Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities

by Sharon L. Snyder (Editor)

Images of disability pervade language and literature, yet disability is, as the volume's introduction notes, "the ubiquitous unspoken topic in contemporary culture." The twenty-five essays in Disability Studies provide perspectives on disabled people and on disability in the humanities, art, the media, medicine, psychology, the academy, and society.

Edited and introduced by Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson and containing an afterword by Michael Bérubé (author of Life As We Know It), the volume is rich in its cast of characters (including John Bulwer, Teresa de Cartagena, Audre Lorde, Oliver Sacks, Samuel Johnson, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman); in its powerful, authentic accounts of disabled conditions (deafness, blindness, MS, cancer, the absence of limbs); in its different settings (ancient Greece, medieval Spain, Nazi Germany, the modern United States); and in its mix of the intellectual and the emotional, of subtle theory and plainspoken autobiography.

Genres: Disability, Disability Studies, Feminism, Research, Academic, Nonfiction, Politics

400 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 28, 2002

About the author

Sharon L. Snyder is a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a leading scholar in Disability Studies, coauthoring Narrative Prosthesis and coediting key works including The Body and Physical Difference and The Encyclopedia of Disability.

Reviews

[Melissa Stacy · Rating 5 out of 5]

First published in 2002, "Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities," edited by Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, is a seminal work in the academic field of disability studies. This essay collection is an excellent introduction to the topic of disability and how to apply disability studies to other methods of inquiry.

My favorite essay in the book was the first one: "Narrative Prosthesis and the Materiality of Metaphor," by David T. Mitchell. This essay was expanded into a book that I'd like to read.

The co-editors of this collection all contributed strong essays as well.

Reading a book like this is certainly rewarding -- it's tremendously educational and stimulating -- but it sure isn't fun. Grappling with ableism and the realities of disability is mental and emotional labor. And because so much of the physical human world still actively bars people with disabilities from participating in social events, and readily promotes works of art that spread the message that people with disabilities are better off dead, these essays are sad and draining to read. As much as I wish the world were better, the world is simply the world: ableist af.

I'm incredibly grateful to the disability studies scholars who created this field of research, and to everyone who keeps expanding our minds with new insights. It's tremendously important work, and certainly needed.

Five stars.

[Victoria Edwards · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book includes articles from some of the biggest names in disability studies in the humanities to create a fundamental text for disability criticism. Split into four sections (Enabling Theory, Autobiographical Subjects, Rehabilitating Representation, and Enabling Pedagogy), Disability Studies tracks a path to accomplish exactly what the title suggests: enable the humanities.