Showing papers in "Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies in 2011"

The Pathos of "Mindblindness": Autism, Science, and Sadness in "Theory of Mind" Narratives

Abstract: Of the many scientific and medical discourses that purport to explain, analyze, demystify, or even cure autism, few have been as influential in recent decades as the Theory of Mind (ToM) account, which holds that autistic people are incapable of intuiting the intentions and emotions of others and are therefore "mindblind", or live with "mindblindness," a condition that separates them from other human beings. ToM is regarded by its more ardent advocates as the primary deficit in autism and the key to understanding autistic cognition and behaviors. The article considers the rhetoric of ToM. The authors argue that despite its foundations in the language of cognitive psychology, it is a discourse of affect and values, or a rhetoric of scientific sadness in which autistic people are mourned even as they are ostensibly explained.

Introduction: Disability and Life Writing

Abstract: The current cultural moment in the U. S. and the U. K. is particularly amenable to life writing. Indeed, it has been widely acknowledged by critics, reviewers, and writers that the last few decades in these two countries have witnessed a memoir boom. Granted, as Ben Yagoda has demonstrated in his recent book, Memoir: A History (2009), this is by no means the first memoir boom. But it is probably accurate to say that in the last two decades or so memoirs have been written, published (or self-published), reviewed, consumed, adapted into film, celebrated (and disparaged) as never before in literary history. I n April 2002, in a Washington Monthly review-essay called "Almost Famous: The Rise of the 'Nobody Memoir,'" Lorraine Adams distinguished between what she dubbed the somebody memoir and the nobody memoir. What determines the classification of a given narrative is simply whether its author was known before its publication or became known only through its publication. Thus, Hillary Clinton's Living History is a somebody memoir, while Lucy G realy's Autobiography of a Face is a nobody memoir. Th e last several decades have seen the spectacular rise of the nobody mem- oir. Some, like Angela's Ashes, Girl, Interrupted, and Eat, Pray, Love have been so successful as to have been made into feature films. Like the memoir boom, nobody memoirs are not unprecedented; some, like Frank Gilbreth's Cheaper by the Dozen (1948) and Jean Kerr's Please Don't Eat the Daisies (1957), were very popular in the U. S. after WWII. But in the past, nobody memoirs tended to be upbeat narratives of life in intact families. This is no longer the case. Indeed, based on a sample of more than two hundred recent nobody memoirs, Lorraine Adams claimed that almost all fall into one of three types: The largest by far is the childhood memoir—incestuous, abusive, alcoholic, impov- erished, minority, "normal," and the occasional privileged. The second largest type is the memoir of physical catastrophe—violence, quadriplegia, amputation, disease, death. The third is mental catastrophe—madness, addiction, alcoholism, anorexia, brain damage. (par. 8)

Disability and Life Writing: Reports from the Nineteenth-century Asylum

Abstract: Historically, especially before the twentieth century, issues of access to accommodation and education have constrained all individuals with disabilities, preventing most from acquiring the means to self-express and thus to present a public voice. Nonetheless, individuals with disabilities in past centuries have found ways to present their own perspectives on creativity, difference, identity, politics, and other issues. The forms these earlier statements have taken, the individuals who succeeded in speaking, and the stories thereby told offer significant insights into lives otherwise lost. The article recovers the life writing of mid-to-late nineteenth-century individuals with mental and physical differences who were classed as insane and institutionalized on that basis. In their narratives, these individuals write about the misperceptions they face and advocate for themselves and others. In particular, the authors characterize their institutionalization in terms of medical and legal abuses, abuses manife...

Introduction: Disability and Emotion: "There's No Crying in Disability Studies!"

