In the disability community, which can have multiple meanings in itself, we often experience poignant moments in sociocultural discourse. Our pathways to knowledge and understanding of identity are defined by life’s landmarks, many of which resonate with what thereby become formative figures or artefacts. This mapping of key moments involves recognising, and reflecting upon, cultural stations of disability.
More than being demarcations of disruption to the normative social order, cultural stations of disability sometimes pertain to its very epitome. They hold something of a moment in discourse with which identification is paramount but variously emotive. They may capture feelings of liberation to which we joyfully return, difficult memories that we revisit to ponder, or the nadir of modernity from which we can only hope to learn.
In this edited volume, an international gathering of contributors finds and defines dozens of cultural stations of disability in music, art, film, television programmes, literature, sitcom, activism, sport, performance, organisations, places, and events.
Cultural Stations of Disability: A Moment in Discourse will be of interest to interdisciplinary readers in disability studies, humour studies, media studies, film studies, television studies, literary studies, gender studies, cultural studies, popular music studies, and related disciplines in the humanities, education, and social sciences.
Table of Contents:
0.Cultural Stations of Disability: A Moment in Discourse. Part I - Bodies at Work. 1.‘It’s To Be About Art, Not About Illness’: Creating Ways of Returning to MS. 2.Dury and Dwoskin: Disabled Gazes and De-normalised Sociocultural Archives. 3.The Crip Archives: Performance and Disability in Lorenza Bötnner and Elian Chali. 4.The Diary and the Diva: Unpacking Disability in Anne Frank and ‘Alejandro’. 5.Touching Trust and Finding Two Rhythms: Challenging Hierarchies as Social Activism. Part Two – Textual Travels. 6.Hidden in Plain Sight: An Autocritical Exploration of Scent of A Woman and All the Light We Cannot See. 7.Cultural Stations of Dwarfism: From Little Helpers to Burney Nesbitt. 8.A New Testament: Changing Positionality, Changing Interpretation. 9.Moments of Identification: Neurodivergent Sociality and Loss in Marvel’s WandaVision. 10.Fiction or Fable: Mental Health Depictions in Children’s Literature. Part III - Personal and Global. 11.The Same Old Story: Disability Erasure and Metaphor in Environmental Discourse. 12.From Cultural Hauntologies to Political Ontologies: An Autocritical Disability Perspective on Welfare Justice as Disability Justice. 13.Performing Femininity: Retelling Stories of the Eyes and the Pure Voice. 14.Figure Skating Pace and Olympics Policy: The Problematics of Performance Normativity Cultures in Women’s Sport. 15.Radical and Regressive: Real-World and Fictional Depictions of Disabled Superheroes in Popular Culture. x.Afterword - Our Hard Day at Hartheim.
About the Author :
David Bolt is Professor of Disability Studies and Interdisciplinarity at Liverpool Hope University, United Kingdom.
