LITERATURE, LITERARY ANALYSES AND MEDIA STUDIES
This section includes creative works and literature by and about women with disabilities as well as an array of literary analyses of women with disabilities in literature, film and the media. While some literature may include autobiographical content, see the section on Personal Narratives for more stories by women with disabilities.
Anzaldúa, G. E., & Keating, A. (Eds.). (2002).
This bridge we call home: Radical visions for transformation. London: Routledge.
Through personal narratives, theoretical essays, textual collage, poetry, letters, artwork and fiction,
This Bridge We Call Home examines and extends the discussion of issues at the center of the first Bridge such as classism, homophobia, racism, identity politics, and community building, while exploring the additional issues of third wave feminism, Native sovereignty, lesbian pregnancy and mothering, transgendered issues, Arab-American stereotyping, Jewish identities, spiritual activism, and surviving academe. Written by women and men--both "of color" and "white," located inside and outside the United States--and motivated by a desire for social justice,
This Bridge We Call Home invites feminists of all colors and genders to develop new forms of transcultural dialogues, practices, and alliances. This book also includes writing on disabilities.
Belling, C. (2005, September). The purchase of fruitfulness: Assisted conception and reproductive disability in a seventeenth-century comedy. In R. Garland-Thomson & M. S. Holmes (Eds.), Disability and medicine: Beyond the medical model [Special issue].
Journal of Medical Humanities, 26(2-3), 79-96.
The relationships between socioeconomic and biogenetic reproduction are always socially constructed but not always acknowledged. These relationships are examined as they apply to an instance of infertility and assisted reproduction presented in a seventeenth-century English play, Thomas Middleton's 1613 comedy,
A Chaste Maid in Cheapside. Middletons satirization of the effects of secrecy on the category of reproductive disability is analyzed and its applicability to our own time considered. The discussion is in four parts, focusing on: the attribution of disabled status to one member of the couple, the wife; the use of this attribution to protect the husband's reputation for sexual and reproductive health; the concealment of the nature of assisted reproduction; and the interests of the child conceived with such assistance.
Boswell, M. (2001, Fall). Sexism, ageism, and 'disability': (Re)constructing agency through (re)writing personal narrative.
Women and Language, 24(2), 47-51.
This paper examines paradoxes involved in living with "disability," arguing that such paradoxes arise from a complex interaction among a set of habitually expressed oppressions. It also discusses how feminisms, ostensibly devoted to dismantling these isms, sometimes perpetuates dominant discourses instead. The paradoxes discussed are "disability" as both deficit and girt, and feminisms as both perpetuators and liberators. In addition, I show how hearing "disabilities" often have as much to do with loss 9f voice as they do with loss of hearing, and conclude with a plea to develop a new social construct of differently abled.
Boyer, M. (2004, March). The disabled female body as a metaphor for language in Sylvia Plath's
The Bell Jar.
Women’s Studies, 33(2), 199-223.
“For Sylvia Plath, writing the disabled body in
The Bell Jar engenders a series of intimate encounters with the ineffectuality of language. The mind/body connection, or, more pointedly, its dis-connection, is explored in this article by utilizing a combination of feminist and disability studies, highlighted by the theoretical concepts of Julia Kristeva and Jacques Lacan” (p. 199).
Dobson, T., & Luce-Kapler, R. (2005, October). Stitching texts: Gender and geography in
Frankenstein and
Patchwork Girl.
Changing English, 12(1), 265-277.
This paper considers how two related texts--one in print and one in hypertext--are locations for adolescents to undertake the work of 'literary anthropology' in considering questions of gender and subjectivity. The first text is Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein, which invites readers to grapple with questions of how adolescents negotiate relations with their parents and others, of how masculinity and femininity are produced and construed, and of how cultural mores inform both processes. The second is Shelley Jackson's
Patchwork Girl, a hypertext novel that parodies the former. Both texts offer a multilayered reading experience for adolescents juxtaposing print and digital technologies, themes of boundary and displacement, and issues of identity and sexuality.