Abstract: Yes, we admit it: we were the crying panelists. We were on the same disability studies panel at the 2000 Modern Language Association conference, each previously unknown to one another, giving papers with roughly the same mission: to jigger the theoretical trajectory of Disability Studies' paradigms-honed by those working on areas of physical impairment-to accommodate mental disability, our interest. To this end, Catherine began her paper by drawing distinctions between the representational preoccupations of Disability Studies and the predicament of people with schizophrenia who, as Peter Wyden has observed, have no poster child; of the disabled, they are the most reviled. Elizabeth's paper voiced similar concerns about the ableist thinking that structures the concept of selfhood in political theory and the exclusion of people with schizophrenia from that discourse. The trouble was, as so often happens in Disability Studies research, we had based some of our key examples on those near and dear, recalling situations from which we had more than an intellectual investment, and each one of us cried. As in baseball, there is no crying at MLA, and, since the publication of Joseph Shapiro's No Pity in 1993, there is definitely no crying in Disability Studies, whether at MLA or anywhere else. Accordingly, the first question Catherine was asked at the end of the presentations was, "Why did you cry at that point?" "That point" had been when Catherine recounted that her loved one, "Barbara," was on medications that seemed to allow her, albeit still schizophrenic, to pursue a Ph.D. in recombinant DNA technology, instead of being homeless, hospitalized, imprisoned, or in any other position that would render her at high risk of being the victim of (yet another) rape. Had Catherine offered-and worse, validated with a pathetic display of tears-a narrative of "overcoming" and a sanction of medical intervention as the audience member's question intimated? What were the emotional investments of the audience member who asked the question, at "that" point, in that setting? Should our debate about these matters settle on the question of whether the narrative championed overcoming disability, or should it go further, to query what forms of emotion are allowed in our "intellectual" work on disability? We clearly want to push the analysis of the emotional in Disability Studies further here. We would argue that, ironically, Disability Studies, forged as it has been with physical impairment as its primary terrain, has inherited damaging ableist assumptions of "mind" that discourage a more robust consideration of emotion. However, in the context of cognitive and psychiatric disability, the focus of several of the articles in this special issue, emotion is unavoidably a complex subject. In psychiatry and in culture at large, emotion is monitored, measured, and regulated. In some cases emotion is elicited; in others, suppressed. The lack of emotion is pathologized: the "flattened affect" of people diagnosed with schizophrenia is treated as a disabling symptom by psychiatrists. And the presence of emotion is pathologized: sustained feelings of sadness prompt consumers to seek medical and pharmaceutical interventions, while sustained feelings of elation might lead consumers to shun them.1 Emotion and the expression of emotion are also gendered in significant ways. Tears are feminine, and hence trivialized. Crying during a conference presentation is in one respect a failure to regulate the emotions. It signifies a moment of vulnerability that threatens to undermine the authority of the speaker and, further, in this particular case, it appears to resuscitate the pity narrative that undermines disability rights. On the other hand, crying at a conference presentation is a transgression that foregrounds issues central to both feminism and Disability Studies in potentially productive ways. Our bodies, and our minds, do not always conform to prescribed norms and regulations. …

A Reflection on Inspiration: A Recuperative Call for Emotion in Disability Studies

Abstract: The article calls for a reconsideration of the term inspiration so that it might be recuperated as a valuable emotion within disability discourse. Inspirational narratives often carry the attendant baggage of pity and fear, suggesting that disability can and should automatically evoke sympathy or concern from the audience—concern that people with disabilities might be a social or economic burden, concern of becoming disabled themselves. Dichotomously, other inspirational narratives promote the idea of the "supercrip" who, against all odds, overcomes the burdens of disability in the face of pervasive adversity. In these narratives, inspiration rightly becomes an emotion unsettling to Disability Studies and the disability community. Yet certain disabilities, such as psychiatric and emotional disabilities (arguably underrepresented in Disability Studies), may benefit from inspirational narratives. After reflecting on some analyses of these contested emotions by disability scholars, the article offers a repos...

Reading Disability in Children's Literature: Hans Christian Andersen's Tales

Abstract: The article examines the diversity issues that are embedded in fairy tales and explores socio-political implications for the construction of so-called able-bodiedness. Critical disability theory is discussed, as are studies that provide alternative approaches to reading children's texts that explore disability. In order to expose the discourses of power, four of Hans Christian Andersen's tales that feature non-human characters with disabilities are analyzed. The conclusion is that, though seemingly innocent and thus supposedly pertinent for children's reading, fairy tales are loaded with ableist ideology.

Plural Singularities: The Disability Community in Life-Writing Texts

Abstract: The article explores the potential for the singular voice of the life-writing text to create an emancipatory disability group identity by featuring stories of disabled people and groups. While disabled others have been studied in the past for how they relate to the autobiographical subject, their depiction is itself a form of disability representation that can contribute to the positive construction of the disability community and amplify the autobiographer's call to action by corroborating her experiences, thereby giving her voice greater social and political significance. Disability communities are identified in texts by Mary Grimley Mason, Eli Clare, and Nancy Mairs and are shown to be central to Simi Linton's My Body Politic. Linton's narrative of her entrance into the disability community functions as a metanarrative about autobiography that challenges notions about the singular, isolated voice often associated with the genre. The multifaceted and vibrant disability communities featured in Linton's a...

