Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Body Language: Narrating illness and disability

Body Language: Narrating illness and disability

Couser, G.

Paperback

Series: Life Writing

Literary CriticismFiction Anthologies

ISBN10: 0367890089
ISBN13: 9780367890087
Publisher: Routledge
Published: Dec 12 2019
Pages: 160
Weight: 0.60
Height: 0.34 Width: 6.85 Depth: 9.69
Language: English

As much as we may like to evade them, illness and disability inescapably attend human embodiment - we are all vulnerable subjects. So it might seem natural and inevitable that the most universal, most democratic, form of literature - autobiography - should address these common features of human experience. Yet for the most part, autobiographical writing expressive of illness and disability remained quite uncommon until the second half of the twentieth century, when it flourished concurrently with successive civil rights movements. Women's liberation, with its signature manifesto Our Bodies Ourselves, supported the breast cancer narrative; the gay rights movement encouraged AIDS narrative in response to a deadly epidemic; and the disability rights movement stimulated a surge in narratives of various disabilities. Conversely, the narratives helped to advance the respective rights movements. Such writing, then, has been representative in two senses of the term: aesthetic (mimetic) and political (acting on behalf of). It has done, and continues to do, important cultural work.

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