Amala Poli // I find, when I write, I don’t want to write well-made scenes, narratives that flow, structures that give a sense of wholeness and balance, plays that feel intact. Intact people should write intact plays with sound narratives built of sound scenes that unfold with a sense of dependable cause and effect; solid…
Tag: Disability
Testing for Normalcy: Amniocentesis and Disability in the 1970s
John A. Carranza // “2. Pregnancy is usually a happy time. Most newborn infants are normal and healthy. Even so, parents often wonder if their unborn child will be normal.”[1] By the late 1970s, reproductive decisions and the sense of normality were challenged and redefined by the women’s liberation and disability rights movement, among others….
Redefining the Field: A Critical Review of the 2019 International Health Humanities Consortium
Maryam Golafshani // Though this was my first time at the Health Humanities Consortium’s international conference, which just celebrated its fifth year, I was struck by the sense that a pervasive shift is taking place in the field. The scholarship at this year’s conference strongly reflected how the health humanities are expanding beyond the field’s…
Special Issue Review: Chemistry, Disability, and Frankenstein
Diana Rose Newby // Chemistry, Disability, and Frankenstein, theme issue of Literature and Medicine, vol. 36, no. 2, fall 2018. In her introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley concludes with well wishes for her creation’s second life: “And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper” (25). Today,…
The Deaf Crusaders: A Risky Prophecy
Mia Florin-Sefton // In March 2008, The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) hosted a talk titled “A Spotlight on Deafness” [1]. The talk was one in a long series dedicated to discussing various conditions thought to be potentially treatable with the development of new embryonic stem cell therapies (ESC). It is noteworthy, however, that…
Neurodiverse Reading
Ittai Orr // In See It Feelingly: Classic Novels, Autistic Readers, and the Schooling of a No-Good English Professor (Duke Univ. Press, 2018), Ralph Savarese writes that literature is a kind of social medicine, that it represents a “way of restoring relation” (193). There is no better illustration of this power of literature—or rather, of a…
Monstrous Myths of Disability in M. Night Shyamalan’s Glass
Diana Rose Newby // Warning: This piece contains mild spoilers for the film Glass. Difference is the bread and butter of the superhero genre. And to a degree, so is disability. Think X-Men’s paraplegic Professor X; the blindness and depression of Marvel’s Daredevil; the facial scarring that catalyzes Harvey Dent’s murderous mental illness; Iron Man’s super-powered…
Disability as Experience
In this post, I’d like to make things a bit more personal than I have so far. Last week I got into a debate with a professor. It’s not important what this debate was about. Instead, it’s important what this debate wasn’t about. This professor was asking my class—myself and six other graduate students/artists—to participate…
Disorientations: On Disability in Graduate School
Sara Ahmed, in Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (2006), asks what it means to be orientated. By thinking through sexuality in terms of lived, embodied experience, Ahmed challenges us to think about how queer bodies occupy space and time. She writes that “if orientation is a matter of how we reside in space, then sexual…
The Anti-Disability of Anti-Vaccination
During my final year of undergraduate studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, I was studying at a café and had with me Seth Mnookin’s controversial new book, The Panic Virus.[1] While I was reading, I was approached by a woman who happened to be waiting for her order by my table. Intrigued by…