"What the Hell Happened to Maggie?": Stereotype, Sympathy, and Disability in Toni Morrison's "Recitatif"

Abstract: The article shows that, while the "no pity" position justifiably opposes representations of the disabled that reinforce the perceived weaknesses of the disabled population, there are alternative ways of looking at the role played by sympathy in response to disabled characters in fiction, as is emphasized by an examination of Toni Morrison's short story "Recitatif." While the narrative's dependence on the implicitly disabled character Maggie for its effects suggests that she serves a "prosthetic" role in the development of the protagonists' (and readers') sympathy, the article argues that "Recitatif" makes a significant move in guiding readers toward a more complex view of Maggie's identity, as well as a level of sympathetic engagement that effectively transcends her apparently prosthetic function. Thus, it is demonstrated that a rigid rejection of sympathetic responses to disabled characters denies readers an important opportunity to develop "a cultivated imagination for what men have in common and a rebe...

Comment from the Field: Disability and the Majority World: Challenging Dominant Epistemologies

Abstract: The one-day conference, held on 9 July 2010 at the Gaskell campus at Manchester Metropolitan University, successfully brought together academics, disability activists, researchers, and other stakeholders, to discuss and contribute to the often partial and fragmented debate around disability in the global South. More specifically, it sought to provide an open space for dialogue, and for the articulation and questioning of dominant epistemologies, to instead explore themes often bypassed, ignored, or rejected by Western disability studies; engaging alternative approaches to knowledge and its generation; challenging dominant epistemologies and exploring the possibilities of developing a Disability Studies that is both critical and global. My opening presentation, "Intersections in Disability, Poverty and Development: A Global Disability Studies?," problematized some of the complexities in articulating a debate around disability, development, and poverty, highlighting how various gaps remain, bound to Western Disability Studies and epistemologies such as the social model, unequipped and even unwilling to engage with contextual, historical, economic, and many other critical aspects that differentiate the global South in its complex heterogeneity. I concluded that the exportation of Western epistemologies will not do, extending the call for a critical global Disability Studies that is interdisciplinary, open, questioning, and willing to learn and challenge ideas at its very core. Susan Buell from the University of East Anglia, in "Social, Medical or Ch'alla?: The Poisoned Chalice of the Disability Professional," focused on people with a communication impairment in Bolivia to explore the experiences of families and the spaces where they find representation, support, and information. Buell, among other things, argued that the concept of the disability professional, within the Western social model context, continues to be enmeshed with that of the medical model in the exportation of knowledge. Overall, within dominant models of disability, "specialist knowledge," she argued, is viewed as a poisoned chalice that is made so in practice by ignoring the value that skilled knowledge can contribute to breaking down barriers for families by providing support at the micro level, especially when professionals are willing to gain and share knowledge and to work with traditional systems. Alison Sheldon from the University of Leeds, in her presentation "Locating Disability in the Majority World: Geography or Poverty?," adopted a materialist social model approach, and argued around/against the notion of a majority world as a separate space and a poverty within, as something different or separate from that in the West, drawing instead similarities between poverty in the global South and homeless people in the United Kingdom, stating that experiences of deprivation among other things are shared and operate on similar dynamics, and that in turn even open the spaces for relevance of Western theories. The next presentation, "Rising to the Challenge of Inclusive Networking: Balancing Insider and Outsider Perspectives," by Susie Miles from the University of Manchester, introduced the Enabling Education Network (EENET), while reflecting on the meaning of inclusive education, highlighting the culturally determined nature of this concept. …

Battles on the Body: Disability, Interpreting Dramatic Literature, and the Case of Lynn Nottage's Ruined

Abstract: Disability Studies has made significant inroads in theorizing literary representation and analyzing performance from within disability culture. Yet there is a dearth of Disability Studies work exploring canonical drama by moving beyond looking for realistic or progressive depictions of extraordinary bodies. Using Lynn Nottage's 2009 play Ruined as a case study, the article argues why examining "traditional" drama (as opposed to that coming from within disability culture) helps advance the project of Disability Studies as it moves to understand disability representation in a more nuanced manner. Theatre Studies can be likewise invigorated; whereas the ending of Ruined seems to undermine the play's feminist and postcolonial politics, exploring the presence of disability in the work complicates, reclaims, and deepens our understanding of its activism. Ultimately, this reveals a new and important way to understand more fully Nottage's work, and suggests why interpreting dramatic literature from a Disability S...

