Extraordinary bodies: figuring physical disability in American culture and literature

Abstract

"Although American cultural and literary criticism often explores how difference and identity operate in politicized constructions of the body such as gender, race, and sexuality, the figure of the physically disabled individual has been either overlooked or treated as a personal misfortune or a medical problem. As the first major critical study to examine literary and cultural representations of physical disability, Extraordinary Bodies situates disability as a social construction, shifting it from a property of bodies to a product of cultural rules about what bodies should be or do. Rosemarie Garland Thomson examines disabled figures in sentimental novels such as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron Mills, African-American novels by Toni Morrison and Audre Lorde, and the popular cultural ritual of the freak show. Extraordinary Bodies inaugurates a new field of disability studies in the humanities by framing disability as a minority discourse, rather than a medical one, ultimately revising oppressive narratives of disability and revealing liberatory ones" -- Back of cover.

Contents

Contents -- Preface and Acknowledgments -- PART 1: POLITICIZING BODILY DIFFERENCES -- 1. Disability, Identity, and Representation: An Introduction: -- The Disabled Figure in Culture -- The Disabled Figure in Literature -- The Gap Between Representation and Reality -- An Overview and a Manifesto -- 2. Theorizing Disability: -- Feminist Theory, the Body, and the Disabled Figure -- Sociocultural Analyses of the Extraordinary Body -- The Disabled Figure and the Ideology of Liberal Individualism -- The Disabled Figure and the Problem of Work -- PART 2: CONSTRUCTING DISABLED FIGURES: CULTURAL AND LITERARY SITES -- 3. The Cultural Work of American Freak Shows, 1835-1940: -- The Spectacle of the Extraordinary Body -- Constituting the Average Man -- Identification and the Longing for Distinction -- From Freak to Specimen: "The Hottentot Venus" and "The Ugliest Woman in the World" -- The End of the Prodigious Body -- 4. Benevolent Maternalism and the Disabled Women in Stowe, Davis, and Phelps: -- The Maternal Benefactress and Her Disabled Sisters -- The Disabled Figure as a Call for Justice: -- Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin -- Empowering the Maternal Benefactress -- Benevolent Maternalism's Flight from the Body: Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin -- The Female Bod as Liability -- Two Opposing Scripts of Female Embodiment: Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron Mills -- The Triumph of the Beautiful, Disembodied Heroine: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Silent Partner -- 5. Disabled Women as Powerful Women in Petry, Morrison, and Lorde: -- Revising Black Female Subjectivity -- The Extraordinary Woman as Powerful Woman: Ann Petry's The Street -- From the Grotesque to the Cyborg -- The Extraordinary Body as the Historicized Body: Toni Morrison's Disabled Women -- The Extraordinary Subject: -- Audre Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name -- The Poetics of Particularity -- Conclusion: From Pathology to Identity -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.