The Critical Limits of Embodiment

Reflections on Disability Criticism

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Edited by Carol A. Breckenridge and Candace Vogler

Duke University Press

Due/Published October 2001, 205 pages, paper

ISBN 0822365049

A Special Issue of Public Culture

Disability studies has the potential to unsettle many basic assumptions about the body, citizenship, capital, and beauty. This special issue of Public Culture explores disability criticism, an emergent subfield within disability studies.

 The articles in this collection build on recent work in the larger arena of disability studies and address such subjects as the hegemony of the concept of normalcy, the idea of the able body, and the constitutive place of disability in ethics, liberalism, and capitalism. The Critical Limits of Embodiment examines the commonsense foundations of disability studies, which tend to universalize Western norms and assumptions in which the normal is foregrounded and the able body forms the basis for the universal liberal subject. The broad geographic scope of these essays constitutes one of their greatest contributions to the field. In order to query the body-related universalisms of Western thought, the issue seeks to be self-conscious about cultural locations.

Contributors. Renu Addlakha, Carol A. Breckenridge, Veena Das, Faye Ginsburg, Wu Hung, Eva Kittay, Celeste Langan, David Mitchell, Rayna Rapp, Susan Schweik, Sharon Snyder, Candace Vogler, Hank Vogler

Contents

Introduction--Carol A. Breckenridge and Candace Vogler
Re-engaging the Body: Disability Studies and the Resistance to Embodiment--David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder
Mobility Disability--Celeste Langan
Enabling Disability: Rewriting Kinship, Reimagining Citizenship--Rayna Rapp and Faye Ginsberg
Censorship and the Narrative Disability in Colonial Korea--Kyeong-Hee Choi
The Voice of "Reason"--Susan Schweik
Disability and Domestic Citizenship: Stigma, Contagion, and the Making of the Subject--Veena Das and Renu Addlakha
When Caring is Just and Justice is Caring: Justice and Mental Retardation--Eva Kittay
Photographing Deformity: Liu Zheng and His Photo Series "My Countrymen"--Wu Hung
Stolen Bodies, Reclaimed Bodies: Queerness and Disability--Eli Clare
"Books" (short fiction)--Hank Vogler
"I" (photoessay)--Alexa Wright