Book cover of The Disability Studies Reader

Book description

The fifth edition of The Disability Studies Reader addresses the post-identity theoretical landscape by emphasizing questions of interdependency and independence, the human-animal relationship, and issues around the construction or materiality of gender, the body, and sexuality. Selections explore the underlying biases of medical and scientific experiments and explode the binary…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Disability Studies Reader as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

I was absolutely stunned when I read "Unspeakable Conversations" by Harriet McBryde Johnson, one of the many brilliant pieces included in this reader. My edition is from 2010, but new and updated editions have come out since. It explores questions of interdependency and independence, gender, the body, sexuality, biases in science and medicine, and physical disabilities, and investigates issues around pain, mental disability, and invisible disabilities.

Becoming familiar with some disability theories has been invaluable to me. My capacity to read myself as disabled has grown and still fluctuates. To know that sharp minds have been working on this and…

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December on 5C4 by Adam Strassberg,

Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!

On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…

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