Rackham 580 Winter 06

It is our intention to support the full participation of all students in the learning process of this class. We have incorporated a variety of instruction techniques and evaluation methods in the course process. In spite of these efforts, situations may occur in which the learning style of individual students is not met by the instructional climate. It is our expectation that students who require specific or additional support to acquire the course content or demonstrate their achievement of the objectives will inform us of their needs immediately. For UM-Ann Arbor, please contact the Office of Students with Disabilities, G664 Haven Hall, at 763-3000. For U-M Flint, Ms. Paula Pollander is available in the office of Accessibility Services in 264 UCEN at 762-3456 to provide direct assistance.

Course Description

“ Topics in Disability Studies” provides an interdisciplinary approach to disability studies, including focus on the arts and humanities, natural and social sciences, and professional schools. We will focus this term on the humanities in particular, considering the relation of disability studies to theories of minority identity developed in the humanities over the last 30 years. We will examine both the individual, theoretical stakes of different minority identities as well as how they contribute to or are changed by disability status. Some theories of minority identity include Critical Race Theory, Feminist Theory, and Queer Theory. Students will also have the opportunity to interact with visiting speakers from a broad range of fields.

Disability Studies views people with disabilities not as objects but as producers of knowledge whose common history has generated a wide variety of art, music, literature, and science infused with the experience of disability. The course is offered for 1 or 3 credits. Accessible classroom with realtime captioning. For more information, please contact Tobin Siebers.

Learning Objectives

The course will prepare the student

to understand how disability is culturally represented, historically and currently
to understand how disability is addressed as a minority category in relation to other minority categories

Students should be able to describe the implications of various conceptualizations of disability, including the implications for how perceptions of persons with disabilities

relate to the sex/gender system
affect racial and ethnic stereotyping
require adjustment in theoretical models of identity in the humanities

Students will also be able to describe formal models of disability, such as the medical model, social model, minority model, business model, and others.

Requirements: 1 credit: attendance and a paragraph summary of each class session; 3 credits: attendance, participation, class project or paper

Course Schedule

I expect each person who is taking the course for 3 credits to write one or two paragraphs describing what you plan to do for the final project, a preliminary bibliography of the material you have reviewed for the project (including material other than what is included in the coursepack), a brief description of the format you plan to use and the department or program you represent. I will ask each of those persons to briefly talk about their project in class. This project description is due on February 3.

The following three questions will be the point of departure for your review discussion. Please write down your responses so you can submit them on the day of class.

Each student who is taking the class for 3 credits is responsible for a 3-5 minute presentation of the results of their project. It is expected that the presentation will demonstrate how you have integrated material from the class (lectures, readings and outside speakers) into your project. Also, all final projects will be submitted on this day.

Required Readings (Coursepack available at Kolossos, 1214 South University Street)

Albrecht, Gary. “The Social Meaning of Impairment and Interpretation of Disability.” The Disability Business: Rehabilitation in America. Newbury Park, Calif. : Sage Publications, 1992. Pp. 67-90.

Auslander, Philip, and Carrie Sandahl. “Introduction.” Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance. Ed. Philip Auslander and Carrie Sandahl. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Pp. 1-12.

Asch, Adrienne. “Critical Race Theory, Feminism, and Disability: Reflections on Social Justice and Personal Identity.” Ohio State Law Journal 62.1 (2000): 391-423.

Baynton, Douglas C. “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History.” The New Disability History: American Perspectives. Ed. Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky. New York: NYU Press, 2001. Pp. 33-57. Comparative analysis of disability in the context of prejudices against women, people of color, and immigrants, showing how disability supplements these prejudices.

Brueggemann, Brenda. “Delivering Disability, Willing Speech.” Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance. Ed. Philip Auslander and Carrie Sandahl. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Pp. 17-29.

Davis, Lennard. “Crips Strike Back: The Rise of Disability Studies.” ALH 11.3 (1999): 500-12. A history of disability studies in the context of other minority movements.

Dworkin, A, and R. Dworkin. “What is a Minority?” The Minority Report. New York: Praeger, 1976. Pp. 11-25. A theory of minority identity that considers how differential and unjust treatment and the awareness of it creates minority identity.

Edelman, Lee. “The Future is Kid Stuff.” No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Pp. 1-31.

Ferguson, Roderick A. "The Specter of Woodbridge: Canonical Formations and the Anticanonical in Invisible Man." Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Pp. 54-81.

Fox, Ann M., and Joan Lipkin. “Res(Crip)ting Feminist Theater Through Disability Theater: Selections from The DisAbility Project.” NWSA Journal 14.3 (2002) 77-98. The presence of disabled bodies on stage has recently begun to be theorized in the context of an emerging disability culture. Does the application of feminist principles of theater-making to disability performance serve as a catalyst by which an aesthetic of disability theater can be advanced? What are the implications that emerge to the feminist theater practitioner working to create a disability theater? These questions are explored here and include the scripts for three performance pieces created by The DisAbility Project and directed by feminist playwright Joan Lipkin. The DisAbility Project uses feminist strategies in the creation of script and movement; this essay explores how these facilitate discourses about the disability experience. But it also extends to ask how an emergent disability aesthetic can complicate and expand the interrogations of feminist theater, both in text and in performance. The work of The DisAbility Project suggests that a disability aesthetic can mitigate some of the limitations feminist theater faces in constructing its own subtle re-inscriptions of normalcy, leading to a reconsideration of the use of metaphor for feminist ends. Disability theater, like disability studies, asks the viewer not just to trouble gender or ability, but the entire matrix of identities constructing—and constricting—our understanding of the "normate."

Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory.” NWSA Journal 14.3 (2002a): 1-32. This essay aims to amplify feminist theory by articulating and fostering feminist disability theory. It names feminist disability studies as an academic field of inquiry, describes work that is already underway, calls for needed study and sets an agenda for future work in feminist disability studies. Feminist disability theory augments the terms and confronts the limits of the ways we understand human diversity, the materiality of the body, multiculturalism, and the social formations that interpret bodily differences. The essay asserts that integrating disability as a category of analysis and a system of representation deepens, expands, and challenges feminist theory. To elaborate on these premises, the essay discusses four fundamental and interpenetrating domains of feminist theory: representation, the body, identity, and activism, suggesting some critical inquiries that considering disability can generate within these theoretical arenas.

_____. “Making Freaks: Visual Rhetorics and the Spectacle of Julia Pastrana.” Thinking the Limits of the Body. Ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Gail Weiss. SUNY Press, 2002b. Pp. 195-218.

_____. “Re-shaping, Re-thinking, Re-defining: Feminist Disability Studies.” Center for Women Policy Studies: Barbara Waxman Fiduccia Papers on Women and Girls with Disabilities, 2001.

_____. “Welcoming the Unbidden: The Case for Conserving Human Biodiversity.” What Democracy Looks Like. Ed. A.S. Lang and C. Tiechi. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, forthcoming 2005.

Goffman, Erving. “Stigma and Social Identity.” Stigma:Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963. Pp. 1-40.

Halberstam, Judith. "Queer Temporality and Postmodern Geographies." In a Queer Time and Place: TransgenderBodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press, 2005. Pp. 1-21.

Herndon, April. “ Disparate But Disabled:  Fat Embodiment and Disability Studies.” NWSA Journal 14.3 (2002): 120-137. This paper explores questions of fat embodiment and how tensions between and among biologically based descriptions of fatness and disability feature in the lives of women. In tracing the medicalization of fatness and disability and exploring important shared experiences of fat women and disabled people, this paper dislodges both fatness and disability from biological moorings and examines them within cultural and political contexts. In particular, the experiences of oppression and pathology are analyzed to expose the commonalities between what might initially appear to be disparate groups. By illustrating why medicalized rubrics cannot usefully account for the stigma associated with fat and/or disabled embodiments, this paper seeks to set the stage for a feminist disability studies that recognizes disability as a diverse social category and meaningfully incorporates fat embodiments.

Kudlick, Catherine J. “Disability History: Why We Need Another ‘Other.’” American Historical Review 108.3 (2003): 50 pars. 2 Dec. 2004 <http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/108.3/kudlick.html>.

Kuppers, Petra. “Bodies, Hysteria, Pain: Staging the Invisible.” Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance. Ed. Philip Auslander and Carrie Sandahl. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Pp.147-162.

Loury, G. C. “Introduction.” “Racial Stereotypes.” The Anatomy of Racial Inequality. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. Pp. 1-13, 17-54.

Mairs, Nancy. “Body in Trouble.” Waist-High in the World: A Life Among the Nondisabled. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996. Pp. 40-63.

McGovern, Theresa M. S.P. v. Sullivan: The Effort to Broaden the Social Security Administration's Definition of AIDS, 21 Fordham Urban L.J. 1083 (Summer 1994).

Mitchell, David T., and Sharon Snyder. “The Eugenic Atlantic: Race, Disability, and the Making of an International Eugenic Science, 1800-1945.” Disability and Society 18.7 (2003): 843-64.

Pernick, Martin. “Defining the Defective: Eugenics, Aesthetics, and Mass Culture in Early 20th-Century-America.” The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability. Ed. David T. Mitchell and Sharon Snyder. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Pp. 89-110.

Samuels, Ellen. “Critical Divides: Judith Butler's Body Theory and the Question of Disability.” NWSA Journal 14.3 (2002): 58-76. Until 1999, major works in disability studies tended to ignore the influential body theories of Judith Butler, or to argue that her theories relied upon the disabled body as a constitutive Other. Between 1999 and 2001, however, a number of works have appeared which apply Butler's theories to disability. I consider both the original disregard for Butler and her recent adoption in disability studies to shed light upon possibilities for developing integrated feminist disability theory and praxis in the future. I suggest that applying Butler's theories to disability should take place in a contextualized and critical mode, and that substituting disability for Butler's own terms of sex or gender without fully considering the implications of such a substitution may obscure important differences between identity-categories. Finally, I challenge feminist and gender theorists such as Butler to include and account for the disabled body in their future work.

Sandahl, Carrie. “Black Man, Blind Man: Disability Identity Politics and Performance.” Theatre Journal (December 2004): 579-602.

Snyder, Sharon, and David T. Mitchell. “Out of the Ashes of Eugenics: Diagnostic Regimes in the United States and the Making of a Disability Minority.” Patterns of Prejudice 36.1 (2002): 79-103.

Titchkosky, Tanya. “Looking Blind: A Revelation of Culture’s Eye.” Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance. Ed. Philip Auslander and Carrie Sandahl. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Pp. 219-229.

Wendell, Susan. “The Social Construction of Disability.” The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability. New York: Routledge, 1996. Pp. 35-56.

_____. “ Unhealthy Disabled:  Treating Chronic Illnesses as Disabilities.” Hypatia 16.4 (2001): 17-33. Chronic illness is a major cause of disability, especially in women. Therefore, any adequate feminist understanding of disability must encompass chronic illnesses. I argue that there are important differences between healthy disabled and unhealthy disabled people that are likely to affect such issues as treatment of impairment in disability and feminist politics, accommodation of disability in activism and employment, identification of persons as disabled, disability pride, and prevention and "cure" of disabilities.