Rosemarie Garland Thomson

3 Key excerpts on "Rosemarie Garland Thomson"

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  The Fantasy of Disability

  Images of Loss in Popular Culture

  • Jeffrey Preston(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Extraordinary Bodies (1997) shows how literary criticism can provide fertile methodological ground. Garland-Thomson reviews the way physical disability has been represented in American literature, with special attention given to the intersection of disability and femininity. Garland-Thomson also provides a useful research model by comparing and contrasting female characters with disabilities – both those within individual texts and also across texts (Garland-Thomson 1997, 81). This text is especially useful because it deploys a nuanced methodology for interrogating literature, such as metaphor and simile, and how they are just as important, if not more important, to consider the role of disability in culturally imbued shorthand.

  Recent years have seen yet another shift in the way disability studies interrogates media texts, largely induced by the influx of communications scholars bringing new methodologies to the field. Tobin Siebers believes it crucial to consider the aesthetics of disability because “The representation of inferiority always comes back to the appearance of the body and the way the body makes other bodies feel” (Siebers 2010, 26). One popular text that engages with the question of media and disability is Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell’s Cultural Locations of Disability (2006), which deals with “narrative prosthesis” upon which fantasies are projected. As this work focuses on highlighting the function of disability in literature, and does not explore its psychic dimension, it will not be a focus of this text. Having said that, the most significant example for this text is the work of Beth Haller. Haller is a mass communications scholar who has brought disability into her primary research about media, rather than the other way around. Her text Representing Disability in an Ableist World

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  Rethinking Women's and Gender Studies Volume 2

  • Catherine M. Orr, Ann Braithwaite, Catherine M. Orr, Ann Braithwaite(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  system that stigmatizes certain kinds of bodily variations,” she pointed out that disability is also “a culturally fabricated narrative of the body, similar to what we understand as the fictions of race and gender” (2002, 5, emphasis added), and argued that WGS teaching and scholarship would be deepened by integrating the consideration of disability into four key areas of feminist theory: representation, the body, identity, and activism. This well-received presentation, along with a marked rise in publication of disability-related scholarly articles thereafter, suggested that by the mid-2000s, disability was “on the table” in WGS scholarship.

  WGS and Disability Studies have indeed, per Garland-Thomson’s aspiration, had a mutually enriching relationship in the years since. WGS’s longstanding critique of advertising’s messages that women are “never okay the way they are” (Kilbourne and Jhally 2000 , 10:20), for example, has been expanded to expose the workings of patriarchy, misogyny, and ableism in service of capitalist consumerism (Mitchell and Snyder 2020 , 49). Feminist disability scholars like Alison Piepmeier have extensively questioned the conflict of values that arises when pro-choice feminists’ abortion access arguments appeal to ableism, or anti-choice advocates claim to want to limit abortion by claiming they want to respect disability (2013a , 2013b ); similarly, Braithwaite and Orr ask, “Is there another way to think about [abortion and choice] that doesn’t depend on this kind of hierarchy of desired bodies, that doesn’t see arguments for reproductive justice and disability justice as opposed, but can hold them together at the same time?” (2017 , 377). Transnational feminist analyses reveal the material production of disability and impairment through the traumas of war, famine, colonialism, and its “sub-commandants:” unsafe industry, land dispossession, poverty, and the disruption and destruction of positive aspects of kinship and custom (Connell 2011 ; Erevelles 2011 ; Soldatic and Grech 2014 ). Feminist antiracist and abolitionist work also needs the lens of disability; Leroy Moore et al. (2016 ) discuss, for example, what they call “disabled profiling,” such as the assumption that a man who is Black and has slurred speech or uneven gait is intoxicated—and therefore dangerous—rather than perhaps having cerebral palsy or any other condition. The supposed dangerousness of Black men and the assumption of able-bodiedness—in other words, gendered racial bias and ableism—compound here, producing not just stigma but imminent peril for the person being misjudged. And disability scholars have benefited from feminist tools, too, such as when, echoing the Bechdel Test for representation in popular culture—which asks a) whether there were two or more female characters in a film, and b) if they interacted with each other about something other than a man—the Fries Test was developed to ask: “Does the book or film have more than one disabled character? Do the disabled characters have their own narrative purpose other than the education and profit of a nondisabled character? Is the character’s disability not eradicated either by curing or killing?” (Fries 2017

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  Disabling Romanticism

  • Michael Bradshaw(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Byron is a significant voice in this revisionism because, as Garland Thomson notes, he works outside of ‘an almost overwhelming tradition of representing disability as deviance’, and re-imagines ‘disability’s radical potential to disrupt the norm’ (‘Byron’ 323). Work on Harriet Martineau has been particularly important, and a great deal of scholarship has been devoted to understanding the relationship between her deafness and illnesses and her work as a writer. 8 Betty Adelson, Deborah Needleman Armintor, Barbara Benedict, and Kerry Duff all explore the lives of people of small stature, with Josef Boruwlaski’s autobiography, Memoirs of the Celebrated Dwarf (1788) receiving the most attention. 9 Eitan Bar-Yosef has recovered journals written by deaf and blind travellers, opening up travelling with disabilities as ‘sub-genre of current travel literature’ (134). 10 A great deal of work informed by biography combines disability studies, the medical humanities, and cognitive science. 11 Work on invalidism by Maria Frawley and Martha Stoddard Holmes is important, and scholars are beginning to investigate people with disabilities who worked within the medical professions, linking personal experiences to a benign approach. 12 The inclusion of entries in reference works, the launching of journals, the writing of overviews of the field, and of introductory books, are all signs that literary disability studies and Romantic-era disability studies are gaining traction. 13 Panels on disability studies and literature are increasingly included at conferences devoted to the long eighteenth century and Romantic period. Martha Stoddard Holmes’s entry on ‘Disability’ in The Encyclopedia of the Gothic, for instance, is significant, and so is the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Literature and Disability, edited by Clare Barker and Stuart Murray

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