Making Rights a Reality? explores the way in which disability activists in the United Kingdom and Canada have transformed their aspirations into legal claims in their quest for equality. It unpacks shifting conceptualizations of the political identity of disability and the role of a rights discourse in these dynamics. In doing so, it delves into the diffusion of disability rights among grassroots organizations and the traditional disability charities. The book draws on a wealth of primary sources including court records and campaign documents and encompassing interviews with more than sixty activists and legal experts. While showing that the disability rights movement has had a significant impact on equality jurisprudence in two countries, the book also demonstrates that the act of mobilizing rights can have consequences, both intended and unintended, for social movements themselves.

Disability rights advocates in the United Kingdom and the United States recently embraced new media technologies in unexpected and innovative ways. This book sheds light on this process of renewal and asks whether the digitalisation of disability rights advocacy can help re-configure political participation into a more inclusive experience for disabled Internet users, enhancing their stakes in democratic citizenship. Through the examination of social media content, Web link analysis, and interviews with leading figures in grassroots groups on both sides of the Atlantic, Filippo Trevisan reveals the profound impact that the Internet has had on disability advocacy in the wake of the austerity agenda that followed the 2008 global financial crisis. In Britain, a new, tech-savvy generation of young disabled self-advocates has emerged from this process. The role of social media platforms such as Facebook in helping politically inexperienced users make sense of complex policy changes through the use of personal stories is discussed also. In addition, this book explains why British disability advocates adopted more innovative and participatory strategies compared to their American counterparts when faced with similar policy crises. This book reviews the implications of this unexpected digital transformation for the structure of the disability rights movement, its leadership, and the opportunity for disabled citizens to participate fully in democratic politics vis-a-vis persisting Web access and accessibility barriers. An original perspective on the relationship between disability and the Internet, and an indispensable read for scholars wishing to contextualize and enrich their knowledge on digital disability rights campaigns vis-a-vis the broader ecology of policymaking.

Recycling the disabled: Army, medicine, and modernity in WWI Germany examines the 'medical organisation' of Imperial Germany for total war. Faced with mounting casualties and a growing labour shortage, German military, industrial, and governmental officials turned to medical experts for assistance in the total mobilisation of society. Through an investigation of developments in orthopaedic medicine, prosthetic technology, military medical organisation and the cultural history of disability, Heather Perry reveals how the pressures of modern industrial warfare not only transformed medical ideas and treatments for injured soldiers, but also transformed social and cultural expectations of the disabled body - expectations that long outlasted the war. This book is ideal for scholars and students interested in war, medicine, disability, science and technology, and modern Germany. -- .

In a tradition extending from the medieval era to the early twentieth century, visually disabled Japanese women known as goze toured the Japanese countryside as professional singers and contributed to the vitality of rural musical culture. The goze sang unique narratives (many requiring several hours to perform) as well as a huge repertory of popular ballads and short songs, typically accompanied by a three-stringed lute known as the shamisen. During the Edo period (1600-1868) goze formed guild-like occupational associations and created an iconic musical repertory. They were remarkably successful in fighting discrimination accorded to women, people with physical disabilities, the poor, and itinerants, using their specialized art to connect directly to the commoner public. The best documented goze lived in Echigo province in the Japanese northwest. Although their activities peaked in the nineteenth century, some women continued to tour until the middle of the twentieth. The last active goze survived until 2005. In Goze: Blind Women and Musical Performance in Traditional Japan, author Gerald Groemer argues that goze activism was primarily a matter of the agency of performance itself. Groemer shows that the solidarity goze achieved with the rural public through narrative and music was based on the convergence of the goze's desire to achieve social autonomy and the wish of lower-class to mitigate the cultural deprivation to which they were otherwise so often subject. It was this correlation of emancipatory interests that allowed goze to flourish and attain a degree of social autonomy. Far from being pitied as helpless victims, goze were recognized as masterful artisans who had succeeded in transforming their disability into a powerful social tool and who could act as agents of widespread cultural development. As the first full-length scholarly work on goze in English, this book is sure to prove an invaluable resource to scholars and students of Japanese culture, Japanese music, ethnomusicology, and disability studies worldwide.

Bioethics and Disability provides tools for understanding the concerns, fears and biases that have convinced some people with disabilities that the health care setting is a dangerous place and some bioethicists that disability activists have nothing to offer bioethics. It wrestles with the charge that bioethics as a discipline devalues the lives of persons with disabilities, arguing that reconciling the competing concerns of the disability community and the autonomy-based approach of mainstream bioethics is not only possible, but essential for a bioethics committed to facilitating good medical decision making and promoting respect for all persons, regardless of ability. Through in-depth case studies involving newborns, children and adults with disabilities, it proposes a new model for medical decision making that is both sensitive to and sensible about the fact of disability in medical cases.

