This innovative and adventurous book examines disability in the context of two areas - subjectivity and sexuality - in which it has been hitherto suppressed. Using feminist and postmodernist analysis, Margrit Shildrick explores what motivates the discrimination, devaluation and alienation directed at disabled people, and argues that the difference that disability encapsulates uncovers a psycho-cultural imaginary that sustains modernist understandings of what constitutes an embodied subject. Where autonomy is the most valued attribute of subjectivity, any compromise of bodily control, indication of connectivity, or of corporeal instability, mobilizes a deep-seated anxiety in the normative majority that is most acute in relation to disability and sexuality.
By critiquing conventional paradigms this study shows how it becomes possible to celebrate the fluidity, unpredictability and connectivity - already associated with disability - and creatively queer understanding of the embodied self. Using an analysis that draws on critical cultural theory, emergent strands in critical disability studies, postconventional philosophy and feminist theories of the body from Merleau-Ponty to Haraway and Deleuze, and social policy and legal discourse, Shildrick argues for the need to contextualise disability as a matter of ethical import.
'Dangerous Discourses of Disability, Subjectivity and Sexuality breaks new critical ground by bringing together three fundamental registers of difference to critically engage the fact of human bodily variation. This book asks sharp questions coming from theory, politics, and the material environment about our understandings of what it means to be a person living in a body deemed different.' - Professor Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Emory University, USA
'In Dangerous Discourses Margrit Shildrick leads readers on a tour of the promise that Critical Disability Studies holds for postmodern theories of embodiment, fluidity, and subjective interconnectivity. Rather than argue on behalf of an "inclusionary" model of integration into socially-derived norms, the work takes up a more radical project of disability as integral to human differences. This turn moves disability from a marginalized condition to that which marks the possibilities of becoming - a mutating force that posits instability as a creative catalyst for alternative modes of intersubjectivity.' - David T. Mitchell, Temple University, USA
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Corporealities
Genealogies
Contested Pleasures and Governmentality
Sexuality, Subjectivity and Anxiety
Transgressing the Law
Queer Pleasures
Global Corporealities
Conclusion: Thinking Differently
Notes
Bibliography
Index
MARGRIT SHILDRICK is Reader in Gender Studies at Queen's University, Belfast, UK and Adjunct Professor of the Critical Disability Studies program, York University, Toronto, Canada. She is the author of Leaky Bodies and Boundaries and Embodying the Monster, and co-editor of several books including Ethics of the Body.
Description
This innovative and adventurous book examines disability in the context of two areas - subjectivity and sexuality - in which it has been hitherto suppressed. Using feminist and postmodernist analysis, Margrit Shildrick explores what motivates the discrimination, devaluation and alienation directed at disabled people, and argues that the difference that disability encapsulates uncovers a psycho-cultural imaginary that sustains modernist understandings of what constitutes an embodied subject. Where autonomy is the most valued attribute of subjectivity, any compromise of bodily control, indication of connectivity, or of corporeal instability, mobilizes a deep-seated anxiety in the normative majority that is most acute in relation to disability and sexuality.
By critiquing conventional paradigms this study shows how it becomes possible to celebrate the fluidity, unpredictability and connectivity - already associated with disability - and creatively queer understanding of the embodied self. Using an analysis that draws on critical cultural theory, emergent strands in critical disability studies, postconventional philosophy and feminist theories of the body from Merleau-Ponty to Haraway and Deleuze, and social policy and legal discourse, Shildrick argues for the need to contextualise disability as a matter of ethical import.
Reviews
'Dangerous Discourses of Disability, Subjectivity and Sexuality breaks new critical ground by bringing together three fundamental registers of difference to critically engage the fact of human bodily variation. This book asks sharp questions coming from theory, politics, and the material environment about our understandings of what it means to be a person living in a body deemed different.' - Professor Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Emory University, USA
'In Dangerous Discourses Margrit Shildrick leads readers on a tour of the promise that Critical Disability Studies holds for postmodern theories of embodiment, fluidity, and subjective interconnectivity. Rather than argue on behalf of an "inclusionary" model of integration into socially-derived norms, the work takes up a more radical project of disability as integral to human differences. This turn moves disability from a marginalized condition to that which marks the possibilities of becoming - a mutating force that posits instability as a creative catalyst for alternative modes of intersubjectivity.' - David T. Mitchell, Temple University, USA
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Corporealities
Genealogies
Contested Pleasures and Governmentality
Sexuality, Subjectivity and Anxiety
Transgressing the Law
Queer Pleasures
Global Corporealities
Conclusion: Thinking Differently
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Authors
MARGRIT SHILDRICK is Reader in Gender Studies at Queen's University, Belfast, UK and Adjunct Professor of the Critical Disability Studies program, York University, Toronto, Canada. She is the author of Leaky Bodies and Boundaries and Embodying the Monster, and co-editor of several books including Ethics of the Body.
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