Dear MECCSA-DISABILITY subscribers,

 

We hope these titles are of interest

 

Feminist, Queer, Crip

Alison Kafer

   "Feminist, Queer, Crip makes significant contributions to our understanding of how disability works in the world, contributions that no other academic book in the recently emergent field of interdisciplinary disability studies has done so thoroughly."—Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, November 2014

   "Feminist, Queer, Crip is a unique addition to the feminist, disability literature that could easily serve as a supplemental text in a disability studies or queer studies undergraduate or graduate course.... it is certainly relevant to academicians, researchers and clinicians interested in the future of disability studies and provides an intriguing list of diverse examples with which to further explore this too often invisible topic." —Sex Roles

   In Feminist, Queer, Crip Alison Kafer imagines a different future for disability and disabled bodies. 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 rejects the idea of disability as a pre-determined limit. She 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. This bold book goes against the grain of normalization and promotes a political framework for a more just world.

Indiana University Press

 

May 2013 276pp 2 b&w illus. 9780253009340 Paperback £18.99 now only £14.24 when you quote CS1214DISA when you order.

http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/feminist-queer-crip

 

 

Sex and Disability

Edited by Robert McRuer & Anna Mollow

   "This is a big collection, literally, politically, and theoretically. With essays drawing on sociology, anthropology, literary studies, history, and cultural studies, as well as some more lyrical, performative, and autobiographical, Sex and Disability will be indispensable for a wide range of audiences in gender studies, disability studies, queer studies and beyond."—Siobhan B. Somerville, author of Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture

   "This riveting collection of essays is a fascinating rethinking of what sex and disability could feel like together, affirmatively and generatively. Opening with a candid, frank introduction that moves deftly between the autobiographical and the political, the volume mounts a serious challenge to the sex-ableism of queer theory and the tendency to think of sex and disability in negative terms. Having read about pregnant men, the vagaries of touch, amputee devotees, and sex addiction, the reader will emerge uncertain about what exactly sex is, who has it, and with what. More trenchantly, these works demand an acknowledgement of how notions of ableism severely limit broader experiences of sexual erotics, intimacy, and arousal. Kudos to the editors for undertaking this important project."—Jasbir K. Puar, author of Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times

   The title of this collection of essays, Sex and Disability, unites two terms that the popular imagination often regards as incongruous. The major texts in sexuality studies, including queer theory, rarely mention disability, and foundational texts in disability studies do not discuss sex in much detail. What if "sex" and "disability" were understood as intimately related concepts? And what if disabled people were seen as both subjects and objects of a range of erotic desires and practices? These are among the questions that this collection's contributors engage. From multiple perspectives—including literary analysis, ethnography, and autobiography—they 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. At the same time, they challenge conceptions of disability in the dominant culture, queer studies, and disability studies.

Duke University Press Books

 

January 2012 432pp 11 illustrations, 3 figures 9780822351542 Paperback £18.99 now only £14.24 when you quote CS1214DISA when you order

http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/sex-and-disability

 

 

 

 

Fantasies of Identification

Disability, Gender, Race

Ellen Samuels

   “A beautifully written, ambitiously imagined, and wonderfully nuanced book. Samuels provides brilliantly argued case studies that demonstrate the discursive and visual processes by which Americans have, since the mid-nineteenth century, lived under various regimes of identification—both those imposed and those claimed through one’s subjective understanding of the world. Fantasies of Identification will be a marvelous contribution to disability studies, American studies, and literary historical studies.”—David Serlin,author of Replaceable You: Engineering the Body in Postwar America

   “Whether through measures of blood quantum, disability assessment, or sex/gender testing in athletics, Ellen Samuels makes clear that what she terms ‘biocertification’ continues to operate everywhere in contemporary cultures, regulating social worth, citizenship, and group membership. We have long needed Fantasies of Identification to understand more fully the ways in which disability is thickly interwoven with histories of race, sexuality, and gender in the United States.”—Robert McRuer,author of Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability

   In the mid-nineteenth-century United States, as it became increasingly difficult to distinguish between bodies understood as black, white, or Indian; able-bodied or disabled; and male or female, intense efforts emerged to define these identities as biologically distinct and scientifically verifiable in a literally marked body. Combining literary analysis, legal history, and visual culture, Ellen Samuels traces the evolution of the “fantasy of identification”—the powerful belief that embodied social identities are fixed, verifiable, and visible through modern science. From birthmarks and fingerprints to blood quantum and DNA, she examines how this fantasy has circulated between cultural representations, law, science, and policy to become one of the most powerfully institutionalized ideologies of modern society.

   Yet, as Samuels demonstrates, in every case, the fantasy distorts its claimed scientific basis, substituting subjective language for claimed objective fact.From its early emergence in discourses about disability fakery and fugitive slaves in the nineteenth century to its most recent manifestation in the question of sex testing at the 2012 Olympic Games, Fantasies of Identification explores the roots of modern understandings of bodily identity.

New York University Press

 

April 2014 288pp 9781479859498 Paperback £16.99 now only £12.74 when you quote CS1214DISA when you order

http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/fantasies-of-identification

 

 

 

Disability and Passing

Blurring the Lines of Identity

Edited by Jeffrey A Brune & Daniel J Wilson

   "Disability and Passing is innovative in its use of disability to analyze both the acts and ideologies of passing from a wide range of theoretical, topical, and disciplinary perspectives. The essays are strong and smart—some are brilliant."—Kim E. Nielsen, Professor of Disability Studies and History, University of Toledo, and author of A Disability History of the United States.

