The Matter of Disability: Materiality, Biopolitics, Crip Affect

by David T. Mitchell (Editor), Susan Antebi (Editor), Sharon L. Snyder (Editor)

Overview

The Matter of Disability returns disability to its proper place as an ongoing historical process of corporeal, cognitive, and sensory mutation operating in a world of dynamic, even cataclysmic, change. The book's contributors offer new theorizations of human and nonhuman embodiments and their complex evolutions in our global present, in essays that explore how disability might be imagined as participant in the "complex elaboration of difference," rather than something gone awry in an otherwise stable process. This alternative approach to materiality sheds new light on the capacities that exist within the depictions of disability that the book examines, including Spider-Man, Of Mice and Men, and Bloodchild.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780472054114
Publisher:	University of Michigan Press
Publication date:	05/01/2019
Series:	Corporealities: Discourses Of Disability
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

David T. Mitchell is Professor of English at George Washington University. Susan Antebi is Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Toronto. Sharon L. Snyder is Instructor of Honors and Women's, Sexuality, and Gender Studies at George Washington University.

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments vii

Introduction David T. Mitchell Susan Antebi Sharon L. Snyder 1

Part I The Matter of Subjectivity

Returning the Social to the Social Model Tobin Siebers 39

Disability Ecology and the Rematerialization of Literary Disability Studies Joshua Kupetz 48

Unique Mattering: A New Materialist Approach to William Gibson's Pattern Recognition Olga Tarapata 67

Part II The Matter of Meaning

Hannah Werner's Transversal Poetics: Collaboration, Disability, and Clairvoyance Patrick Durgin 89

Dis-affection: Disability Effects and Disabled Moves at the Movies Angela M. Smith 118

Part III The Matter of Mortality

Spider-Man's Designer Genes: Hypercapacity and Transhumanism in a "DIY World" Samuel Yates 143

An Arm Up or a Leg Down? Grounding the Prosthesis and Other Instabilities Chris Ewart 160

Breeding Aliens, Breeding AIDS: Male Pregnancy, Disability, and Viral Materialism in "Bloodchild" Matt Franks 182

Why Lennie Can Teach Us New Tricks: Reading for Idiocy, Caninity, and Tropological Confusion in Of Mice and Men David Oswald 204

Part IV The Matter of Memory

Informal Economies in Mexico City Transit: The Matter of Disappearance Susan Antebi 229

Posthumanist T4 Memory David T. Mitchell Sharon L. Snyder 249

Contributors 273

Index 277

Editorial Reviews

"Adapting research in new materialism, affect theory, and critical race studies, this theoretically innovative collection displaces the classical humanist Subject . . . The Matter of Disability is a bellwether for wheredisability studies is going and why the matter of embodiment matters. The editors have thrown down the gauntlet to scholars in other fields to 'come on in.'"
--Michael Davidson, University of California, San Diego

"The attention to larger critiques, the desire to cross barriers, and the formulation of disability as 'matter in motion, ' with its 'alternative agencies of becoming' all position this collection as theoretically and politically innovative, potent, and generative. The book's introduction is superb--engaging, extensive, with a sharp sense of the trajectory and significance of the collection and its lively, fascinating range of topics, texts, and films."
--Stacy Alaimo, author of Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self

From the Publisher

"The essays in this volume, especially if read concurrently, provide a
fresh perspective and a valuable contribution to recent disability studies scholarship and critical theories of embodiment more generally. For readers with little to no prior knowledge in posthumanism and/or disability studies, The Matter of Disability may prove challenging at times. Yet, while the book expects much of its readers, readers can also expect much in return."
—Amerikastudien / American Studies

Amerikastudien/American Studies - Gesine Wegner