front cover of Radical Health
Radical Health
Unwellness, Care, and Latinx Expressive Culture
Julie Avril Minich
Duke University Press, 2023
In Radical Health Julie Avril Minich examines the potential of Latinx expressive culture to intervene in contemporary health politics, elaborating how Latinx artists have critiqued ideologies of health that frame wellbeing in terms of personal behavior. Within this framework, poor health—obesity, asthma, diabetes, STIs, addiction, and high-risk pregnancies—is attributed to irresponsible lifestyle choices among the racialized poor. Countering this, Latinx writers and visual artists envision health not as individual duty but as communal responsibility. Bringing a disability justice approach to questions of health access and equity, Minich locates a concept of radical health within the work of Latinx artists, including the poetry of Rafael Campo, the music of Hurray for the Riff Raff, the fiction of Angie Cruz, and the performance art of Virginia Grise. Radical health operates as a modality that both challenges the stigma of unhealth and protests the social conditions that give rise to racial health disparities. Elaborating on this modality, Minich claims a critical role for Latinx artists in addressing the structural racism in public health. 
[more]

front cover of Rated RX
Rated RX
Sheree Rose with and after Bob Flanagan
Yetta Howard
The Ohio State University Press, 2020
“The thing that people don’t understand is that Bob was my invention,” says Sheree Rose, the oft-overlooked partner of the late “supermasochist” performance artist Bob Flanagan. Unpacking this statement is at the heart of this important collection, which seeks to recuperate and showcase Rose’s contributions as performer, photographer, writer, and cultural innovator. While Rose is mostly known for blurring the boundaries between art and lived experience in the context of her full-time, mistress-slave relationship with Flanagan, Rated RX shifts focus from Flanagan to Rose, presenting a feminist project that critically reassesses the artistic legacies of Sheree Rose.
 
Curated with attention to queer-crip subjectivities and transgressive feminisms, Rated RX includes essays by and interviews with scholars, artists, and Rose’s collaborators that address gender politics, archival practices, minority embodiment, and disability in Rose’s work as well as more than eighty photographs and rare archival materials reflecting Rose’s recent and past performances. Offering a necessary corrective, Rated RX is the first collection to underscore Sheree Rose as a legendary figure in performance art and BDSM subcultural history, reflecting her lifetime of involvement in documenting the underground and the transformative role her work plays in sexual, subcultural, and art exhibitionism.
 
[more]

front cover of Reading Sounds
Reading Sounds
Closed-Captioned Media and Popular Culture
Sean Zdenek
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Imagine a common movie scene: a hero confronts a villain. Captioning such a moment would at first glance seem as basic as transcribing the dialogue. But consider the choices involved: How do you convey the sarcasm in a comeback? Do you include a henchman’s muttering in the background? Does the villain emit a scream, a grunt, or a howl as he goes down? And how do you note a gunshot without spoiling the scene?

These are the choices closed captioners face every day. Captioners must decide whether and how to describe background noises, accents, laughter, musical cues, and even silences. When captioners describe a sound—or choose to ignore it—they are applying their own subjective interpretations to otherwise objective noises, creating meaning that does not necessarily exist in the soundtrack or the script.

Reading Sounds looks at closed-captioning as a potent source of meaning in rhetorical analysis. Through nine engrossing chapters, Sean Zdenek demonstrates how the choices captioners make affect the way deaf and hard of hearing viewers experience media. He draws on hundreds of real-life examples, as well as interviews with both professional captioners and regular viewers of closed captioning. Zdenek’s analysis is an engrossing look at how we make the audible visible, one that proves that better standards for closed captioning create a better entertainment experience for all viewers.
[more]

front cover of Reading Victorian Deafness
Reading Victorian Deafness
Signs and Sounds in Victorian Literature and Culture
Jennifer Esmail
Ohio University Press, 2013

Winner of the 2013 Sonya Rudikoff Award for best first book in Victorian Studies
Short-listed for the 2013 British Society for Literature and Science Book Prize.

Reading Victorian Deafness is the first book to address the crucial role that deaf people, and their unique language of signs, played in Victorian culture. Drawing on a range of works, from fiction by Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, to poetry by deaf poets and life writing by deaf memoirists Harriet Martineau and John Kitto, to scientific treatises by Alexander Graham Bell and Francis Galton, Reading Victorian Deafness argues that deaf people’s language use was a public, influential, and contentious issue in Victorian Britain.

