The Body and Physical Difference

by Mitchell, David T.; Snyder, Sharon L.

• ISBN13: 9780472066599
• ISBN10: 0472066595
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1997-12-01
• Publisher: Univ of Michigan Pr

Summary

For years the subject of human disability has engaged those in the biological, social and cognitive sciences, while at the same time, it has been curiously neglected within the humanities.The Body and Physical Differenceseeks to introduce the field of disability studies into the humanities by exploring the fantasies and fictions that have crystallized around conceptions of physical and cognitive difference. Based on the premise that the significance of disabilities in culture and the arts has been culturally vexed as well as historically erased, the collection probes our society's pathological investment in human variability and "aberrancy." The contributors demonstrate how definitions of disability underpin fundamental concepts such as normalcy, health, bodily integrity, individuality, citizenship, and morality--all terms that define the very essence of what it means to be human. The book provides a provocative range of topics and perspectives: the absence of physical "otherness" in Ancient Greece, the depiction of the female invalid in Victorian literature, the production of tragic innocence in British and American telethons, the reconstruction of Civil War amputees, and disability as the aesthetic basis for definitions of expendable life within the modern eugenics movement. With this new, secure anchoring in the humanities, disability studies now emerges as a significant strain in contemporary theories of identity and social marginality. Moving beyond the oversimplication that disabled people are marginalized and made invisible by able-ist assumptions and practices, the contributors demonstrate that representation is founded upon the perpetual exhibition of human anomalies. In this sense, all art can be said to migrate toward the "freakish" and the "grotesque." Such a project paradoxically makes disability the exceptionandthe rule of the desire to represent that which has been traditionally out-of-bounds in polite discourse. The Body and Physical Differencehas relevance across a wide range of academic specialties such as cultural studies, the sociology of medicine, history, literature and medicine, the allied health professions, rehabilitation, aesthetics, philosophical discourses of the body, literary and film studies, and narrative theory. David T. Mitchell is Assistant Professor of English, Northern Michigan University. Sharon L. Snyder teaches film and literature at Northern Michigan University.

Table of Contents

Foreword
Introduction: Disability Studies and the Double Bind of Representation	p. 1
Constructions of Physical Disability in the Ancient Greek World: The Community Concept	p. 35
Nude Venuses, Medusa's Body and Phantom Limbs: Disability and Visuality	p. 51
Disfigurement and Reconstruction in Oliver Wendell Holmes's "The Human Wheel, Its Spokes and Felloes	p. 71
Defining the Defective: Eugenics, Aesthetics, and Mass Culture in Early-Twentieth-Century America	p. 89
In Search of Al Schmid: War Hero, Blinded Veteran, Everyman	p. 111
Conspicuous Contribution and American Cultural Dilemmas: Telethon Rituals of Cleansing and Renewal	p. 134
Feminotopias: The Pleasures of "Deformity" in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England	p. 161
"A Prisoner to the Couch": Harriet Martineau, Invalidism, and Self-Representation	p. 174
"It Is More than Lame": Female Disability, Sexuality, and the Maternal in the Nineteenth-Century Novel	p. 189
The "Talking Cure" (Again): Gossip and the Paralyzed Patriarchy	p. 202
From Social Welfare to Civil Rights: The Representation of Disability in Twentieth-Century German Literature	p. 223
Disabled Women as Powerful Women in Petry, Morrison, and Lorde: Revising Black Female Subjectivity	p. 240
Muteness and Mutilation: The Aesthetics of Disability in Jane Campion's The Piano	p. 267
"Making up the Stories as We Go Along": Men, Women, and Narratives of Disability	p. 283
Contributors	p. 297
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