Disability Studies

A groundbreaking collection of first-person writing on the joys and challenges of the modern disability experience- Disability Visibility brings together the voices of activists, authors, lawyers, politicians, artists, and everyday people whose daily lives are, in the words of playwright Neil Marcus, "an art . . . an ingenious way to live."

In Brilliant Imperfection Eli Clare uses memoir, history, and critical analysis to explore cure--the deeply held belief that body-minds considered broken need to be fixed. Cure serves many purposes. It saves lives, manipulates lives, and prioritizes some lives over others. It provides comfort, makes profits, justifies violence, and promises resolution to body-mind loss. Clare grapples with this knot of contradictions, maintaining that neither an anti-cure politics nor a pro-cure worldview can account for the messy, complex relationships we have with our body-minds.

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.

This book traces how disabled people came to be viewed as biologically deviant and reveals cracks in the social production of human variation as aberrancy.

Explores the intersections of disability, race, gender, and sexuality as these various aspects of identity influence each other and make identity fluid. Focusing on the United States from the nineteenth century to the present, the essays in Disability and Passing speak to the complexity of individual decisions about passing and open the conversation for broader discussion.

An anthropology of disability culture, with a wealth of examples of performance, including dance, poetry, and other community-based art.

Examines the changing nature of the concept of disability, key debates in the sociology of health and illness, the politicisation of disability, social policy, and the cultural and media representation of disability. As well as providing an excellent overview of the literature in the area, the book develops an understanding of disability that has implications for both sociology and society.

Challenging the ways in which ideas about the future and time have been deployed in the service of compulsory able-bodiedness and able-mindedness, Kafer juxtaposes theories, movements, and identities such as environmental justice, reproductive justice, cyborg theory, transgender politics, and disability that are typically discussed in isolation and envisions new possibilities for crip futures and feminist/queer/crip alliances.

Towson University journalism professor Beth A. Haller's 20 years of research into disability and mass media inform this one-of-a-kind collection on advertising, news, entertainment television, film and Internet new media. Ideal for disability studies students and researchers as well as disability activists.

In looking at the intersection of sexuality and disability, this nonfiction anthology challenges readers to confront how America deals with difference. Writers represent a broad range of disabilities (chronic fatigue syndrome, manic depression, cerebral palsy) as well as a variety of racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds.

From multiple perspectives--including literary analysis, ethnography, and autobiography--contributors consider how sex and disability come together and how disabled people negotiate sex and sexual identities in ableist and heteronormative culture. Queering disability studies, while also expanding the purview of queer and sexuality studies, these essays shake up notions about who and what is sexy and sexualizable, what counts as sex, and what desire is.

Cutting across a disciplinary divide, Sociologies of Disability critically reviews and compares the conflicting perspectives on disability and chronic illness found in disability studies and medical sociology.