"Disability and Passing, cuts to the heart of disability identity, revealing as never before the centrality of passing to how disabled people think about themselves. Brune and Wilson’s collection demands a spot on everyone's bookshelf."—Tobin Siebers, University of Michigan

   Passing—an act usually associated with disguising race—also relates to disability. Whether a person classified as mentally ill struggles to suppress aberrant behaviour to appear “normal” or a person intentionally takes on a disability identity to gain some advantage, passing is a pervasive and much-discussed phenomenon. Nevertheless, Disability and Passing is the first anthology to examine this issue.

   The editors and contributors to this volume explore the intersections of disability, race, gender, and sexuality as these various aspects of identity influence each other and make identity fluid. They argue that the line between disability and normality is blurred, discussing disability as an individual identity and as a social category. And they discuss the role of stigma in decisions about whether or not to pass.

   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.  

Temple University Press

May 2013 216pp 9781439909805 Paperback £20.99 now only £15.74 when you quote CS1214DISA when you order.

http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/Book/36788/Disability-and-Passing

 

 

 

The Disarticulate

Language, Disability, and the Narratives of Modernity

James Berger

 

   “The Disarticulate is an important intervention in the field of disability studies, providing a solid historicization of the ways 'cognitive impairment' is at the very center of modernity. As the field turns decisively towards such questions, James Berger's work will be an invaluable guide, moving the conversation decisively forward.”—Robert McRuer,author of Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability

 

   “In Hölderlin's famous hymn, ‘Celebration of Peace,’ the poet warns of a return to stillness—the condition of the cessation of language. There has to be some guarantee of language leaking in during the greatest moment of muteness. Berger offers such an opening with bright, eloquent, yet cautious terms that bravely confront the threat of linguistic foreclosure. At times close to Nietzsche’s subterranean howl, he philosophizes with a stammer, passing the mic to those who speak otherwise, according to untapped locutions.”—Avital Ronell,author of Loser Sons: Politics and Authority

 

    Language is integral to our social being. But what is the status of those who stand outside of language? The mentally disabled, “wild” children, people with autism and other neurological disorders, as well as animals, infants, angels, and artificial intelligences, have all engaged with language from a position at its borders. In the intricate verbal constructions of modern literature, the ‘disarticulate’—those at the edges of language—have, paradoxically, played essential, defining roles.

 

   Drawing on the disarticulate figures in modern fictional works such as Billy Budd, The Sound and the Fury, Nightwood, White Noise, and The Echo Maker, among others, James Berger shows in this intellectually bracing study how these characters mark sites at which aesthetic, philosophical, ethical, political, medical, and scientific discourses converge. It is also the place of the greatest ethical tension, as society confronts the needs and desires of “the least of its brothers.” Berger argues that the disarticulate is that which is unaccountable in the discourses of modernity and thus stands as an alternative to the prevailing social order. Using literary history and theory, as well as disability and trauma theory, he examines how these disarticulate figures reveal modernity’s anxieties in terms of how it constructs its others.

 

New York University Press

 

May 2014 320pp 9780814725306 Paperback £17.99 now only £13.49 when you quote CS1214DISA when you order.

 

http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/the-disarticulate

 

 

 

Chronic Youth

Disability, Sexuality, and U.S. Media Cultures of Rehabilitation

Julie Passanante Elman

 

   “Chronic Youth is cultural studies at the top of its game—a whip-smart read that makes groundbreaking contributions across a diversity of disciplines. Its voice is passionate; its case studies are meticulously parsed; and its conclusions more than mere food for thought. It is, in sum, a profound treatise on how and why we worry, police, manufacture, and delude ourselves into the faux crisis that is the teenager in contemporary American cultures.”—Scott Herring,author of Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism

 

    “With rigorous and insightful analysis of popular media representations, Elman shows how disability has increasingly become an all-purpose referent for the ‘problem years’ of transition from childhood to adulthood. Bringing disability and femininity into the framework of youth studies in order to address a neglected intersection of experiences, Chronic Youth provides a wonderful example of what disability studies can bring to media studies of the body.”-David T. Mitchell,George Washington University

 

   The teenager has often appeared in culture as an anxious figure, the repository for American dreams and worst nightmares, at once on the brink of success and imminent failure. Spotlighting the “troubled teen” as a site of pop cultural, medical, and governmental intervention, Chronic Youth traces the teenager as a figure through which broad threats to the normative order have been negotiated and contained.

 

   Undertaking a cultural history of youth that combines disability, queer, feminist, and comparative media studies, Elman offers a provocative new account of how American cultural producers, policymakers, and medical professionals have mobilized discourses of disability to cast adolescence as a treatable “condition.” By tracing the teen’s uneven passage from postwar rebel to 21st century patient, Chronic Youth shows how teenagers became a lynchpin for a culture of perpetual rehabilitation and neoliberal governmentality.

 

New York University Press

 

October 2014 288pp 9781479818228 Paperback £16.99 now only £12.74 when you quote CS1214DISA when you order.

 

http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/chronic-youth

 

 

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