Extraordinary Bodies

Extraordinary Bodies PDF

Author: Rosemarie Garland Thomson

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2017-03-07

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 0231544774

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Extraordinary Bodies is a cornerstone text of disability studies, establishing the field upon its publication in 1997. Framing disability as a minority discourse rather than a medical one, the book added depth to oppressive narratives and revealed novel, liberatory ones. Through her incisive readings of such texts as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron Mills, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson exposed the social forces driving representations of disability. She encouraged new ways of looking at texts and their depiction of the body and stretched the limits of what counted as a text, considering freak shows and other pop culture artifacts as reflections of community rites and fears. Garland-Thomson also elevated the status of African-American novels by Toni Morrison and Audre Lorde. Extraordinary Bodies laid the groundwork for an appreciation of disability culture and an inclusive new approach to the study of social marginalization.

Freakery

Freakery PDF

Author: Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 1996-10

Total Pages: 426

ISBN-13: 9780814782224

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A groundbreaking anthology that probes the disposition towards the visually different Giants. Midgets. Tribal non-Westerners. The very fat. The very thin. Hermaphrodites. Conjoined twins. The disabled. The very hirsute. In American history, all have shared the platform equally, as freaks, human oddities, their only commonality their assigned role of anomalous other to the gathered throngs. For the price of a ticket, freak shows offered spectators an icon of bodily otherness whose difference from them secured their own membership in a common American identity--by comparison ordinary, tractable, normal. Rosemarie Thomson's groundbreaking anthology probes America's disposition toward the visually different. The book's essays fall into four main categories: historical explorations of American freak shows in the era of P.T. Barnum; the articulation of the freak in literary and textual discourses; contemporary relocations of freak shows; and theoretical analyses of freak culture. Essays address such diverse topics as American colonialism and public presentations of natives; laughing gas demonstrations in the 1840's; Shirley Temple and Tom Thumb; Todd Browning's landmark movie Freaks; bodybuilders as postmodern freaks; freaks in Star Trek; Michael Jackson's identification with the Elephant Man; and the modern talk show as a reconfiguration of the freak show. In her introduction, Thomson traces the freak show from antiquity to the modern period and explores the constitutive, political, and textual properties of such exhibits. Freakery is a fresh, insightful exploration of a heretofore neglected aspect of American mass culture.

Strange Bodies

Strange Bodies PDF

Author: Marcel Theroux

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2014-02-04

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0374709513

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A dizzying novel of deception and metempsychosis by the author of the National Book Award finalist Far North Whatever this is, it started when Nicholas Slopen came back from the dead. In a locked ward of a notorious psychiatric hospital sits a man who insists that he is Dr. Nicholas Slopen, failed husband and impoverished Samuel Johnson scholar. Slopen has been dead for months, yet nothing can make this man change his story. What begins as a tale of apparent forgery involving unknown letters by the great Dr. Johnson grows to encompass a conspiracy between a Silicon Valley mogul and his Russian allies to exploit the darkest secret of Soviet technology: the Malevin Procedure. Marcel Theroux's Strange Bodies takes the reader on a dizzying speculative journey that poses questions about identity, authenticity, and what it means to be truly human.

Celebrate Your Body (and Its Changes, Too!)

Celebrate Your Body (and Its Changes, Too!) PDF

Author: Sonya Renee Taylor

Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc.

Published: 2018-05-29

Total Pages: 199

ISBN-13: 1641520280

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A body-positive guide to help girls ages 8 to 12 navigate the changes of puberty and grow into women Puberty can be a difficult time for a young girl—and it's natural not to know who (or what) to ask. Celebrate Your Body is a reassuring puberty book for girls that encourages them to face puberty and their body's changes with excitement and empowerment. From period care to mysterious hair in new places, this age-appropriate sex education book has the answers young girls are looking for—in a way that they can relate to. Covering everything from bras to braces, this body-positive puberty book for girls offers friendly guidance and support for when it's needed most. In addition to tips on managing intense feelings, making friends, and more, this book provides advice on what to eat and how to exercise so your body is healthy, happy, and ready for the changes ahead. PUBERTY EXPLAINED: Explanations on what happens, when it happens, and why the body (and mind) is amazing in every way. SOCIAL SKILL DEVELOPMENT: Help your young girl discover how to use her voice to stand up to peer pressure, stay safe on social media, and keep the right kind of friends. SELF-CARE TIPS: This body book for girls 9-12 helps them discover how to choose the right food, exercise, and sleep schedule to keep their changing bodies at their best. This inclusive puberty book for girls is the ultimate guide to facing puberty with confidence.

