Unruly Bodies: Life Writing by Women with Disabilities - Softcover

Mintz, Susannah B.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807858307 ISBN 13: 9780807858301

Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007

Synopsis

The first critical study of personal narrative by women with disabilities, Unruly Bodies examines how contemporary writers use life writing to challenge cultural stereotypes about disability, gender, embodiment, and identity.

Combining the analyses of disability and feminist theories, Susannah Mintz discusses the work of eight American autobiographers: Nancy Mairs, Lucy Grealy, Georgina Kleege, Connie Panzarino, Eli Clare, Anne Finger, Denise Sherer Jacobson, and May Sarton. Mintz shows that by refusing inspirational rhetoric or triumph-over-adversity narrative patterns, these authors insist on their disabilities as a core--but not diminishing--aspect of identity. They offer candid portrayals of shame and painful medical procedures, struggles for the right to work or to parent, the inventive joys of disabled sex, the support and the hostility of family, and the losses and rewards of aging. Mintz demonstrates how these unconventional stories challenge feminist idealizations of independence and self-control and expand the parameters of what counts as a life worthy of both narration and political activism. Unruly Bodies also suggests that atypical life stories can redefine the relation between embodiment and identity generally.

About this title

Book Description:

"Elegantly written and free of jargon, Unruly Bodies refuses the reductive understanding often applied to disability stories. By including previously unrecognized literary voices, particularly within women's studies and minority studies, it is an important resource for literary critics, teachers, and scholars in the developing field of disability studies. I want people to read this book."--Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Emory University

About the Author:

Susannah B. Mintz is associate professor of English at Skidmore College. She is author of Threshold Poetics: Milton and Intersubjectivity.

About this edition

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0807858307
• ISBN 13: 9780807858301
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 264