This is an interesting article, despite the fact there is no specific mention of disability. For those interested in Patchwork Girl, go to
http://www.eastgate.com/catalog/PatchworkGirl.html Eerikäinen, H. (2001). Love your prosthesis like yourself: “Sex,” text and the body in cyber discourse. In A. Koivunen & S. Paasonen (Eds.),
Conference proceedings for Affective encounters: Rethinking embodiment in feminist media studies. University of Turku, School of Art, Literature and Music, Media Studies. Retrieved June 6, 2005 from
http://www.hum.utu.fi/mediatutkimus/affective/eerikainen.pdf “Why from an artificial limb trying to substitute for a bodily loss has become a technological extension of the body allegedly augmenting and enhancing not only the range of abilities of the subject, but most of all, post-corporeal pleasures of the `postmodern body,' a body enveloped by computer screens and networks all calling for immediate interfacing and interaction and promising an enjoyable experience of indulging oneself in a total immersion…? How is it that a bitter necessity has turned into an object of utopian dreams, even a vehicle of libidinal fantasies? Why is the prosthesis seductive? Why is the prosthetic body “sexy”?
Garland-Thomson, R. (1994). Redrawing the boundaries of feminist Disability Studies.
Feminist Studies, 20(3), 583-597.
In this review essay, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson argues for the recognition of feminist Disability Studies within feminism. She states that feminist critical analysis does not usually recognize disability as a category of otherness (as it does with race, class, and gender) unless the study specifically states this focus. Although helpful, she would like to see a shift away from women’s autobiographical accounts of their own experiences with disability, which often promote the “disaster/terror/pity scenario of disability,” to an articulation of feminist Disability Studies as a “major critical subgenre within feminism.” She asserts that feminist Disability Studies can be located in the broader area of identity politics if discourses of the body marked as deviant are included.
To illustrate her argument, Thomson draws on four feminist works. The first three,
Invalid Women: Figuring Feminine Illness in American Fiction and Culture, 1840-1940 by Diane Price Herndl,
Monstrous Imagination by Marie-Helene Huet, and
Tattoo, Torture, Mutilation, and Adornment: The Denaturalization of the Body in Cultural Text edited by Frances E. Mascia-Lees and Patricia Sharpe, do not deal with “disability” specifically; instead, Thomson interprets these works in a feminist Disability Studies perspective. She uses the fourth book, Barbara Hillyer’s
Feminism and Disability, because it specifically addresses the issue of disability and feminism, and because it embodies the feminist principle that the personal is political. Thomson hopes that these four books introduce perspective into the emerging field of feminist Disability Studies.
Gold, N., & Auslander, G. (1999, December). Gender issues in newspaper coverage of people with disabilities: A Canada-Israel comparison.
Women & Health, 29(4), 75-96.
This research compared how over a three-month period Canadian and Israeli newspapers wrote about females and males with disabilities. The results showed that in both countries there was significantly greater coverage of males than females. In addition, different (and stereotypical) types of details were used to describe the two groups, and females were associated with different kinds of problems than males, including a higher incidence of violence and victimization. There were also some significant differences between the male and female journalists in this study, and evidence of sexism within the newspaper industry. This paper concludes with some ideas for altering the images of disabled women in the media.
Guertin, C. G. (2003). Chapter 2. The matrix: Information overload, ii. Feminist dis/orientations. In C. G. Guertin,
Quantum feminist mnemotechnics: The archival text, digital narrative and the limits of memory. Doctoral Disseration, University of Toronto. Retrieved June 6, 2005 from
http://www.mcluhan.utoronto.ca/academy/carolynguertin/2ii.html This is a chapter from a doctoral dissertation exploring and analyzing new feminist digital/hypertext media, which now allows women with another avenue of expression.
