her Disabled SistersThe Disabled Figure as a Call for Justice: Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's CabinEmpowering the Maternal BenefactressBenevolent Maternalism's Flight from the Body: Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's CabinThe Female Body as LiabilityTwo Opposing Scripts of Female Embodiment: Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron MillsThe Triumph of the Beautiful, Disembodied Heroine: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Silent Partner5. Disabled Women as Powerful Women in Petry, Morrison, and LordeRevising Black Female SubjectivityThe Extraordinary Woman as Powerful Woman: Ann Petry's The StreetFrom the Grotesque to the CyborgThe Extraordinary Body as the Historicized Body: Toni Morrison's Disabled WomenThe Extraordinary Subject: Audre Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My NameThe Poetics of ParticularityConclusion: From Pathology to IdentityNotesBibliographyIndex

Über Autor(innen)

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson is professor of English at Emory University and the author of Staring: How We Look (2009) and the editor of Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (1996).