Invisible Disability: Georgina Kleege\u27s Sight Unseen

This essay discusses Sight Unseen, Georgina Kleege\u27s 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\u27s 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

Writing as Refiguration: Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face

This essay focuses on the relationship between life-writing, disability, and subjectivity. In her account of facial disfigurement resulting from jaw cancer, Lucy Grealy confronts cultural mythologies that signify corporeal difference as monstrous deviations, mapping new possibilities for female, embodied identity as well as for memoirs of illness and physical impairment

Review of Disability and World Religions: An Introduction

No abstract available

Lyric Bodies: Poets on Disability and Masculinity

This essay extends the study of disability and masculinity representations by exploring the transformational possibilities of poetry as exemplified in the work of Tom Andrews, Floyd Skloot, and Kenny Fries. It argues that lyricism as a process of invention and play enacts both disability and male identity as equally unfixed and that through an “accidental poetics” each author engages with maleness as a continually renegotiated experience necessitated in part by the conditions of disability. Challenging norms that pertain to them as men with disabilities, resisting the imposition of controlling ideological narratives, Skloot, Fries, and Andrews revise themselves as textual bodies whose unruliness is instantiated and celebrated in the unique structural and figurative moves of verse