The author discusses how digital media now “emerge(s) as a form that seems to embody the potentialities suited to feminist musings.” While discussing how historically women were limited in their narrative discourse by “devalued mediums--journals, letters, diaries--or tailoring existing forms to their use,” they now have “access to technology and new writing spaces.”
Of note, the one work analyzed,
The Patchwork Girl, uses a site map that is “…organized on a model of the graveyard (entered through the headstone), and the archive of the text is contained in the database of individual graves where her donors cluster together geographically adjacent to one another underground, just as they are in her form, but functioning as uneasy neighbours in both locations. This site map and ecosystem of body part lenders tells the unrecorded stories of women of the era--a swarm of forgotten, faceless, unknown souls who each have their own disabilities and afflictions, and methods of subverting the official system.”
Hall, K. Q. (2005, Winter). Queerness, disability, and
The Vagina Monologues.
Hypatia, 20(1), 99-119.
This paper questions the connection between vaginas and feminist embodiment in
The Vagina Monologues and considers how the text both challenges and reinscribes (albeit unintentionally) systems of patriarchy, compulsory heterosexuality, and ableism. I use the Intersex Society of North America's critique as a point of departure and argue that the text offers theorists and activists in feminist, queer, and disability communities an opportunity to understand how power operates in both dominant discourses that degrade vaginas and strategies of feminist resistance that seek to reclaim and celebrate them.
Herndl, D. P. (1993).
Invalid women: Figuring feminine illness in American fiction and culture, 1840-1940. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
Close textual readings of literary representations of disability and illness in literary texts by such authors as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edith Wharton, Tillie Olsen, and others.
Hershey, L. (various dates). Poems and tapes:
On the lawn,
In the way,
Dreams of a different woman (these are books of poetry);
The prostitutes of Nairobi,
You get proud by practicing (these are tapes of the author reading her poems). Denver, CO: Author.
Hershey’s very powerful poems are about disability rights and lesbian sexuality. Her work includes essays in a variety of periodicals as well as these books and tapes. Well worth sending for, at $5 per book and $7 per tape. Some of the poems can be read at http://www.cripcommentary.com/ and the booklets can be ordered at
http://www.disabilitypride.com/products.php?id=6 Hirshorn, S. (1998, Fall). Women with disabilities in film and TV: Rating the role models.
Herizons, 12(3), 15-18.
This article critiques women with disabilities as portrayed in TV and films of the early 1990s.
Keith, L. (2001).
Take up thy bed and walk: Death, disability and cure in classic fiction for girls. London: The Women’s Press, Ltd.
Heidi,
The Secret Garden, and
Pollyanna are all classic "girls' books," featuring a miracle cure of an invalid character who literally gets up and walks away from illness or paralysis. Such stories were common in Victorian novels and they implicitly conveyed the idea that disability and physical suffering were punishment for wrongdoing: unruly girls could not enter womanhood unless they were tamed, and an accident was the perfect plot device for this transformation. Other characters, like Helen Burns in
Jane Eyre or Beth in
Little Women, were just too good to live, and died so that another character could be redeemed by their example.
Lois Keith points out in this study that the temptation to either cure or kill off disabled characters has surprising tenacity. The widespread belief that a disabled life isn't a full life and that patients can cure themselves through force of will endures to the present day. In
Take Up Thy Bed & Walk, Lois Keith brings her lively and observant eye to the classic books of childhood from
Jane Eyre,
Heidi, and
Pollyanna, to modern American classics such as Laura Ingalls Wilder's
Little House on the Prairie and Judy Blume's
Deenie. Keith explores the recurring images of impairment and ill health in literature and asks the reader to reconsider the messages they send to a devoted young audience. This book is also a testament to the singular passion with which these books are read by younger readers and reminds us of the intensity of our own reading experience as children.
Kent, D. (1987). Disabled women: Portraits in fiction and drama. In A. Gartner & J. Joe (Eds.),
Images of the disabled, disabling images (pp 47 63). New York: Praeger Publishers.
