Extraordinary Bodies
Extraordinary Bodies

Author: Rosemarie Garland Thomson

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2017-03-07

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 0231544774

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Extraordinary Bodies is a cornerstone text of disability studies, establishing the field upon its publication in 1997. Framing disability as a minority discourse rather than a medical one, the book added depth to oppressive narratives and revealed novel, liberatory ones. Through her incisive readings of such texts as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron Mills, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson exposed the social forces driving representations of disability. She encouraged new ways of looking at texts and their depiction of the body and stretched the limits of what counted as a text, considering freak shows and other pop culture artifacts as reflections of community rites and fears. Garland-Thomson also elevated the status of African-American novels by Toni Morrison and Audre Lorde. Extraordinary Bodies laid the groundwork for an appreciation of disability culture and an inclusive new approach to the study of social marginalization.

Big and Small
Big and Small

Author: Lynne Vallone

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2017-11-07

Total Pages: 373

ISBN-13: 0300231717

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A groundbreaking work that explores human size as a distinctive cultural marker in Western thought Author, scholar, and editor Lynne Vallone has an international reputation in the field of child studies. In this analytical tour-de-force, she explores bodily size difference—particularly unusual bodies, big and small—as an overlooked yet crucial marker that informs human identity and culture. Exploring miniaturism, giganticism, obesity, and the lived experiences of actual big and small people, Vallone boldly addresses the uncomfortable implications of using physical measures to judge normalcy, goodness, gender identity, and beauty. This wide-ranging work surveys the lives and contexts of both real and imagined persons with extraordinary bodies from the seventeenth century to the present day through close examinations of art, literature, folklore, and cultural practices, as well as scientific and pseudo-scientific discourses. Generously illustrated and written in a lively and accessible style, Vallone’s provocative study encourages readers to look with care at extraordinary bodies and the cultures that created, depicted, loved, and dominated them.

Freakery
Freakery

Author: Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 1996-10

Total Pages: 426

ISBN-13: 9780814782224

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A groundbreaking anthology that probes the disposition towards the visually different Giants. Midgets. Tribal non-Westerners. The very fat. The very thin. Hermaphrodites. Conjoined twins. The disabled. The very hirsute. In American history, all have shared the platform equally, as freaks, human oddities, their only commonality their assigned role of anomalous other to the gathered throngs. For the price of a ticket, freak shows offered spectators an icon of bodily otherness whose difference from them secured their own membership in a common American identity--by comparison ordinary, tractable, normal. Rosemarie Thomson's groundbreaking anthology probes America's disposition toward the visually different. The book's essays fall into four main categories: historical explorations of American freak shows in the era of P.T. Barnum; the articulation of the freak in literary and textual discourses; contemporary relocations of freak shows; and theoretical analyses of freak culture. Essays address such diverse topics as American colonialism and public presentations of natives; laughing gas demonstrations in the 1840's; Shirley Temple and Tom Thumb; Todd Browning's landmark movie Freaks; bodybuilders as postmodern freaks; freaks in Star Trek; Michael Jackson's identification with the Elephant Man; and the modern talk show as a reconfiguration of the freak show. In her introduction, Thomson traces the freak show from antiquity to the modern period and explores the constitutive, political, and textual properties of such exhibits. Freakery is a fresh, insightful exploration of a heretofore neglected aspect of American mass culture.

Extraordinary Measures
Extraordinary Measures

Author: Joseph N. Straus

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2011-03-24

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 0199831408

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Approaching disability as a cultural construction rather than a medical pathology, this book studies the impact of disability and concepts of disability on composers, performers, and listeners with disabilities, as well as on discourse about music and works of music themselves. For composers with disabilities--like Beethoven, Delius, and Schumann--awareness of the disability sharply inflects critical reception. For performers with disabilities--such as Itzhak Perlman and Evelyn Glennie--the performance of disability and the performance of music are deeply intertwined. For listeners with disabilities, extraordinary bodies and minds may give rise to new ways of making sense of music. In the stories that people tell about music, and in the stories that music itself tells, disability has long played a central but unrecognized role. Some of these stories are narratives of overcoming-the triumph of the human spirit over adversity-but others are more nuanced tales of accommodation and acceptance of life with a non-normative body or mind. In all of these ways, music both reflects and constructs disability.

Disability Rhetoric
Disability Rhetoric

Author: Jay Timothy Dolmage

Publisher: Syracuse University Press

Published: 2014-01-22

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 081565233X

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Disability Rhetoric is the first book to view rhetorical theory and history through the lens of disability studies. Traditionally, the body has been seen as, at best, a rhetorical distraction; at worst, those whose bodies do not conform to a narrow range of norms are disqualified from speaking. Yet, Dolmage argues that communication has always been obsessed with the meaning of the body and that bodily difference is always highly rhetorical. Following from this rewriting of rhetorical history, he outlines the development of a new theory, affirming the ideas that all communication is embodied, that the body plays a central role in all expression, and that greater attention to a range of bodies is therefore essential to a better understanding of rhetorical histories, theories, and possibilities.

