Ugly Laws

So-called “ugly laws” were mostly municipal statutes in the United States that outlawed the appearance in public of people who were, in the words of one of these laws, “diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object” (Chicago City Code 1881). Although the moniker “ugly laws” was coined to refer collectively to such ordinances only in 1975 (Burgdorf and Burgdorf 1975), it has become the primary way to refer to such laws, which targeted the overlapping categories of the poor, the homeless, vagrants, and those with visible disabilities. Enacted and actively enforced between the American Civil War (1867) and World War I (1918), such laws and their enforcement can tell us much about the very sorts of people who were also, a generation later, subject to explicitly eugenic laws, such as sterilization legislation. And like eugenic laws and policies, such laws continue to affect the lives of people with disabilities to this day (Schweik 2011)

Project Re•center dot Vision: disability at the edges of representation

The representational history of disabled people can largely be characterized as one of being put on display or hidden away. Self-representations have been a powerful part of the disability rights and culture movement, but recently scholars have analysed the ways in which these run the risk of creating a ‘single story’ that centres the experiences of white, western, physically disabled men. Here we introduce and theorize with Project Re•Vision, our arts-based research project that resists this singularity by creating and centring, without normalizing, representations that have previously been relegated to the margins. We draw from body becoming and new materialist theory to explore the dynamic ways in which positionality illuminates bodies of difference and open into a discussion about what is at stake when these stories are let loose into the world

Lomax's Matrix: Disability, Solidarity, and the Black Power of 504

No abstract availabl

Marshall P. Wilder and Disability Performance History

Marshall P. Wilder, born in 1859, was a highly visible public figure who is now forgotten. A famous vaudeville performer often described as a “hunchback dwarf,” Wilder played dynamically with the disabling discourses that framed him, and he resisted tokenization by developing and claiming cross-disability (as well as cross-class) alliances with marginalized others. His work speaks not only to disability studies but to the conjunction of performance studies and critical prison studies. Early in the last century, he set the stage for productive connections to be made in this one between the theaters of disability, poverty and incarceration

Collision and Collusion: Artists, Academics, and Activists in Dialogue with the University of California and Critical Disability Studies

This essay recounts two interconnected collaborative disability studies projects. Because of every person’s complex relationship to their own embodiment and that of others, disability beckons us to a realm beyond abstraction, even as the field becomes ever more theoretical. We describe how disability shaped what we did and how we did it; description is a key term here. Conversations such as the ones we had in 2010 and 2012 pave the way for new ideas by offering concrete examples of disability as a generative force.  Through risk taking and creative practice, the best academics and artists challenge the status quo, maybe serving as translators for people not in the habit of giving disability or disabled people much thought. The more people come to associate disability with positive ideas, the more we can imagine changing those hardwired negative, pitying forces that dominate approaches to policy, practices, and encounters in daily life.  Keywords: access, arts, audio description, critical disability studies, collaboration, curation, design, distance learning.

State of Change: State-Level Actions to Protect the Rights of Parents with Disabilities and Their Children

This policy brief provides an overview of current legislation that discriminates against parents with disabilities. It also considers non discriminatory legislation that has been enacted or is currently being enacted at the state level, with the hope of encouraging more states—eventually all states—to adopt similar legislation. It is our strong belief that such legislative changes are both needed and deserved by the at least 4.1 million disabled parents currently raising children under the age of 18 in the US

Forum Introduction: Reflections on the Fiftieth Anniversary of Erving Goffman’s Stigma

The plenary session at SDS 2013 on “Reflections on the Fiftieth Anniversary of Stigma” marked the fiftieth anniversary of Erving Goffman’s Stigma, which remains one of the most cited and influential works in the field. The panelists, whose essays appear in this forum, discuss Stigma’s origins and uses over the past decades, how the book has affected their own research and understandings of disability, and what role Stigma might play as disability studies continues to evolve. Each of the five essays in its own way answers one central question: whether and how Goffman’s work remains useful as we move the field forward