In this chapter Deborah Kent, who herself has a disability, looks at the ways women with disabilities have been portrayed in plays and novels, to determine whether the image which literature conveys is overwhelmingly negative. Her conclusion is that writers, like most other people, seem to see the disability before anything else when they portray a woman with a disability. Few authors manage to portray the person behind the disability. In all instances, the disability determines the woman's interaction with other people. The competencies and capabilities, education and personality of women with disabilities have little effect on the attitudes towards her. "Disability seems to undermine the very roots of her womanhood" (p. 63). Kent concludes that only a few writers have managed to create works that show women with disabilities as total persons who are capable of the full range of human experiences and emotions.
Kent, D. (1988). In search of a heroine: Images of women with disabilities in fiction and drama. In M. Fine & A. Asch (Eds.),
Women with disabilities: Essays in psychology, culture, and politics (pp. 90 110). Philadelphia; Temple University Press.
Using her own search for identity as a framework, Deborah Kent describes her childhood and adult reactions to literary portrayals of women with disabilities. She contrasts negative and devalued stereotypes with more positive images of women with disabilities leading meaningful full lives. Kent points out how important the identification with female character in the literature is for the emotional development and emerging self-image of young women. She claims that although it is hard for women in general to find heroines in the literature, this is even harder for women with disabilities. Most fiction where a woman with a disability is a character portrays the negative stereotype of a helpless, dependent, pitiable and undesirable woman. Kent concludes with a call to women with disabilities to start writing fiction that provides a more positive image of women and girls with disabilities.
Marston, C. L. (1997, August 2).
Hand-ling media research on disability: Toward including a feminist "exile" perspective on theory and practice. Paper presented to the Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication annual conference, Chicago, IL. Retrieved June 6, 2005 from
http://list.msu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9710a&L=aejmc&F=&S=&P=5081 “In this paper, I hope to emphasize the relevance of a disability perspective to feminist theory and to the practice of feminist media research. I will begin by discussing feminist theory's open system of theory and practice, as well as the incompleteness of feminism without the inclusion of a disability perspective. I will then discuss the space in feminist media studies for a disability perspective and articulate the issues central to a feminist disability framework. Lastly, I will suggest preliminary ideas toward a program of research for feminist disability scholars in media. This program will explore the potential for research on representations of disability in the mainstream and alternative media, as well as on workers with disabilities in the journalistic and academic workplaces. These points will be based on my preliminary explorations of literature on feminism, feminist media studies, and disability studies.”
May, V. M. & Ferri, B. A. (2002). “I’m a wheelchair girl now”: Abjection, intersectionality, and subjectivity in Atom Egoyan’s
The Sweet Hereafter.
Women’s Studies Quarterly, 30(1&2), 131-150.
May and Ferri underscore the potential of intersectional political and analytical frameworks not only because they help to understand the nuances of Nichole's subjectivity in the film
The Sweet Hereafter, but also because thinking "at the intersections" is a productive methodological practice.
McDonagh P. (2000, June). Diminished men and dangerous women: Representations of gender and learning disability in early- and mid-nineteenth-century Britain.
British Journal of Learning Disabilities, 28(2), 49-53.
The present article explores the relationship of gender and learning disabilities in early- and mid-nineteenth-century literary representations of people with learning disabilities. Literary texts are useful historical documents because these often foreground how learning disabilities worked symbolically in a social context and enable us to examine the ideological forces shaping notions of learning disabilities. The images explored in the present study suggest some common cultural themes. Men with learning disabilities were understood as being diminished, somehow lacking an essential component of masculine identity. Women, on the other hand, were often reduced to the essential, yet disruptive element of feminine sexuality, or later in the century, were conceived as deviant from the feminine norm in their carnality.
Miller, V. (Ed.). (1985).
Despite this flesh: The disabled in stories and poems. Austin: University of Texas Press.
This is a literary anthology by forty-five women and men with disabilities.
