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The burgeoning field of disability studies has emerged as one of the most innovative and transdisciplinary areas of scholarship in recent years. This special issue of Radical History Review combines disability studies with radical history approaches, demonstrating how disability studies cuts across regional histories as well as familiar disciplinary categories. Disability and History also discloses how the ways in which we define “disability” may expose biases and limitations of a given historical moment rather than a universal truth.

Drawing on archival research and other primary materials, as well as on methods from labor history, ethnic studies, performance studies, and political biography, this special issue explores how historical forces and cultural contexts have produced disability as a constantly shifting and socially constructed concept. One essay examines how Western definitions of disability imposed during colonial rule shaped Botswanan perceptions of disability. Another looks at labor activism among blind workers in Northern Ireland in the 1930s; a third essay, drawing on previously untranslated political texts by disabled writers and activists from the Weimar era, dispels the simplistic assessment of the disabled as complacent in the face of the Nazis’ rise to power. Other essays interpret U.S. radical Randolph Bourne as a philosopher of disability politics and chronicle the emergence of a disabled feminist theater practice in the 1970s and 1980s.

Contributors. Diane F. Britton, Susan Burch, Sarah E. Chinn, R. A. R. Edwards, Barbara Floyd, David Gissen, Kim Hewitt, J. Douglass Klein, Seth Koven, R. J. Lambrose, Victoria Ann Lewis, Julie Livingston, Paul K. Longmore, Robert McRuer, Teresa Meade, Paul Steven Miller, Natalia Molina, Patricia A. Murphy, Máirtín Ó Catháin, Carol Poore, Geoffrey Reaume, David Serlin, Katherine Sherwood, Ian Sutherland, Geoffrey Swan, Everett Zhang

Homeland Securities, a special issue of Radical History Review, addresses the complex challenge for radical scholars and activists presented by the shift in U.S. domestic and international agendas in the wake of September 11 and the accompanying rhetorics of national defense, the war on terrorism, and the declaration of “homeland security.” While the agencies and policies grouped under the rubric of homeland security ostensibly address the safety of the United States and its citizens, the implications of homeland security reach far beyond the borders of the United States and raise questions about transnational mobility, imperialism, nation, and citizenship.

The contributors to this special issue offer critical perspectives on the many fronts of the global “war on terror” and reveal continuities and discontinuities within familiar strategies of political control, racial discrimination, and state-sanctioned violence. Featured articles explore such issues as the intersection of racism, homophobia, and imperialism at Abu Ghraib; the conundrum faced by economically disadvantaged Latino youth who find themselves doubly targeted by aggressive army recruitment and anti-immigration activity; and the ways that rhetoric and policies of homeland security have provided new legal tools in the ongoing project of defining “real Americans” through exclusion and state violence. Other essays examine the role of the military in civilian spaces, the right-wing assault on progressive historians and on area studies, librarians’ efforts to protect the privacy of their patrons’ records in light of the Patriot Act, and the role of intellectuals in resisting everyday forms of control and surveillance.

Contributors. Barbara Abrash, Lori A. Allen, Jerry Atkin, Rachel Tzvia Back, Francisco E. Balderrama, Beatriz da Costa, Lara Z. Deeb, Eric Hiltner, Martha Howell, Lawrence Jones, Burçak Keskin-Kozat, R. J. Lambrose, Jorge Mariscal, Joseph Masco, Conor McGrady, Quincy T. Mills, Priscilla Murolo, Enrique C. Ochoa, Claire Pentecost, Kavita Philip, Vivian H. Price, Jasbir K. Puar, Eliza Jane Reilly, Natsu Taylor Saito, Ellen Schrecker, David Serlin, Rogers M. Smith, Marc Stein, Matias Viegener, Kath Weston, Maurice B. Wheeler, Jessica Winegar

From seventeenth-century broadsides about the handling of dead bodies, printed during London's plague years, to YouTube videos about preventing the transmission of STDs, public health advocacy and education has always had a powerful visual component. Imagining Illness explores the diverse visual culture of public health, broadly defined, from the nineteenth century to the present.

Contributors to this volume examine historical and contemporary visual practices-Chinese health fairs, documentary films produced by the World Health Organization, illness maps, fashions for nurses, and live surgery on the Internet-in order to delve into the political and epidemiological contexts underlying their creation and dissemination.
 

Contributors: Liping Bu, Alma College; Lisa Cartwright, U of California, San Diego; Roger Cooter, U College London; William H. Helfand; Lenore Manderson, Monash U, Australia; Emily Martin, New York U; Gregg Mitman, U of Wisconsin, Madison; Mark Monmonier, Syracuse U; Kirsten Ostherr, Rice U; Katherine Ott, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian; Shawn Michelle Smith, Art Institute of Chicago; Claudia Stein, Warwick U.

In this special issue of Radical History Review, scholars and activists examine the rise of “homonormativity,” a lesbian and gay politics that embraces neoliberal values under the guise of queer sexual liberation. Contributors look at the historical forces through which lesbian and gay rights organizations and community advocates align with social conservatives and endorse family-oriented formations associated with domestic partnership, adoption, military service, and gender-normative social roles.

Distinguished by its historical approach, “Queer Futures” examines homonormativity as a phenomenon that emerged in the United States after World War II and gained traction in the 1960s and 1970s. One essay compares Anita Bryant’s antigay campaigns in the late 1970s with those of current same-sex marriage proponents to show how both focus on the abstract figure of the “endangered child.” Another essay explores how the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation’s organizational amnesia has shaped its often conservative agenda. Other essays include a Marxist reading of the transsexual body, an examination of reactionary politics at the core of the movement to repeal the U.S. military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, and a history of how “safe streets” patrols in the 1970s and 1980s became opportunities for urban gentrification and community exploitation.

Contributors. Anna M. Agathangelou, Daniel Bassichis, Aaron Belkin, Nan Alamilla Boyd, Maxime Cervulle, Vincent Doyle, Roderick A. Ferguson, Christina Hanhardt, Dan Irving, Regina Kunzel, Patrick McCreery, Kevin P. Murphy, Tavia Nyong’o, Jason Ruiz, David Serlin, Tamara L. Spira, Susan Stryker, Margot D. Weiss

After World War II, the United States underwent a massive cultural transformation that was vividly realized in the development and widespread use of new medical technologies. Plastic surgery, wonder drugs, artificial organs, and prosthetics inspired Americans to believe in a new age of modern medical miracles. The nationalistic pride that flourished in postwar society, meanwhile, encouraged many Americans to put tremendous faith in the power of medicine to rehabilitate and otherwise transform the lives and bodies of the disabled and those considered abnormal. Replaceable You revisits this heady era in American history to consider how these medical technologies and procedures were used to advance the politics of conformity during the 1950s.