Dangerous discourses of disability, subjectivity and sexuality / Margrit Shildrick.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Shildrick, Margrit.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

People with disabilities.

Marginality, Social.

Physical Description:

vii, 215 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Basingstoke, UK ; New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Summary:

This innovative and adventurous book examines disability in the context of two areas - subjectivity and sexuality - in which it has been hitherto suppressed. Using feminist and postmodernist analysis, Margrit Shildrick explores what motivates the discrimination, devaluation and alienation directed at disabled people, and argues that the difference that disability encapsulates uncovers a psycho-cultural imaginary that sustains modernist understandings of what constitutes an embodied subject. Where autonomy is the most valued attribute of subjectivity, any compromise of bodily control, indication of connectivity, or of corporeal instability, mobilizes a deep-seated anxiety in the normative majority that is more acute relation to disability and sexuality.

By critiquing conventional paradigms this study shows how it becomes possible to celebrate the fluidity, unpredictability and connectivity - already associated with disability - and creatively queer understanding of the embodied self. Using an analysis that draws on critical cultural theory, emergent strands in critical disability studies, postconventional philosophy and feminist theories of the body from Merleau-Ponty to Haraway and Deleuze, and social policy and legal discourse, Shildrick argues for the need to contextualise disability as a matter of ethical import.

Contents:

Corporealities

Genealogies

Contested pleasures and governmentality

Sexuality, subjectivity and anxiety

Transgressing the law

Queer pleasures

Global corporealities.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780230210561

0230210562

OCLC:

317926986