Phallacies: Historical Intersections of Disability and Masculinity

Phallacies: Historical Intersections of Disability and Masculinity is a collection of essays that focuses on disabled men who negotiate their masculinity as well as their disability. The chapters cover a broad range of topics: institutional structures that define what it means to be a man with a disability; the place of women in situations where masculinity and disability are constructed; men with physical and war-related disabilities; male hysteria, suicide clubs, and mercy killing; male disability in literature and popular culture; and more. All the authors regard masculinity and disability in the historical contexts of the Americas and Western Europe, with particular attention to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Taken together, the essays in this volume offer a nuanced portrait of the complex, and at times competing, interactions between masculinity and disability.

Kathleen M. Brian, PhD, is a Lecturer in the Liberal Studies Department at Western Washington University. Brian's recent work has appeared in the Journal of Literary and Disability Studies, the History of Psychiatry, and the Bulletin of the History of Medicine.

James W. Trent, Jr., PhD, is a Visiting Scholar in the Heller School at Brandeis University. He is author of The Manliest Man: Samuel G. Howe and the Contours of Nineteenth-Century American Reform (2012) and Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Intellectual Disability in the United States (2016).