« Robert Meisner, '66, JD'69 | Main | Harold Orel, MA'49, PhD'53 »
December 21, 2007
David T. Mitchell, MA'91, PhD'93
Cultural Locations of Disability, The University of Chicago Press, 2006
The book: The book's co-authors trace how disabled people came to be viewed as biologically deviant. The eugenics era pioneered techniques that managed "defectives" through the application of therapies, invasive case histories, and acute surveillance techniques, turning disabled persons into subjects for a readily available research pool. Snyder and Mitchell argue that the social production of human variation as aberrancy. From our modern obsessions with tidiness and cleanliness to our desire to attain perfect bodies, notions of disabilities as examples of human insufficiency proliferate. These disability practices infuse more general modes of social obedience at work today. Consequently, this important study explains how disabled people are instrumental in charting the passage from a disciplinary society to one based upon regulation of the self.
The author: David Mitchell is an associate professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago and is one of the founders of the Modern Language Association's Committee on Disability Issues in the Profession and a past president of the Society for Disability Studies. He has edited and authored books and a documentary video about disability cultures and the representation of disability in the arts and literature.
Posted by tobiaslw at December 21, 2007 02:44 PM