Celebrate Your Body (and Its Changes, Too!)
Celebrate Your Body (and Its Changes, Too!)

Author: Sonya Renee Taylor

Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc.

Published: 2018-05-29

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 1641520280

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A body-positive guide to help girls ages 8 to 12 navigate the changes of puberty and grow into women Puberty can be a difficult time for a young girl—and it's natural not to know who (or what) to ask. Celebrate Your Body is a reassuring puberty book for girls that encourages them to face puberty and their body's changes with excitement and empowerment. From period care to mysterious hair in new places, this age-appropriate sex education book has the answers young girls are looking for—in a way that they can relate to. Covering everything from bras to braces, this body-positive puberty book for girls offers friendly guidance and support for when it's needed most. In addition to tips on managing intense feelings, making friends, and more, this book provides advice on what to eat and how to exercise so your body is healthy, happy, and ready for the changes ahead. PUBERTY EXPLAINED: Explanations on what happens, when it happens, and why the body (and mind) is amazing in every way. SOCIAL SKILL DEVELOPMENT: Help your young girl discover how to use her voice to stand up to peer pressure, stay safe on social media, and keep the right kind of friends. SELF-CARE TIPS: This body book for girls 9-12 helps them discover how to choose the right food, exercise, and sleep schedule to keep their changing bodies at their best. This inclusive puberty book for girls is the ultimate guide to facing puberty with confidence.

Uncanny Bodies
Uncanny Bodies

Author: Scott T. Smith

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2019-12-10

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 0271086300

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Superhero comics reckon with issues of corporeal control. And while they commonly deal in characters of exceptional or superhuman ability, they have also shown an increasing attention and sensitivity to diverse forms of disability, both physical and cognitive. The essays in this collection reveal how the superhero genre, in fusing fantasy with realism, provides a visual forum for engaging with issues of disability and intersectional identity (race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality) and helps to imagine different ways of being in the world. Working from the premise that the theoretical mode of the uncanny, with its interest in what is simultaneously known and unknown, ordinary and extraordinary, opens new ways to think about categories and markers of identity, Uncanny Bodies explores how continuums of ability in superhero comics can reflect, resist, or reevaluate broader cultural conceptions about disability. The chapters focus on lesser-known characters—such as Echo, Omega the Unknown, and the Silver Scorpion—as well as the famous Barbara Gordon and the protagonist of the acclaimed series Hawkeye, whose superheroic uncanniness provides a counterpoint to constructs of normalcy. Several essays explore how superhero comics can provide a vocabulary and discourse for conceptualizing disability more broadly. Thoughtful and challenging, this eye-opening examination of superhero comics breaks new ground in disability studies and scholarship in popular culture. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Sarah Bowden, Charlie Christie, Sarah Gibbons, Andrew Godfrey-Meers, Marit Hanson, Charles Hatfield, Naja Later, Lauren O’Connor, Daniel J. O'Rourke, Daniel Pinti, Lauranne Poharec, and Deleasa Randall-Griffiths.

Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies
Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies

Author: Maddie Mortimer

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2022-06-28

Total Pages: 448

ISBN-13: 198218177X

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Lia, her husband, Harry, and their daughter, Iris, are a perfectly balanced family of three with a happy life. But when a devasting diagnosis threatens to derail their lives, the world around them begins to warp and transform, and Lia's carefully hidden secrets come rushing out.

The Difference that Disability Makes
The Difference that Disability Makes

Author: Rod Michalko

Publisher: Temple University Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 9781566399340

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Rod Michalko launches into this book asking why disabled people are still feared, still regarded as useless or unfit to live, not yet welcome in society? Michalko challenges us to come to grips with the social meanings attached to disability and the body that is not "normal." Michalko's analysis draws from his own understanding of blindness and narratives by other disabled people. Connecting lived experience with social theory, he shows the consistent exclusion of disabled people from the common understandings of humanity and what constitutes the good life. He offers new insight into what suffering a disability means to individuals as well as to the polity as a whole. He shows how disability can teach society about itself, about its determination of what is normal and who belongs. Guiding us to a new understanding of how disability, difference, and suffering are related, this book enables us to choose disability as a social identity and a collective political issue. The difference that disability makes can be valuable and worthwhile, but only if we choose to make it so. Author note: Rod Michalko is Associate Professor of Sociology at St. Francis Xavier University. He is the author of The Mystery of the Eye and the Shadow of Blindness (1998) and The Two- in-One: Walking with Smokie, Walking with Blindness (Temple, 1999).