The Victorians understood signed languages in multiple, and often contradictory, ways: they were objects of fascination and revulsion, were of scientific import and literary interest, and were considered both a unique mode of human communication and a vestige of a bestial heritage. Over the course of the nineteenth century, deaf people were increasingly stripped of their linguistic and cultural rights by a widespread pedagogical and cultural movement known as “oralism,” comprising mainly hearing educators, physicians, and parents.

Engaging with a group of human beings who used signs instead of speech challenged the Victorian understanding of humans as “the speaking animal” and the widespread understanding of “language” as a product of the voice. It is here that Reading Victorian Deafness offers substantial contributions to the fields of Victorian studies and disability studies. This book expands current scholarly conversations around orality, textuality, and sound while demonstrating how understandings of disability contributed to Victorian constructions of normalcy. Reading Victorian Deafness argues that deaf people were used as material test subjects for the Victorian process of understanding human language and, by extension, the definition of the human.

[more]

logo for Georgetown University Press
Reconsidering Intellectual Disability
L'Arche, Medical Ethics, and Christian Friendship
Jason Reimer Greig
Georgetown University Press, 2016

Drawing on the controversial case of “Ashley X,” a girl with severe developmental disabilities who received interventionist medical treatment to limit her growth and keep her body forever small—a procedure now known as the “Ashley Treatment”—Reconsidering Intellectual Disability explores important questions at the intersection of disability theory, Christian moral theology, and bioethics.

What are the biomedical boundaries of acceptable treatment for those not able to give informed consent? Who gets to decide when a patient cannot communicate their desires and needs? Should we accept the dominance of a form of medicine that identifies those with intellectual impairments as pathological objects in need of the normalizing bodily manipulations of technological medicine?

In a critical exploration of contemporary disability theory, Jason Reimer Greig contends that L'Arche, a federation of faith communities made up of people with and without intellectual disabilities, provides an alternative response to the predominant bioethical worldview that sees disability as a problem to be solved. Reconsidering Intellectual Disability shows how a focus on Christian theological tradition’s moral thinking and practice of friendship with God offers a way to free not only people with intellectual disabilities but all people from the objectifying gaze of modern medicine. L'Arche draws inspiration from Jesus's solidarity with the "least of these" and a commitment to Christian friendship that sees people with profound cognitive disabilities not as anomalous objects of pity but as fellow friends of God. This vital act of social recognition opens the way to understanding the disabled not as objects to be fixed but as teachers whose lives can transform others and open a new way of being human.

[more]

front cover of Reflections
Reflections
My Life in the Deaf and Hearing Worlds
John B. Christiansen
Gallaudet University Press, 2010

Hard of hearing since early childhood, John Christiansen spent the first 30 years of his life trying to fit in to a hearing world that did little to accommodate his communication needs. Although he excelled in academics, Christiansen found social situations stressful at every level, until he obtained a position as a professor of sociology at Gallaudet University. There he learned sign language and joined a new community. Reflections: My Life in the Deaf and Hearing Worlds grew out of his personal experiences inhabiting these two worlds.

As a sociologist, Christiansen could identify the toll that trying to communicate with hearing people took on his psyche, the classic looking-glass self in action: I am what I think you think I am. He saw that people with hearing loss frequently blame themselves for social awkwardness and gaffs, even though the responsibility for clear communication should be shared. Still, after living in the hearing world for most of his life, he opted to undergo a cochlear implantation to try to improve interaction with his hearing friends, wife, and children.

His description of adjusting to his cochlear implant brings fresh reality to the implant process. As he puts it, he was not a superstar. After ten years, though, he feels positive enough about his experience to endorse it. As a denouement to his affecting memoir, he describes the disruptive 2006 protest at Gallaudet over the choice of a new president from his vantage point as a member of the search committee. Reflections stands as a remarkable account of one person’s navigation through the intricacies of two different and occasionally opposing worlds.