Mintz, S. B. (2002, Fall). Invisible disability: Georgina Kleege’s
Sight Unseen. In K. Q. Hall (Ed.), Feminist Disability Studies [Special issue].
NWSA Journal, 14(3), 155-177.
This essay discusses
Sight Unseen, Georgina Kleege's collection of personal essays about partial blindness from macular degeneration, and explores the challenge Kleege poses to the presumably universal relation between vision, knowledge, and stable subjectivity. I argue that the semiotic and personal analysis Kleege performs in her essays disrupts the entrenched connection between seeing and selfhood whereby the blind are construed as diminished or helpless figures. Sight Unseen maximizes the specular effects of the autobiographical situation, making transgressively visible the anomalous body that patriarchal discourse has sought to control and that feminist theory has largely ignored as a meaningful category of identity. The text manifests the defining impact of disability on a woman's idea of herself in a culture in which the parameters of normative gendered identity are circulated largely through visual imagery, but in turn contests the ontological primacy of vision by orienting the narrative toward the new focal point of blindness. Unveiling the fictions surrounding sightedness as a stable mode of access to identity and reality, Kleege subverts the dominance of myths of knowledge and mastery granted to the eyes.
Mossman, M. (2003, Summer). Reading Mary Lamb’s Madness: Disability as textual space. Special issue: Autotheory.
Women Writers: A Zine. Retrieved March 15, 2005 from
http://www.womenwriters.net/may2003/marylamb.html “The specific purpose of this essay is to demonstrate how the developing field of the New Disability Studies provides the critical insight necessary to re-evaluate the way Mary Lamb’s manic depression was constructed both in the critical/literary discourses of nineteenth-century Britain as well as within the more recent theoretical paradigms of twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary and historical studies. Simultaneously, the paper is also an attempt to push back the postmodern concept of disability itself, and thus re-define the notion and its representation in a historically marginalized context. The larger significance of the essay, then, is that it is an attempt to describe in new terms the historicity of disability experience and, therefore, participate in the current movement of re-shaping “disability” practice in the postmodern cultures of the West.”
Norden, M. F., & Cahill, M.A. (1998). Violence, women, and disability in Tod Browning’s
Freaks and
The Devil Doll.
Journal of Popular Film and Television, 26(2), 86-94.
Norden and Cahill examine the roles of women, violence and disability in two films by Tod Browning:
Freaks and
The Devil Doll. Browning disrupted an established pattern by inscribed disabled women as violent.
Ryan, J. E. (1999, June). The blind authoress of New York: Helen De Kroyft and the uses of disability in antebellum America.
American Quarterly, 51(2), 385-418.
A discussion of Helen de Kroyft, an antebellum resident of the New York Institution for the Blind who was marketed as "The Blind Authoress." De Kroyft's writing raises a number of connected historical issues, such as gender roles and literary professionalism for women, blindness as a powerful theme in antebellum texts, therapeutic epistemologies and popular health practices for the visually disabled, and the creatively adaptive process by which blindness began to function as a form of cultural leverage. The rhetoric of her literary project, considered within the context of 19th-century print culture, shows a mixture of pious emotionalism and enthusiasm for belle-lettres pursuits and social reform that both perpetuates and recreates the impulses of antebellum self-culture and prescriptive emotional evolution.
Saad, S. C. (1999, January). The gender of chronically ill characters in children's realistic fiction, 1970–1994. In M. Teppner (Ed.), Gender and disability [Special issue].
Sexuality and Disability, 17(1), 79-92.
The purpose of this study was to determine how the numbers of female chronically ill characters compared with the numbers of male chronically ill characters in children's books. I used 100% sampling to investigate the 78 children's chapter books with chronically ill main characters which met the criteria for inclusion in this study. Four-fifths (80.8%) of the children's books studied had female chronically ill main characters, 18% had chronically ill male main characters, and 1.3% had a chronically ill main character of each gender. This preponderance of ill female characters reflects the traditional societal view that female bodies are inherently pathological.
