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Crip Eye for the Normate Guy: Queer Theory and the Disciplining of Disability Studies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Robert McRuer*
Affiliation:
George Washington University

Extract

In “seeing the disabled: visual rhetorics of disability in Popular Photography,” Rose-marie Garland-Thomson argues that representations of disability in photography, over more than a century, have generally fallen into four broad categories: the wondrous, which places the disabled subject on high and elicits awe from viewers because of the supposedly amazing achievement represented; the sentimental, which places the disabled subject in a diminished, childlike, or custodial position, evoking pity; the exotic, which makes disability strange and distant—a freakish or perhaps transgressive spectacle; and the realistic, which brings disability close, potentially minimizing the difference between viewer and viewed. In the essay, which first appeared in print in the important disability studies anthology The New Disability History, Garland-Thomson reiterates some of the central disability studies insights that have transformed scholarship in the humanities over the past decade. Simultaneously, she takes disability studies in new directions, providing a critical taxonomy that those of us in the field can use as a foundation for countless other projects.

Type
Conference on Disability Studies and the University
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2005

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