Reading and Writing Disability Differently: The Textured Life of Embodiment

Mixing rigorous social theory with concrete analysis, Reading and Writing Disability Differently unpacks the marginality of disabled people by addressing how the meaning of our bodily existence is configured in everyday literate society.

Tanya Titchkosky begins by illustrating how news media and policy texts reveal dominant Western ways of constituting the meaning of people, and the meaning of problems, as they relate to our understandings of the embodied self. Her goal is to configure disability as something more than a problem, and beyond simply a positive or a negative, and to treat texts on disability as potential sites to examine neo-liberal culture. Titchkosky holds that through an exploration of the potential behind limited representations of disability, we can relate to disability as a meaningful form of resistance to the restricted normative order of contemporary embodiment.

Incorporating a textual analysis of ordinary depictions of disability, this innovative study promises to represent embodied differences in new ways and alter our imaginative relations to the politics of the body.

Tanya Titchkosky is an associate professor and an associate department chair at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto.