Phallacies Historical Intersections of Disability and Masculinity

by Brian, Kathleen M.; Trent, Jr., James W.

• ISBN13: 9780190458997
• ISBN10: 0190458992
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2017-10-03
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Phallacies: Historical Intersections of Disability and Masculinity is a collection of essays that focuses on disabled men who negotiate their masculinity as well as their disability. The chapters cover a broad range of topics: institutional structures that define what it means to be a man with a disability; the place of women in situations where masculinity and disability are constructed; men with physical and war-related disabilities; male hysteria, suicide clubs, and mercy killing; male disability in literature and popular culture; and more. All the authors regard masculinity and disability in the historical contexts of the Americas and Western Europe, with particular attention to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Taken together, the essays in this volume offer a nuanced portrait of the complex, and at times competing, interactions between masculinity and disability.

Author Biography

Kathleen M. Brian, PhD, is a Lecturer in the Liberal Studies Department at Western Washington University. Brian's recent work has appeared in the Journal of Literary and Disability Studies, the History of Psychiatry, and the Bulletin of the History of Medicine.

James W. Trent, Jr., PhD, is a Visiting Scholar in the Heller School at Brandeis University. He is author of The Manliest Man: Samuel G. Howe and the Contours of Nineteenth-Century American Reform (2012) and Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Intellectual Disability in the United States (2016).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Contributor Biographies

Introduction
David Serlin

Part I: Is He Normal?
Chapter 1. "Disability's Other: The Production of 'Normal Men' in Midcentury America"
Anna Creadick
Chapter 2. "Henry Darger and the Unruly Paper Dollhouse Scrapbook"
Mary S. Trent
Chapter 3. "Black and Crazy: The Antinomian Black Male in North American Consciousness"
Lawrence E. Holcomb
Chapter 4. "Masculinity or Bust: Gender and Impairment in Russ Meyer's Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!"
Murray K. Simpson

Part II: War, Manhood, and Disability
Chapter 5. "Marketing Disabled Manhood: Veterans and Advertising since the Civil War"
John Kinder
Chapter 6. "'Half a Man': The Symbolism and Science of Paraplegic Impotence in World War II America"
Beth Linker and Whitney E. Laemmli
Chapter 7. "'A Blind Man's Home-Coming': Masculinity, Disability and Male Care-giving in First World War Britain"
Jessica Meyer

Part III: Disabled Man as "Less than a Man"
Chapter 8. "Hysteria in the Male: Images of Masculinity in Late Nineteenth-Century France"
Daniela S. Barberis
Chapter 9. "Down and Out: American Male Beggars' Presentations, 1860s-1930s"
Robert Bogdan
Chapter 10. "Death on a Silver Platter: Masculinity, Disabilities, and the Noxon Murder Trials of 1944"
Ivy George and James W. Trent Jr.

Part IV: Men and Boys as "Supercrips"
Chapter 11. "Mythological Pedagogies; or, Suicide Clubs as Eugenic Alibi"
Kathleen M. Brian
Chapter 12. "Making Useful Men: The Roman Rosell Institute and Asylum for the Blind, 1933-1950"
Rebecca Ellis
Chapter 13. "Weeping and Bad Hair: The Bodily Suffering of Early Christian Hell as a Threat to Masculinity"
Megan Henning
Chapter 14. "Porgy and Dubose"
Susan Schweik
Chapter 15. "Ernest Hemingway: Ernest Hemingway, the Man, the Girl, and the Genius"
Carolyn Slaughter

Contributor Biographies

Index