Imogen’s Reviews > Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature > Status Update

Garland-Thomson discusses the origin of the "grotesque" trope in modern literature, and suggests (quite accurately, in my opinion) that it discourages authors and critics from politically conscious perspectives on disabled characters

Garland-Thomson charts the literary progression from a disabled rhetoric of sympathy in works like Uncle Tom's Cabin, to a rhetoric of dispair in industrialized novels like The Silent Partner, to a rhetoric of celebration in Black postmodern fiction like The Bluest Eye and Zami. She recognizes each rhetoric as a form of protest, but deftly points out the flaws in these representations.

Garland-Thomson introduces two essential terms to her examination of disabled cultural representation: "benevolent maternalism," or the impulse of female protagonists to care for and pity those with disabilities on the margins of the narrative, and "charismatic deviants," or disabled women whose very presence evokes complex issues, but who are never treated as truly human.

Thomson underscores the intersectionality at play when disabled women of color were exhibited in freak shows, suggesting that their "non-western ethnicity was essential to their enfreakment."

Anyone looking for a primer on sociological disability studies should read this. Thomson is revolutionary in connecting such social theories as Goffman's stigma theory and Douglas's theory of dirt to the cultural perception of disability and its wider implications

Garland-Thomson makes the incisive point that, if nondisabled women are objects of the male gaze, disabled women become objects of the impolite stare