Disability studies scholars and activists have long criticized and critiqued so-termed 'charitable' approaches to disability where the capitalization of individual disabled bodies to invoke pity are historically, socially, and politically circumscribed by paternalism. Disabled individuals have long advocated for civil and human rights in various locations throughout the globe, yet contemporary human rights discourses problematically co-opt disabled bodies as 'evidence' of harms done under capitalism, war, and other forms of conflict, while humanitarian non-governmental organizations often use disabled bodies to generate resources for their humanitarian projects. It is the connection between civil rights and human rights, and this concomitant relationship between national and global, which foregrounds this groundbreaking book's contention that disability studies productively challenge such human rights paradigms, which troublingly eschew disability rights in favor of exclusionary humanitarianism. It relocates disability from the margins to the center of academic and activist debates over the vexed relationship between human rights and humanitarianism. These considerations thus productively destabilize able-bodied assumptions that undergird definitions of personhood in civil rights and human rights by highlighting intersections between disability, race, gender ethnicity, and sexuality as a way to interrogate the possibilities (and limitations) of human rights as a politicized regime.

Produced in conjunction with Autism Spectrum Australia (Aspect), Australia's largest provider of services with people on the autism spectrum, this new text explores the experiences, needs and aspirations of adults on the spectrum. The volume utilises the structure of a recent survey (the only one of its type in Australia and one of few conducted internationally) and presents data from the study with contributions from adults on the spectrum to illustrate the findings with first person accounts and case studies. By drawing on these unique experiences, this valuable resource is presented in a way that will be both engaging and accessible for a wide range of readers.

Using data from more than 40,000 soldiers of the Union army, this book focuses on the experience of African Americans and immigrants with disabilities, investigating their decision to seek government assistance and their resulting treatment. Pension administrators treated these ex-soldiers differently from native-born whites, but the discrimination was far from seamless - biased evaluations of worthiness intensified in response to administrators' workload and nativists' late-nineteenth-century campaigns. This book finds a remarkable interplay of social concepts, historical context, bureaucratic expediency, and individual initiative. Examining how African Americans and immigrants weighed their circumstances in deciding when to request a pension, whether to employ a pension attorney, or if they should seek institutionalization, it contends that these veterans quietly asserted their right to benefits. Shedding new light on the long history of challenges faced by veterans with disabilities, the book underscores the persistence of these challenges in spite of the recent revolution in disability rights.

When horrific acts of violence take place, events such as massacres in Boston, Newtown, CT, and Aurora, CO, people want answers. Who would commit such a thoughtless act of violence? What in their backgrounds could make them so inhumane, cruel, and evil? Often, people assume immediately that the perpetrator must have a mental disorder, and in some cases that does prove to be the case. But the assumption that most people with mental disorders are violent, prone to act out, and a threat to others and themselves, is clearly erroneous. Mental Disability, Violence, and Future Dangerousness thoroughly documents and explains how and why persons with mental disabilities who are perceived to be a future danger to others, the community, or themselves have become the most stigmatized, abused, and mistreated group in America, and what should be done to correct the resulting injustices. Each year state and federal governments incarcerate, deny treatment to, and otherwise deprive hundreds of thousands of Americans with mental disabilities of their fundamental rights, liberties, and freedoms- including on occasion their lives-based on unreliable and misleading predictions that they are likely to be dangerous in the future. Yet, due to an exaggerated fear of violence in our society, almost no one seems concerned about these injustices, which exclusively affect Americans who have been impaired by mental disorders and the lack of treatment, especially after they have been abused as children or injured in combat. Instead, we appear to be oblivious to these injustices or comfortable in allowing them to become worse. Here, John Weston Parry carefully delineates the mishandling of persons with mental disabilities by the criminal and civil justice systems, and illustrates the ways in which we can identify and remedy those injustices.

This book provides an international comparative study of the implementation of disability rights law and policy focused on the emerging principles of self-determination and personalisation. It explores how these principles have been enshrined in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and how different jurisdictions have implemented them to enable meaningful engagement and participation by persons with disabilities in society. The philosophy of 'active citizenship' underpinning the Convention - that all citizens should (be able to) actively participate in the community - provides the core focal point of this book, which grounds its analysis in exploring how this goal has been imagined and implemented across a range of countries. The case studies examine how different jurisdictions have reformed disability law and policy and reconfigured how support is administered and funded to ensure maximum choice and independence is accorded to people with disabilities.

