ABOUT THIS BOOK

A practical, accessible introduction to the study of disability art and culture around the world.

What does it mean to approach disability-focused cultural production and consumption as generative sites of meaning-making? Disability Arts and Culture seeks the answer to this question and more in an exploration of disability studies within the arts and beyond. In this collection, international scholars and practitioners use ethnographic and participatory action research approaches alongside textual and discourse analysis to discover how disability figures into our contemporary world. Chapters explore deaf theater productions, representations of disability on screen, community engagement projects, disabled bodies in dance, and more, in a comprehensive overview of disability studies that will benefit both practitioner and scholar.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Petra Kuppers is a disability culture activist, community performance artist, and professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She leads the Olimpias, an international performance research collective. Her books include Theatre and Disability and Studying Disability Arts and Culture: An Introduction, also published by Intellect, and Ice Bar.

REVIEWS

"This book allows us to rethink ideas of disability performances from the most local occurrences . . . to the most global. . . . It takes up the work of critical disability studies by foregrounding many intersectional and global and non-Western explorations of disability art and culture. . . . The book has strong methods-based examples that also benefit from the wide scope. Broken up into four different methods-based approaches to knowledge production, the book covers textual analysis, discourse analysis, qualitative inquiry, and ethnography. Disability studies methods are still being developed in this young discipline, which makes these essays incredibly helpful for people interested in examples of others deploying these methods. The methods are situated in scholarly inquiry, which makes this text perhaps more useful for scholars in the field."

— Disability Studies Quarterly

"The texts that lie outside [the UK and USA] are particularly important contributions to the field of cultural disability studies. . . . When it comes to the analysis of UK or US mainstream culture, some of the research in the collection finds new ways to expand existing discourse. . . . Access to and power over representations of disability are themes that run as a common thread through the volume. The variety of cultural contexts, methodologies and forms of culture that are analyzed make this a useful contribution to the field. . . . The final contribution in the volume by Petra Kuppers, about the Salamander project, contains in itself fragments of writing by various voices and thus beautifully echoes the different perspectives present in the volume, as well as the different perspectives that the category of disability must contain."

— New Theatre Quarterly

"The essays take an unflinching look at disability, unpacking the narratives of disability that are presented in television and other media. . . . Disability Arts and Culture shares multiple experiences of disability to challenge the single story of disability as an inferior state that must be fixed and instead, shows states of being entitled to their agency."

— Journal of Dance Education

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Petra Kuppers

Texts and Complexities

Chapter 1: Pain proxies, migraine and invisible disability in Renée French's H Day

Susan Honeyman

Chapter 2: At the Intersection of Deaf and Asian American performativity in Los Angeles: Deaf West Theatre's and East West Player's adaptations of Pippin

Stephanie Lim

Chapter 3: The blind gaze: Visual impairment and haptic filmmaking in João Júlio Antunes' O jogo/The Game (2010)

Eduardo Ledesma

Chapter 4: What are you looking at? Staring down notions of the disabled body in dance

Meghan Durham-Wall

Discourse Analysis: Cultures and Difference

Chapter 5: Troubling images? The re-presentation of disabled womanhood: Britain's Missing Top Model

Alison Wilde

Chapter 6: Representations of disability in Turkish television health shows: Neo-liberal articulations of family, religion and the medical approach

Dikmen Bezmez and Ergin Bulut

Chapter 7: The portrayal of people with disabilities in Moroccan proverbs and jokes

Gulnara Z. Karimova, Daniel A. Sauers and Firdaousse Dakka

People's Voices: Qualitative Methods

Chapter 8: From awww to awe factor: UK audience meaning-making of the 2012 Paralympics as mediated spectacle

Caroline E. M. Hodges, Richard Scullion and Daniel Jackson

Chapter 9: Disability in television crime drama: Transgression and access

Katie Ellis

Chapter 10: 'It's really scared of disability': Disabled comedians' perspectives of the British television comedy industry

Sharon Lockyer

Ethnographic Approaches: Project Reports

Chapter 11: Re-voicing: Community choir participation as a medium for identity formation amongst people with learning disabilities

Nedim Hassan

Chapter 12: Dancing as a wolf: Art-based understanding of autistic spectrum condition

Kevin Burrows

Chapter 13: Disabling ability in dance: Intercultural dramaturgies of the Thikwa plus Junkan Project

Nanako Nakajima

Chapter 14: Swimming with the Salamander: A community eco-performance project

Petra Kuppers

Notes on Contributors