Disabilities: Autobiography, Education, and Theory

Nancy Mairs, writing from her experience of severe multiple sclerosis, invites us to her book, “not to be uplifted, but to be lowered and steadied into what may be unfamiliar, but is not inhospitable space.” The course seeks to inhabit several such spaces: physico-motor disability, blindness, deafness (deaf culture), autism, depression, traumatic brain injury and stroke. It is built upon the reading of contemporary autobiographies of disability. Around this core, and our requisite attention to the close reading and critical scrutiny of these texts (in themselves varied expressions of a traditional literary genre of self-writing and self-representation), we will attempt to position a number of related, if widely divergent, applications or practices. These include 1) theories of the body and of embodiment in contemporary academic scholarship, 2) the recourses and reiterations of traumatic injury and subsequent memory (or its absence), 3) the ongoing special relationship between the disabled and the responsive/resistant structures of the American educational system, 4) the study of the representation of the disabled in modern and contemporary media, in film most especially, and 5) a critical hearing or airing of the disability rights movement and its effective political militancy. Many of us will no doubt be haunted, chastened, or motivated by this politics: what is the right relationship between the academic study or discussion of disability and activism? The course is designed (or better, thrown about/together) with the hope that students will find a particular path or emphasis among many alternatives, including the five areas I have just mentioned. This emphasis will sponsor the investigation of a significant research topic by term’s end.
Class requirements:
Dedicated attendance and participation, 3or 4 brief response papers, term project. There will be an in-class panel of students leading up to the term project, an education and disabilities symposium, and several showings of films at a mutually agreed upon time. Students will be expected to see and to discuss these films.
Texts will be chosen from among the following (with sections/selections from many):
Nancy Mairs, Waist-High in the World: A Life Among the Nondisabled (Beacon
Press, 1996).
Kathryn Black, In the Shadow of Polio: A Personal and Social History (Addison-
Wesley, 1996).
Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Knopf, 1997).
John M. Hull, Touching the Rock: An Experience of Blindness
(Pantheon Books, 1990).
Georgina Kleege, Sight Unseen (Yale UP, 1999): “Voices in My Head,”
pp. 167-91; “Up Close, In Touch,” pp. 192-228; and selections from
On Blindness: Letters between Bryan Magee and Martin Milligan
(Oxford UP, 1995).
Stephen Kuusisto, Planet of the Blind: A Memoir (Dell, 1999).
J. Winslade: Confronting Traumatic Brain Injury: Devastation, Hope, and Healing
(Yale UP, 1998).
Cathy Crimmins, Where is the Mango Princess? (Knopf, 2000).
Temple Grandin, Thinking in Pictures: And Other Reports from my Life with Autism
(Vintage Books, 1996).
Rachel Simon, Riding the Bus with My Sister (Houghton Mifflin, 2002).
Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
(Vintage Books, 1995).
A poetry packet, including poems by Donne, Herbert, Milton, Wordsworth, W. Owen, Rich, Kuusisto.
Four or five critical packets will be prepared for students from selected chapters and essays from the following:
The Disabilities Studies Reader, ed.Lennard J. Davis (Routledge, 1997); these:
Davis, “Constructing Normalcy: The Bell Curve, the Novel, and the Invention
of the Disabled Body in the Nineteenth Century”; Douglas Baynton, “’A Silent
Exile on the Earth’: The Metaphorical Construction of Deafness in the 19th-C.”;
Ruth Hubbard, “Abortion and Disability: Who Should and Who Should Not
Inhabit the World”; Lerita M. Coleman, “Stigma: An Enigma Demystified”;
Susan Wendell, “Toward a Feminist Theory of Disability.”
The Body and Physical Difference, ed. Mitchell and Snyder (U. Michigan P, 1997).
Disability and Culture, ed. Ingstad and Whyte (Univ. of California P, 1995).
Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out, ed. Kenny Fries
(Penquin Books, 1997).
Paul K. Longmore, Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays on Disabilities
(Temple UP, 2003).
The Ragged Edge: The Disability Experience from the . . . First Fifteen Years
of the Disability Rag, ed. Barrett Shaw (Advocado Press, 1994).
Doris Zames Fleischer and Frieda Zames, The Disability Rights Movement
From Charity to Confrontation (Temple UP, 2001).
Gelya Frank, Venus on Wheels: Two Decades of Dialogue on Disability,
Biography, and Being Female in America (U. of California P, 2000).
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World
(Oxford UP, 1985).
Arthur Kleinman, The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human
Condition (Basic Books, 1988).
Peter Byrne, “The Moral Status of the Cognitively Disabled,” from his Philosophical
and Ethical Problems in Mental Handicap (Macmillan, 2000).
Deborah Marks, “Categorizing ‘impairment,’ from Disability: Controversial debates
and psychosocial perspectives (Routledge, 1999).
Simi Linton, from Claiming Disability (NYU Press, 1998): chapters 3 and 4:
“Divided Society” and “Divided Curriculum,” pp. 34-116; and pp. 134-37
from“Disability Studies/Not Disability Studies.”