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The Body and Physical Difference: discourses on disability
DAVID T. MITCHELL & SHARON SNYDER (EdS), 1997
Michigan, University of Michigan Press
299 pp., 13.50 (pb), available in UK through Plymbridge
ISBN 0 472 06659 5
As this book makes clear, considerations of the disabled body are problematic for many people. Disability as a functional bodily difference is often, literally, messy and unpredictable. By its nature the disabled body can be both fascinating and threatening, particularly to non-disabled people. And because of the associations of disablement and the body with medicine and illness, the disabled body also serves as a metaphor for lack of human endeavour and lost aspirations.
The fantasies and fictions that have been constructed around conceptions of physical and intellectual difference and disablement serve as the focus for this book. Mitchell and Snyder bring together a range of debates about the contribution of the disabled human body in culture and the arts. By so doing they inform and introduce the reader to a variety of cross-disciplinary questions about the representation of disability and the body in various dimensions of the humanities, liberal arts and the social sciences. The various contributors help to emphasise the valuable role that the arts and humanities can play in understanding the inter-disciplinary nature of disability studies. The text also illuminates how the perceived location of `the problem' of disability in the individual, 'tragedy'...