Disability

Catalog description

This course considers disability as a cultural concept - not simply a medical condition or personal misfortune - that describes how human variation matters in the world. How has disability been understood over time and across cultures? How have disabled bodies been represented and classified? How does disability intersect with other identity formations such as race, class, and gender? Ultimately, we will ask: what new forms of representation might bodily difference produce, and what might the concept of disability teach us about all bodies? Alongside texts that may describe disability as defective or tragic, we will trace other literary possibilities for bodies and minds that resist normative structures, from narratives that theorize ideas of access, cure, and care to fictions that reclaim disability as enlivening identity.