The Reclamation of Anna Agnew: Violence, Victimhood, and the Uses of "Cure"

Abstract: The article argues that Anna Agnew's popular 1886 autobiography worked to increase public receptivity to ideas of selective death by co-opting the discursive strategies of hereditarianism to explain her attempts at both filicide and suicide. Prevailing eugenics rationale insisted that insane individuals, like other "defectives," should either be cured or eliminated. In this threatening context, Anna evaded responsibility for her violence by emphasizing her victimization, miraculous cure, and responsible acts of citizenship. In its discursive reliance on psychiatry, evolution, and eugenics, Anna's popular narrative—as well as her attempt to eliminate her children—contributed to the interarticulation of progressive humanitarianism and selective murder. In contemporary disability studies discourse, scholars and activists alike often suggest as solution the inclusion of persons with disabilities in debates over medical and scientific policy. While such a perspective is necessary, Anna's narrative demonstrates...

Bodily Compositions: The Disability Poetics of Karen Fiser and Laurie Clements Lambeth

Abstract: The article focuses on the poetry of Karen Fiser and Laurie Clements Lambeth to examine how poetic language and form are shaped by both the poets' bodies and the way that their bodies relate to their environments, to spaces and institutions both private and public. Poetic language allows these writers to articulate the layered, enigmatic relationship between the particularity of somatic "feelings"—the body's experience of itself and the spaces and objects with which it interacts—and emotional expression. Both poets develop an aesthetics that reflects the body's particularity and that explores the tension between the limits and possibilities of communication in speaking about emotion and illness. As aesthetic objects that bridge the gap between the sayable and the unsayable, these poems can be circulated, not only forging new communities of poets and critics, but also extending or changing the terms of the conversations that people are having about disability, the body, aesthetic theory, accessibility, and...

Narrative Constructions of Motherhood and Autism. Reading embodied Language beyond binary Oppositions.

Abstract: The article is an analysis of the ways in which motherhood is constructed in three narratives written by mothers of children who are diagnosed with autism. The authors relate to discourses on motherhood and autism that strain their identities. The article addresses how the authors negotiate these problematic discourses. Special attention is paid to binary oppositions that underpin these discourses. Moreover, a reading strategy is developed that draws attention to material, physical aspects of the narratives. The article argues, among other things, that some of the authors break away from the discourses on motherhood and autism by mobilizing language in embodied ways.

Disabling Spectacles: Representations of Trig Palin and Cognitive Disability

Abstract: The article examines the confounding contribution that Sarah Palin has made to the public discourse on disability in the United States. While she and her son Trig, who has Down syndrome, brought a great deal of attention to issues surrounding cognitive disability from the instant Palin emerged as the Republican Party's 2008 vice-presidential candidate, it is unclear what utility this visibility actually had or has for real disabled individuals. Palin's rhetoric focused exclusively on disabled children and their families, leaving us to imagine that conditions like Down syndrome are temporary afflictions dissipating into normalcy as the afflicted reach adulthood. The article makes use of Lee Edelman's No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive to show that the cognitively disabled, like queers, are often figured as having "no future" in both popular culture and national health and education policy.

On a Scale from 1 to 10: Life Writing and Lyrical Pain

Abstract: Given the notorious resistance of physical pain to textual representation, how does an author write the story of pain? Using Eula Biss's 2005 essay "The Pain Scale" as its touchstone, the article considers lyric essay as pain's most suitable autobiographical genre. A lyric essay, it is argued, can perform the kind of conceptual shift that many theorists of pain have called for, situating pain along the pathways not just of nerves but of subjectivity, of relationships between self and other, imagination and words. By turns elusive, imagistic, ecstatic, associative, and melodic, more often circling and symbolizing life events than narrating them in linear ways, the lyric essay has a unique capacity to represent the self-in-pain, giving pain a rich experiential dimensionality that it may lack in more conventional, particularly medical, accounts. In "The Pain Scale," Biss does not render pain as an adjunct to other physical experiences, such as addiction or disease, but rather capitalizes on the distinctive f...

