Results by title

In Care at the End of the World, Jina B. Kim develops what she calls crip-of-color critique, bringing a disability lens to bear on feminist- and queer-of-color literature in the aftermath of 1996 US welfare reform and the subsequent evisceration of social safety nets. She examines literature by contemporary feminist, queer, and disabled writers of color such as Jesmyn Ward, Octavia Butler, Karen Tei Yamashita, Samuel Delany, and Aurora Levins Morales, who each bring disability and dependency to the forefront of their literary freedom dreaming. Kim shows that in their writing, liberation does not take the shape of the unfettered individual or hinge on achieving independence. Instead, liberation emerges by recuperating dependency, cultivating radical interdependency, and recognizing the numerous support systems upon which survival depends. At the same time, Kim demonstrates how theories and narratives of disability can intervene into state-authored myths of resource parasitism, such as the welfare queen. In so doing, she highlights the alternate structures of care these writers envision and their dreams of life organized around reciprocity and mutual support.

Concerto for the Left Hand is at the cutting edge of the expanding field of disability studies, offering a wide range of essays that investigate the impact of disability across various art forms---including literature, performance, photography, and film. Rather than simply focusing on the ways in which disabled persons are portrayed, Michael Davidson explores how the experience of disability shapes the work of artists and why disability serves as a vital lens through which to interpret modern culture. Covering an eclectic range of topics---from the phantom missing limb in film noir to the poetry of American Sign Language---this collection delivers a unique and engaging assessment of the interplay between disability and aesthetics. Written in a fluid, accessible style, Concerto for the Left Hand will appeal to both specialists and general audiences. With its interdisciplinary approach, this book should appeal not only to scholars of disability studies but to all those working in minority art, deaf studies, visual culture, and modernism.

An ethnography of factory accidents and their attendant reconstructive plastic surgeries in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, Connective Tissue explores notions of risk, work and labor practices, and the way meaning is made from experiences of trauma, care, and recovery. The book charts a rough chronology of the accident—from the workspace that preceded it, the transformation of the workspace by the accident, through journeys to and treatment in the hospital, and then the various and complex ways in which the accident reverberates into the future during recovery.
 
Connective Tissue revisits scholarship on factory labor by analyzing the accident as constitutive of the experience of work itself, and it refines existing conversations about the body, trauma, and care by introducing an analysis informed by theories of labor and production. Author Lily N. Shapiro argues that care does not happen in spite of or on the margins of capitalism, but rather that capitalism happens in and through care and caring relations. These experiences are intersected by identities of caste, class, and gender, and entangled in state discourse about labor rights, welfare, and industrial law.
 

As Americans--both civilians and veterans--worked to determine the meanings of identity for blind veterans of World War I, they bound cultural constructs of blindness to all the emotions and contingencies of mobilizing and fighting the war, and healing from its traumas. Sighted Americans’ wartime rehabilitation culture centered blind soldiers and veterans in a mix of inspirational stories. Veterans worked to become productive members of society even as ableism confined their unique life experiences to a collection of cultural tropes that suggested they were either downcast wrecks of their former selves or were morally superior and relatively flawless as they overcame their disabilities and triumphantly journeyed toward successful citizenship. Sullivan investigates the rich lives of blind soldiers and veterans and their families to reveal how they confronted barriers, gained an education, earned a living, and managed their self-image while continually exposed to the public’s scrutiny of their success and failures.

Crip Authority explores how Renaissance writers and artists with disabilities drew on consolatory literature to enhance their authority and create a sense of disability community across the centuries. Elizabeth B. Bearden considers how Renaissance writers and artists understood their lived experiences of disability by drawing on the ancient genre of consolation, which aims to comfort people for a variety of hardships, including mental and physical disability. Renaissance writers used the art of consolation to resignify the mental and physical disabilities that their society frequently scorned into an expression of their military, spiritual, political, and most importantly for this study, writerly authority. Bearden names this kind of defiant authorial self-representation crip authority, thereby transgressively cripping our society’s ableist notions of who has the ability and authority to write.  

Disabled authors include Francesco Petrarca, Teresa de Cartagena, Giovani Paolo Lomazzo, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Robert Burton, and John Milton. They all explore their experiences of disability, but their work has rarely or never been considered from a disability studies perspective. Bearden thus brings today’s models of disability studies and crip theory together with early modern articulations of disability based on ancient and Renaissance models of military, political, biblical, and literary authority. In sum, Crip Authority makes a significant contribution to the growing field of early modern disability studies and invites us to rethink the extent of crip history and the endurance of disability gain.

The contributors to Crip Genealogies reorient the field of disability studies by centering the work of transnational feminism, queer of color critique, and trans scholarship and activism. They challenge the white, Western, and Northern rights-based genealogy of disability studies, showing how a single coherent narrative of the field is a mode of exclusion that relies on logics of whiteness and imperialism. The contributors examine how disability justice activists work in concert with other social justice projects, explore crip environments, create alternate disciplinary genealogies, and reject notions of the model minority. Throughout, they demonstrate how the mandate for a single genealogy of the discipline whitewashes disability and continues forms of violence. By cripping disability studies, the contributors allow for divergent histories, the coexistence of anti-ableist and antiracist theorizing, and a radically just and capacious understanding of disability.

Contributors. Suzanne Bost, Mel Y. Chen, Sony Coráñez Bolton, Natalia Duong, Lezlie Frye, Magda García, Alison Kafer, Eunjung Kim, Yoo-suk Kim, Kateřina Kolářová, James Kyung-Jin Lee, Stacey Park Milbern, Julie Avril Minich, Tari Young-Jung Na, Therí A. Pickens, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Jasbir K. Puar, Sami Schalk, Faith Njahîra Wangarî

In Crip Spacetime, Margaret Price intervenes in the competitive, productivity-focused realm of academia by sharing the everyday experiences of disabled academics. Drawing on more than three hundred interviews and survey responses, Price demonstrates that individual accommodations—the primary way universities address accessibility—actually impede access rather than enhance it. She argues that the pains and injustices encountered by academia’s disabled workers result in their living and working in realities different from nondisabled colleagues: a unique experience of space, time, and being that Price theorizes as “crip spacetime.” She explores how disability factors into the exclusionary practices found in universities, with multiply marginalized academics facing the greatest harms. Highlighting the knowledge that disabled academics already possess about how to achieve sustainable forms of access, Price boldly calls for the university to move away from individualized models of accommodation and toward a new system of collective accountability and care.