Big and Small

Big and Small PDF

Author: Lynne Vallone

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2017-11-07

Total Pages: 373

ISBN-13: 0300231717

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A groundbreaking work that explores human size as a distinctive cultural marker in Western thought Author, scholar, and editor Lynne Vallone has an international reputation in the field of child studies. In this analytical tour-de-force, she explores bodily size difference—particularly unusual bodies, big and small—as an overlooked yet crucial marker that informs human identity and culture. Exploring miniaturism, giganticism, obesity, and the lived experiences of actual big and small people, Vallone boldly addresses the uncomfortable implications of using physical measures to judge normalcy, goodness, gender identity, and beauty. This wide-ranging work surveys the lives and contexts of both real and imagined persons with extraordinary bodies from the seventeenth century to the present day through close examinations of art, literature, folklore, and cultural practices, as well as scientific and pseudo-scientific discourses. Generously illustrated and written in a lively and accessible style, Vallone’s provocative study encourages readers to look with care at extraordinary bodies and the cultures that created, depicted, loved, and dominated them.

Medieval Bodies

Medieval Bodies PDF

Author: Jack Hartnell

Publisher: Profile Books

Published: 2018-03-29

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 178283270X

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A SUNDAY TIMES HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEAR 'A triumph' Guardian 'Glorious ... makes the past at once familiar, exotic and thrilling.' Dominic Sandbrook 'A brilliant book' Mail on Sunday Just like us, medieval men and women worried about growing old, got blisters and indigestion, fell in love and had children. And yet their lives were full of miraculous and richly metaphorical experiences radically different to our own, unfolding in a world where deadly wounds might be healed overnight by divine intervention, or the heart of a king, plucked from his corpse, could be held aloft as a powerful symbol of political rule. In this richly-illustrated and unusual history, Jack Hartnell uncovers the fascinating ways in which people thought about, explored and experienced their physical selves in the Middle Ages, from Constantinople to Cairo and Canterbury. Unfolding like a medieval pageant, and filled with saints, soldiers, caliphs, queens, monks and monstrous beasts, it throws light on the medieval body from head to toe - revealing the surprisingly sophisticated medical knowledge of the time in the process. Bringing together medicine, art, music, politics, philosophy and social history, there is no better guide to what life was really like for the men and women who lived and died in the Middle Ages. Medieval Bodies is published in association with Wellcome Collection.

Disability Rhetoric

Disability Rhetoric PDF

Author: Jay Timothy Dolmage

Publisher: Syracuse University Press

Published: 2014-01-22

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 081565233X

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Disability Rhetoric is the first book to view rhetorical theory and history through the lens of disability studies. Traditionally, the body has been seen as, at best, a rhetorical distraction; at worst, those whose bodies do not conform to a narrow range of norms are disqualified from speaking. Yet, Dolmage argues that communication has always been obsessed with the meaning of the body and that bodily difference is always highly rhetorical. Following from this rewriting of rhetorical history, he outlines the development of a new theory, affirming the ideas that all communication is embodied, that the body plays a central role in all expression, and that greater attention to a range of bodies is therefore essential to a better understanding of rhetorical histories, theories, and possibilities.

What Can a Body Do?

What Can a Body Do? PDF

Author: Sara Hendren

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2020-08-18

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 073522000X

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Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR and LitHub Winner of the 2021 Science in Society Journalism Book Prize A fascinating and provocative new way of looking at the things we use and the spaces we inhabit, and a call to imagine a better-designed world for us all. Furniture and tools, kitchens and campuses and city streets—nearly everything human beings make and use is assistive technology, meant to bridge the gap between body and world. Yet unless, or until, a misfit between our own body and the world is acute enough to be understood as disability, we may never stop to consider—or reconsider—the hidden assumptions on which our everyday environment is built. In a series of vivid stories drawn from the lived experience of disability and the ideas and innovations that have emerged from it—from cyborg arms to customizable cardboard chairs to deaf architecture—Sara Hendren invites us to rethink the things and settings we live with. What might assistance based on the body’s stunning capacity for adaptation—rather than a rigid insistence on “normalcy”—look like? Can we foster interdependent, not just independent, living? How do we creatively engineer public spaces that allow us all to navigate our common terrain? By rendering familiar objects and environments newly strange and wondrous, What Can a Body Do? helps us imagine a future that will better meet the extraordinary range of our collective needs and desires.

Bodies of Difference

Bodies of Difference PDF

Author: Matthew Kohrman

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2005-05-23

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0520226445

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Annotation A study of the culture of disability in China and the emergence of the government institution known as the China Disabled Persons' Federation.

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