Thinking with the Thalamus: Lobotomy and the Rhetoric of Emotional Impairment

Abstract: The article analyzes the role of emotion in discourse about lobotomy in the mid-twentieth century. It shows how the scientific justification for lobotomy relied on a general theory of psychopathology that identified emotion as the root impairment in mental illness, and also argues that a similar rhetoric surfaced in arguments against lobotomy's critics, who were dismissed as emotional and unreasonable when they voiced opposition to the operation. Although lobotomy is no longer a mainstream medical practice, the rhetoric of emotional impairment continues to impact on the lives of people with psychiatric disabilities, which the article suggests might be remedied by valuing emotion and validating emotional argument.

"Eloquent Limbs": D.H. Lawrence and the Aesthetics of Disability

Abstract: The article considers the relationship between disability and modernist poetics, with a specific focus on the concept of physical difference in D.H. Lawrence's poetry. It traces the evolution of Lawrence's belief in the unmatched artistic potential of non-normative forms, poetic and otherwise; it expands upon the familiar story of Lawrence's own disability narrative; and, most significantly, it questions entrenched assumptions about the types of bodies that predominate in his writing. Utilizing a methodology that combines Disability Studies with a historicist approach to modernism, the article examines both Lawrence's poetry and his voluminous writings about poetry, and it proffers a range of close readings that confirm his interest in disabled bodies. When considered in aggregate, such readings suggest that Lawrence creates a proto-disability movement in verse, a movement wherein defects enable identification and social dissent; they also indicate that disability is fundamental to Lawrence's vision of li...

Comment from the Field: Resistance on the Plinth: The Why of It

Abstract: I am sitting in the basket of a cherry picker, draped in an ancient white bedspread, being driven forward on a JCB. Through the thick fabric I see spots of bright light and the amber of the vehicle's warning strobe. We begin to rise and I am pitched into that moment when they close the plane door and there is no going back, only a hundred times magnified. So up we rise and rise, high above the plinth, before coming in to land. "Freaky, freaky," says the previous plinther as the wrapped figure draws closer. Spotting the wheels of my chair, she subsides into mortified giggles. The cherry picker docks at the plinth and she welcomes me with a "Hello under there, whatever you are." I am wheeled backwards down the slope of the basket and onto the plinth, except that-oops-running out of time, I have not briefed anyone on how this should be done and immediately plunge into freefall, arse over tit. I lie there in a white shroud, my legs in the air, a foot away from a two-and-a-half storey drop. Now there is no going back. The One & Other project was announced a couple of months earlier. Taking place on Trafalgar Square's Fourth Plinth, home to temporary works of art, sculptor Antony Gormley set out to create a "living monument that captures modern Britain." For one hundred consecutive days, 2,400 people would spend a solitary hour on the plinth. In a public space bordered by military and valedictory monuments, there was something about the ordinariness, smallness, and aliveness of a diversity of people redefining the space that touched me. In the words of Gormley, "Maybe we'll discover what we really care about, what our hopes and fears are for now and for the future." While I lacked both the exhibitionism and courage to be a part of any such thing, we needed to make sure disabled people got up there. So I told my friends, put out a few notices, signed up my own name. When I was picked in the monthly draw, my bluff was called. One & Other arrived at a time when I had spent fourteen years deliberating on and two years creating Resistance, a touring installation about the Nazi campaign against disabled people and its contemporary relevance. It coincided with the seventieth anniversary of the start of Aktion T4, the little-known first phase of systematic mass murder by the Nazis, which targeted disabled people and became the blueprint for the Final Solution to wipe out Jews, gay people, gypsies, and other social and political groups. Disabled people's resistance was pivotal in bringing the episode to a close. And, even as I longed to lie down on the plinth and gaze up to the stars, I knew this was a moment that would never present itself to me again and it had to be well used. I meet my marketing mentor, Ros Fry, and we mull and wrangle over what I might do, until ... oh, how did we get here, because suddenly, in a throw-away comment, we have an idea. How about going up in Nazi uniform? And we laugh, because even as we know it is beyond outrageous, beyond bold, it is also crystal clear that this is it. As a wheelchair user, I will bring together two potent and contradictory images-the swastika and the wheelchair, like repelling magnets- and they will be displayed on all that the plinth represents: elevation, preservation, triumphalism. On the Internet, I find a photograph of a young Asian man, wearing a brightred t-shirt, a large swastika on his chest.1 The image hits in three almost instantaneous blows: first is the swastika, then the man's skin tone, and then the contradiction. In the blink of an eye, it shifts the ground from under me. He stands facing the camera, smiling. And it is all-everything about it-instantly wrong, almost an inner-ear, out-of-balance sensation that keeps me questioning long after I have torn myself from the screen. How easy it is simply to equate the swastika with evil and stop at that, but how much more intriguing it will be to take an image that represents one thing and, by changing its context, transform its meaning and use it to confront itself. …

