Crip Theory

by McRuer, Robert; Berube, Michael

• ISBN13: 9780814757130
• ISBN10: 0814757138
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-06-01
• Publisher: Ingram Pub Services

Summary

View the Table of Contents. Read the Foreword.A compelling case that queer and disabled identities, politics, and cultural logics are inexorably intertwined, and that queer and disability theory need one anotherà. Makes clear that no cultural analysis is complete without attention to the politics of bodily ability and alternative corporealities. --Elizabeth Freeman, author of The Wedding ComplexImportant and significant for its attempt to find the common ground between disability studies and queer studies. This deftly written and very readable book will appeal to a wide range of readers who are increasingly fascinated by the biocultural interplay between the body, sexuality, gender, and social identity. --Lennard Davis, author of Bending Over BackwardsCrip Theory attends to the contemporary cultures of disability and queerness that are coming out all over. Both disability studies and queer theory are centrally concerned with how bodies, pleasures, and identities are represented as normal or as abject, but Crip Theory is the first book to analyze thoroughly the ways in which these interdisciplinary fields inform each other.Drawing on feminist theory, African American and Latino/a cultural theories, composition studies, film and television studies, and theories of globalization and counter-globalization, Robert McRuer articulates the central concerns of crip theory and considers how such a critical perspective might impact cultural and historical inquiry in the humanities. Crip Theory puts forward readings of the Sharon Kowalski story, the performance art of Bob Flanagan, and the journals of Gary Fisher, as well as critiques of the domesticated queerness and disability marketed by the Millennium March, or Bravo TV's Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. McRuer examines how dominant and marginal bodily and sexual identities are composed, and considers the vibrant ways that disability and queerness unsettle and re-write those identities in order to insist that another world is possible.

Table of Contents

Foreword: Another Word Is Possible	vii
Michael Berube
Acknowledgments	xiii
Introduction: Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence	1	(32)
Coming Out Crip: Malibu Is Burning	33	(44)
Capitalism and Disabled Identity: Sharon Kowalski, Interdependency, and Queer Domesticity	77	(26)
Noncompliance: The Transformation, Gary Fisher, and the Limits of Rehabilitation	103	(43)
Composing Queerness and Disability: The Corporate University and Alternative Corporealities	146	(25)
Crip Eye for the Normate Guy: Queer Theory, Bob Flanagan, and the Disciplining of Disability Studies	171	(28)
Epilogue: Specters of Disability	199	(10)
Notes	209	(38)
Works Cited	247	(22)
Index	269	(14)
About the Author	283