Saxton, M. & Howe, F. (Eds.). (1987).
With wings: An anthology of literature by and about women with disabilities. New York: The Feminist Press.
This is a collection of literary writings by and about women with disabilities. This anthology of essays, stories, and poetry conveys the experiences and feelings of women with disabilities. Among the 30 contributors to this book are such well-known names as Alice Walker, Adrienne Rich, Muriel Rukeyser, Vassar Miller, Nancy Mairs, Laurel Lee and Mary Wilkins Freeman. A powerful and moving book about the strengths, the struggle, the dignity, the intelligence, the humanity, and the courage of women with disabilities.
Shannonhouse, R. (Ed.). (2003).
Out of her mind: Women writing on madness. New York: The Modern Library.
Out of Her Mind, edited by Rebecca Shannonhouse, captures the best literature by and about women struggling with madness. A remarkable chronicle of gifted and unconventional women who have spun their inner turmoil into literary gold, the collection features classic short stories, breathtaking literary excerpts, key historical writings, and previously unpublished letters by Zelda Fitzgerald.
Stibbe, A. (2004, March). Disability, gender and power in Japanese television drama.
Japan Forum, 16(1), 21-36.
Traditionally, people with disabilities have been kept segregated and invisible in Japanese society and media. The 1990s, however, saw the start of a surprising boom in the portrayal of disability on Japanese television. Within the last ten years, there have been popular, prime-time dramas featuring portrayals of paraplegia, deafness, autism, visual impairment and learning disabilities. At first sight, the sudden increase in programmes about disability seems to follow a number of political changes which occurred in Japan during the 1990s, as increased disabled activism created pressure to move away from the widely condemned medical model of disability towards new constructions. But closer analysis suggests that, while the television dramas manage to avoid some of the negative images that have appeared on television in the West, their overall effect is that of reinforcing many of the aspects of the traditional medical model. This is particularly true for dramas that feature disabled female characters, suggesting a relationship between representations of disability based on the medical model and traditional representations of gender.
Thomson, R. G. (1995, Fall). Integrating Disability Studies into the existing curriculum: The example of 'Women and Literature' at Howard University. In L. Davis & S. Linton (Eds.), Disability Studies [Feature issue].
Radical Teacher, No. 47, 15-21.
Part of a special section on Disability Studies. The writer discusses how she attempts to introduce Disability Studies in the context of a sustained focus on racial difference. She notes that her aim in teaching Disability Studies is to confound definitions of "we" and "they," which imply a victim/perpetrator and a normal/abnormal relationship between the disabled and the nondisabled. She proposes that Disability Studies should be taught as an integrated part of all courses and indicates that she integrates disability issues into all of the courses she teaches as an English professor. Her "Women in Literature" course at Howard University focuses on the valuing of bodies on the basis of their appearance; uses material from various disciplines that are not explicitly Disability Studies to elucidate the way that disability, along with other stigmatized identities, operates in Western cultures; and offers literary and cultural analyses to reveal the ways that social relations produce the cultural distinctions of disability, race, gender, and class.
Thomson, R. G. (1996, September). Benevolent maternalism and physically disabled figures: Dilemmas of female embodiment in Stowe, Davis, and Phelps.
American Literature, 68(3), 555-586.
A discussion of three novels that deploy disabled female figures in the sentimental tradition as essential rhetorical elements in their argument for humanitarian social reform. The novels are Harriet Beecher Stowe's
Uncle Tom's Cabin, Rebecca Harding Davis's
Life in the Iron Mills, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's
The Silent Partner. The complex and bifurcated interconnection in these works between liberal individualism and a program of "benevolent maternalism" that both revises and replicates such liberalism is explored. By demonstrating the shifts in the way these novels present disabled figures, it is demonstrated that benevolent maternalism not only rehearses the terms of liberal individualism but also, in its move from sympathetic identification with the disabled figures to a distancing repudiation of them, dramatizes individualism's most vexatious internal contradictions.