The Victorian Consumptive in Disability Studies

Abstract: Although public health statistics suggest that by far the most prevalent impairment experienced by disabled people in nineteenth-century Britain was tuberculosis (Smith, Retreat, 19), disability historians have yet to explore the experiences of people with this impairment. The article suggests that Victorian "consumptives" may have been concealed from disability historians by the very same cultural processes that contributed to their disablement in life. While many Victorian texts misrepresented the consumptive's social disadvantage as biologically necessary or morally desirable, and consumptives themselves as "living dead" objects that willingly renounced self-determination and social inclusion, Disability Studies has hitherto failed to offer a politicized critique of the process. The article argues that the redefinition of Victorian consumptives as disabled people allows Disability Studies to reclaim images and individuals that struggled to assert a valid, self-determining, self-aware identity in a disa...

Comment from the Field Transforming Bodies: Prosthetics Seminar

Abstract: Organized by Dr. Ria Cheyne, Lecturer in Disability Studies and Deputy Director of the Centre for Culture and Disability Studies at Liverpool Hope University, this seminar took place in November 2010. It was the first of three seminars in the series Transforming Bodies: New Directions in Medical Humanities and Cultural Disability, funded by the Wellcome Foundation to engage with key topics at the intersection of medical science, disability, and culture. Professor Stuart Murray from the University of Leeds opened the proceedings by underlining the multidisciplinary nature of all three seminars, which seek to address directly the dearth of conversations between medical practitioners and cultural theorists. Murray argued that an interdisciplinary engagement with the theme of prosthetics is crucial, particularly since a tension has grown up between cultural theorists' use of "prosthesis" as part of a critical vocabulary, where the term may have status as merely an unreflective metaphor, and the fact that "prosthesis" constitutes a material reality of twenty-first-century life. Moreover, the science of prosthetics offers a challenge to our notion of "normality," since prosthetic interventions increasingly extend human embodiment into hyper-ability in addition to their original function of "making good" the body which is disabled by lack. Dr. Julie Anderson from the University of Kent gave the first presentation, "Intimate Aids, Public Scrutiny: Ex-Servicemen, Artificial Limbs and Queen Mary." Using authentic photographic material from the World War I period, this paper examined the role of military hospitals as sites of spectacle, where patients and their prostheses were constructed as objects of curiosity. In establishments such as Roehampton Hospital, wounded servicemen's management of their prosthetic limbs was scrutinized not only by medical staff, but also by members of the public, and even members of the royal family, such as Queen Mary, who were invited to marvel at technical interventions in the men's damaged embodiment. Dr. Anderson pointed out that this prurient interest in rehabilitated bodies lay in juxtaposition to the private process of psychological and physical adjustment among the ex-servicemen. Dr. Anderson's fascinating presentation of the lived reality of adjusting to prosthesis use at a point now beyond living memory was to meet an absorbing counterpoint later in the day when Sarah Deans explored present-day attitudes to the rehabilitation process. In the same panel, online materials from the British Optical Association Museum's gallery of artificial eyes, spectacles, and contact lenses were presented by its curator, Neil Handley, who indicated the museum's commitment to opening this rich resource to wider professional and public audiences alike. In this sense, Handley's presentation proved an illustration of exactly the kind of dynamic encounter to which the seminar was committed. Handley outlined a history of ocular prosthetics, arguing that the development of artificial eyes was of principal benefit not to the prosthetic wearer, but to other people, because it was designed to deflect attention and prevent revulsion. Handley's paper showed how the museum also engages with the symbolic meaning of eyes: he argued that there has been a recent shift in the cultural value pertaining to some ocular prostheses with the entry into the commercial market of, for example, coloured contact lenses. Handley's point led to a lively post-panel discussion about the growing trend to use prostheses as body-enhancing supplements, rather than as solely a means of making good a loss or absence. The actress and activist Aimee Mullins was mentioned as an example of a prosthetic limb user who commissions legs to enhance her body as well as to replace missing parts. From the Centre for Biomedicine and Society, King's College London, Dr. Alex Faulkner gave a presentation entitled "Policing Prosthetics: Conflicting Pressures on Orthopaedic Implants," which traced the development of prosthetic practice from its basis in hardware prosthetics to a field which now includes the potentiality of regenerative techniques using orthobiology and nanotechnology. …