In the context of the Care Act 2014, this third edition of the leading textbook on personalisation considers key policy changes since 2009 and new research into the extension and outcomes of personal budgets. Direct payments and personal budgets have developed rapidly, transforming the whole of adult social care. In future, all care will be delivered via a personal budget, with direct payments as the default rather than the exception. As the concepts have spread from adult social care to other sectors, the changes have been controversial and difficult to implement. Front-line practitioners and people using services have struggled to make sense of these ways of working in a challenging financial and policy context. This accessible textbook is essential reading for students, practitioners and policy makers in social work and community care services.

Representing Youth with Disability on Television is a complex and multidimensional mainstream cultural discourse that examines specific stereotypes in fictional programming. The book draws attention to the group labeled as disabled, which is often marginalized, misrepresented, and misunderstood in the media, by analyzing the popular television programs Glee, Breaking Bad, and Parenthood. To obtain a more rigorous account of the way that youth (9-18 years of age) with disability are framed on television, this analysis examines the following issues: how research on popular culture is contextualized within social theory; the theoretical perspectives on representations of disability in popular culture; and the various contexts, genres, media, representations, and definitions of youth with disability in popular culture. The text also outlines the historical growth of disability, which is crucial for a discussion regarding the changing dimensions of popular culture. Critical hermeneutics, content analysis, and methodological bricolage are the melange of methodologies used to closely examine the dominant models of disability (social vs. medical) used in the portrayal of disabled youth on television today.

Praise for the First Edition: ""This is an excellent book, but the best parts are the stories of the disabled, which give readers insights into their struggles and triumphs."" - Score: 94, 4 Stars - Doody's Medical Reviews What are the differences between individuals with disabilities who flourish as opposed to those who never really adjust after a trauma? How do those born with a disability differ from individuals who acquire one later in life? Fully updated and revised, this second edition of a unique rehabilitation counseling text reflects growing disparities among ""haves and have-nots"" as they bear on the psychosocial aspects of disability. New content focuses on returning veterans afflicted with physical and mental health problems, persons with disabilities living in poverty, and the need for increased family and community-based engagement. The book provides updated information about assisted suicide, genetic testing, new legislation, and much more. Using a minority model perspective, the text provides students and practitioners of rehabilitation and mental health counseling with vivid insight into the experience of living with a disability. It features first-person narratives from people living with a variety of disabling conditions, which are integrated with sociological and societal perspectives toward disability, and strategies for counseling such individuals. The text encompasses an historical perspective, psychological and sociological research, cultural variants regarding disability, myths and misconceptions, the attitudes of special interest and occupational groups, the use positive psychology, and adjustments to disability by the individual and family. A wealth of counseling guidelines and useful strategies are geared to individuals with specific disabilities. Designed for a 15-week semester, the book also includes thought-provoking discussion questions and exercises, an Instructor's Manual and PowerPoints. New to the Second Edition: Reflects the growing disparities between "haves and have-nots" as they impact people with disabilities Includes new content on veterans with physical and mental disabilities Describes the experience of impoverished individuals with disabilities Examines the need for increase family and community-based engagement Discusses strengths and weaknesses of the Americans with Disabilities Act Covers assisted suicide, genetic testing, and recent legislation Expanded coverage of sexual identity Provides an Instructor Manual and PowerPoints Key Features: Provides 16 personal narratives demonstrating the ""normalcy"" of individuals with different types of disabling conditions Includes stories of people living with blindness, hearing impairments, spinal chord injuries, muscular dystrophy, mental illness, and other disabilities Delivers counseling strategies geared toward specific disabilities, with ""do's"" and ""don'ts"" Discusses ongoing treatment issues and ethical dilemmas for rehabilitation counselors

Much has been written about cognitive development in those who are cognitively impaired. Much is written about attachment for people who don't have disabilities. Yet people with disabilities have suffered discrimination and neglect of their emotional needs, perhaps because the pain of difference cannot be tolerated, perhaps because of lack of will or lack of knowledge. This book aims to help to fill the knowledge gap and to encourage others to overcome their resistance to facing the pain, and will be an important contribution to our understanding of the world of disability and emotional deprivation. In this book - a result of over twenty years experience with people who have disabilities and additional distress as a result of traumatic life experiences - an attempt is made to bring together what we know about early emotional development and the consequences of failure to provide an emotionally nurturing experience, and the results are then applied to people with disabilities.