[more]

front cover of Revels in Madness
Revels in Madness
Insanity in Medicine and Literature
Allen Thiher
University of Michigan Press, 2004
A sweeping survey of how notions of madness have been represented in medicine and literature from the Greeks to the present
[more]

front cover of Rhetorical Climatology
Rhetorical Climatology
By A Reading Group
Chris Ingraham
Michigan State University Press, 2023
What if rhetoric and climate are intimately connected? Taking climates to be rhetorical and rhetoric to be climatic, A Reading Group offers a generative framework for making sense of rhetorical studies as they grapple with the challenges posed by antiracist, decolonial, affective, ecological, and more-than-human scholarship to a tradition with a long history of being centered around individual, usually privileged, human agents wielding language as their principal instrument. Understanding the atmospheric and ambient energies of rhetoric underscores the challenges and promises of trying to heal a harmed world from within it. A cowritten “multigraph,” which began in 2018 as a reading group, this book enacts an intimate, mutualistic spirit of shared critical inquiry and play—an exciting new way of doing, thinking, and feeling rhetorical studies by six prominent scholars in rhetoric from communication and English departments alike.
[more]

front cover of Richard III's Bodies from Medieval England to Modernity
Richard III's Bodies from Medieval England to Modernity
Shakespeare and Disability History
Jeffrey R. Wilson
Temple University Press, 2022

Richard III will always be central to English disability history as both man and myth—a disabled medieval king made into a monster by his nation’s most important artist.

In Richard III’s Bodies from Medieval England to Modernity, Jeffrey Wilson tracks disability over 500 years, from Richard’s own manuscripts, early Tudor propaganda, and x-rays of sixteenth-century paintings through Shakespeare’s soliloquies, into Samuel Johnson’s editorial notes, the first play produced by an African American Theater company, Freudian psychoanalysis, and the rise of disability theater. For Wilson, the changing meanings of disability created through shifting perspectives in Shakespeare’s plays prefigure a series of modern attempts to understand Richard’s body in different disciplinary contexts—from history and philosophy to sociology and medicine.

While theorizing a role for Shakespeare in the field of disability history, Wilson reveals how Richard III has become an index for some of modernity’s central concerns—the tension between appearance and reality, the conflict between individual will and external forces of nature and culture, the possibility of upward social mobility, and social interaction between self and other, including questions of discrimination, prejudice, hatred, oppression, power, and justice.

[more]

front cover of Rights Enabled
Rights Enabled
The Disability Revolution, from the US, to Germany and Japan, to the United Nations
Katharina Heyer
University of Michigan Press, 2015
Drawing on extensive fieldwork and a variety of original sources, Katharina Heyer examines three case studies—Germany, Japan, and the United Nations—to trace the evolution of a disability rights model from its origins in the U.S. through its adaptations in other democracies to its current formulation in international law. She demonstrates that, although notions of disability, equality, and rights are reinterpreted and contested within various political contexts, ultimately the result may be a more robust and substantive understanding of equality.

Rights Enabled is a truly interdisciplinary work, combining sociolegal literature on rights and legal mobilization with a deep cultural and sociopolitical analysis of the concept of disability developed in Disability Studies. Heyer raises important issues for scholarship on comparative rights, the global reach of social movements, and the uses and limitations of rights-based activism.
[more]

front cover of The Rising of Lotus Flowers
The Rising of Lotus Flowers
Self-Education by Deaf Children in Thai Boarding Schools
Charles B. Reilly
Gallaudet University Press, 2005

In developed nations around the world, residential schools for deaf students are giving way to the trend of inclusion in regular classrooms. Nonetheless, deaf education continues to lag as the students struggle to communicate. In the Bua School in Thailand, however, 400 residential deaf students ranging in age from 6 to 19 have met with great success in teaching each other Thai Sign Language (TSL) and a world of knowledge once thought to be lost to them. The Rising of Lotus Flowers: Self-Education by Deaf Children in Thai Boarding Schools reveals how their institutionalization allowed them to foster a unique incubator of communication and education.

Charles B. Reilly, a teacher and community organizer in Thailand for eight years, and Nipapon Reilly, a Deaf Thai citizen, studied the students in the Bua School for 14 years, with periodic follow-ups thereafter. They found that the students learned little from their formal instructors, but that they were able to educate each other in time spent away from the classroom. Older students who had learned TSL in the dorms and on the playground successfully passed it on to six-year-olds who had virtually no language at all. The Reillys’ study uncovers an elaborate hierarchy of education among these students, with each group using games and other activities to teach and bring other classmates up to their level. Named for the much admired aquatic plant that blooms in Thailand’s bogs, the Bua School epitomizes the ideal of The Rising of Lotus Flowers, which also offers analytical evidence of the continuing value of residential schools in deaf education.

[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter