The Matter of Disability
Materiality, Biopolitics, Crip Affect
Breaks new ground by exploring the limits and transformations of the social model of disability
Description
The Matter of Disability returns disability to its proper place as an ongoing historical process of corporeal, cognitive, and sensory mutation operating in a world of dynamic, even cataclysmic, change. The book’s contributors offer new theorizations of human and nonhuman embodiments and their complex evolutions in our global present, in essays that explore how disability might be imagined as participant in the “complex elaboration of difference,” rather than something gone awry in an otherwise stable process. This alternative approach to materiality sheds new light on the capacities that exist within the depictions of disability that the book examines, including Spider-Man, Of Mice and Men, and Bloodchild.
David T. Mitchell is Professor of English at George Washington University. Susan Antebi is Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Toronto. Sharon L. Snyder is Instructor of Honors and Women's, Sexuality, and Gender Studies at George Washington University.
Reviews
"The essays in this volume, especially if read concurrently, provide a
- Gesine Wegner, Philipps-Universität Marburg
fresh perspective and a valuable contribution to recent disability studies scholarship and critical theories of embodiment more generally. For readers with little to no prior knowledge in posthumanism and/or disability studies, The Matter of Disability may prove challenging at times. Yet, while the book expects much of its readers, readers can also expect much in return."
—Amerikastudien / American Studies