"Nothing Is Uglier than Ignorance": Art, Disability Studies, and the Disability Community in the Positive Exposure Photography Project

Abstract: The Positive Exposure photography project, a collaboration between Rick Guidotti and Diane McLean, has the aim of reconfiguring visible disabilities and differences as beautiful and worthy of celebration; it combines art, education, social activism, and support for the disability community. The article argues that an understanding of disability theory and the visual representation of disability can inform a discussion and interrogation of the assumptions behind such a project. Ultimately, Positive Exposure is found to function by simultaneously working with and against traditional modes of how the disabled body is presented to the public.

Comment from the Field: Transforming Bodies: Ageing Seminar

Abstract: This event was the concluding seminar in the series Transforming Bodies: New Directions in Medical Humanities and Cultural Disability, funded by the Wellcome Trust, and followed previous seminars on Prosthesis and on Prenatal Genetic Screening and Neonatal Diagnosis held in Liverpool and Birmingham Organized by Stuart Murray, Professor of Contemporary Literatures and Film at the University of Leeds, it took place on 9 May 2011 in the newly opened Medical Humanities Centre in the School of English Prof Murray used Alice Neel's painting The Last Sickness (1953) to introduce the day and raise issues he hoped would stimulate interdisciplinary discussions He suggested that the painting, of an older woman, linked the process of ageing to the concepts of illness and disability in a way that has rarely been done While the ageing process is considered normal, there is a reluctancy to associate it with disability, and there may be mileage not only in linking the two but in reconsidering ageing as a disabling process To illustrate this, Prof Murray drew on the examples of John Milton, James Joyce, and others, as writers who completed their greatest works while older and, crucially, disabled, the latter fact of which had not yet been used to inform these works Questions of categorization and interaction, therefore, opened the themes of the day Dr Micheal Fitzpatrick, a General Practitioner from the Barton House Group Practice in London, opened the first panel with a talk entitled "Looking After Adults with Autism in General Practice" He introduced his theme by outlining the controversies of the "autism epidemic" following the recent increase in diagnoses of children on the autistic spectrum, and of the "hidden hoard," an apparant lack of autistic adults in the face of so many autistic children Dr Fitzpatrick drew on three case studies from his own experience to demonstrate some of the issues of providing care for adults diagnosed as, or considered, autistic His third example in particular raised the issue of the potential benefits of, and damages done by, an adult diagnosis of autism, both in critical discussion and for individual patients He maintained that while the label of Asperger's had been helpful to his patient, there was, and continues to be, a lack of meaningful resources, particularly for medical and day care, to allow GPs to impliment current policy and make diagnosis truly useful in all cases The second speaker on the panel was Dr Mary Godfrey from the Leeds Institute of Health Sciences Her paper, "Theorising Ageing Contained within or Constrained by Focus on Disability," sought to address the conceptual boundaries between ageing and disability by examining whether the social model of disability can be usefully mapped onto or help categorize the ageing process After outlining the main principles of the social model she argued that the ageing process is framed as a one-way dependency relationship of the old upon the young in contemporary society, which does not take the changing courses of human lives over time into account She maintained that the social model provided too narrow a scope to analyse ageing satisfactorily, and that other micro and macro factors should be taken into account, such as embodiment and lived experience, and the widening gap between a life expectancy and a "health" expectancy The afternoon began with Prof Bridget Bennett, from the School of English at the University of Leeds, and her paper "The Place of Death" A scholar of American literature, she argued that, despite the many forms of literature that specifically deal with it, death has become hidden in contemporary Western society Even highly publicized accounts of the deaths of celebrities do not bring to light the minutiae of dying and its consequences Prof Bennet posed an intriguing question: when does dying, or the process of dying, actually begin? …