Disability is a widespread phenomenon, indeed a potentially universal one as life expectancies rise. Within the academic world, it has relevance for all disciplines yet is often dismissed as a niche market or someone else's domain. This collection explores how academic avoidance of disability studies and disability theory is indicative of social prejudice and highlights, conversely, how the academy can and does engage with disability studies. This innovative book brings together work in the humanities and the social sciences, and draws on the riches of cultural diversity to challenge institutional and disciplinary avoidance. Divided into three parts, the first looks at how educational institutions and systems implicitly uphold double standards, which can result in negative experiences for staff and students who are disabled. The second part explores how disability studies informs and improves a number of academic disciplines, from social work to performance arts. The final part shows how more diverse cultural engagement offers a way forward for the academy, demonstrating ways in which we can make more explicit the interdisciplinary significance of disability studies - and, by extension, disability theory, activism, experience, and culture. Disability, Avoidance and the Academy: Challenging Resistance will interest students and scholars of disability studies, education studies and cultural studies.

People with disabilities are among the most adversely affected during conflict situations or when natural disasters strike. They experience higher mortality rates, have fewer available resources and less access to help, especially in refugee camps, as well as in post-disaster environments. Already subject to severe discrimination in many societies, people with disabilities are often overlooked during emergency evacuation, relief, recovery and rebuilding efforts. Countries party to the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities must take all necessary measures to ensure the protection and safety of people with disabilities during situations of armed conflict, humanitarian emergencies, and natural disasters. Such aid should be designed to support preparedness, response, recovery and rebuilding. This book includes perspectives from around the globe and explores the implications at the policy, programme, and personal level, discussing issues such as: How can national laws, policies, and regulations provide guidance, methods and strategies to integrate and coordinate inclusive emergency management? What should people with disabilities know in order to be prepared for emergency situations? What lessons have we learned from past experiences? What are the current shortfalls (physical and cultural) that put people with disabilities at risk during emergencies and what can be done to improve these situations (e.g. through new technologies and disaster planning)? How does disability affect people's experiences as refugees and other displaced situations; what programmes and best practices are in place to protect and promote their rights during their period of displacement? How must disabled people with disabilities be factored in to the resettlement and rebuilding process; does an opportunity for ensuring universal access exist in the rebuilding process? What is the impact of disasters and conflicts on such special populations as disabled women, disabled children, and those with intellectual disabilities? Spotlighting a pressing issue that has long been neglected in emergency planning fields, this innovative book discusses how to meet the needs of people with disabilities in crises and conflict situations. It is an important reference for all those working in or researching disability and inclusion, and emergency and disaster management, both in developed and developing countries.

Whose lives count as fully human? The answer matters for everyone, disabled or not. The ancient Greek ideal linked physical wholeness to moral wholeness - the virtuous citizen was "beautiful and good." It's an ideal that has all too often turned deadly, casting those who do not measure up as less than human. In the pre-Christian era, infants with disabilities were left on the rocks; in modern times, they have been targeted by eugenics. Much has changed, thanks to the tenacious advocacy of the disability rights movement. Yesteryear's hellish institutions have given way to customized educational programs and assisted living centers. Public spaces have been reconfigured to improve access. Therapies and medical technology have advanced rapidly in sophistication and effectiveness. Protections for people with disabilities have been enshrined in many countries' antidiscrimination laws. But these victories, impressive as they are, mask other realities that collide awkwardly with society's avowals of equality. Why are parents choosing to abort a baby likely to have a disability? Why does Belgian law allow for euthanasia in cases of disability, even absent a terminal diagnosis or physical pain? Why, when ventilators were in short supply during the first Covid wave, did some states list disability as a reason to deny care? On this theme: - Heonju Lee tells how his son with Down syndrome saved another child's life. - Molly McCully Brown and Victoria Reynolds Farmer recount their personal experiences with disability. - Amy Julia Becker says meritocracies fail because they value the wrong things. - Maureen Swinger asks six mothers around the world about raising a child with disabilities. - Joe Keiderling documents the unfinished struggle for disability rights. - Isaac T. Soon wonders if Saint Paul's "thorn in the flesh" was a disability. - Leah Libresco Sargeant reviews What Can a Body Do? and Making Disability Modern. - Sarah C. Williams says testing for fetal abnormalities is not a neutral practice. Also in the issue: - Ross Douthat is brought low by intractable Lyme disease. - Edwidge Danticat flees an active shooter in a packed mall. - Eugene Vodolazkin finds comic relief at funerals, including his own father's. - Kelsey Osgood discovers that being an Orthodox Jew is strange, even in Brooklyn. - Christian Wiman pens three new poems. - Susannah Black profiles Flannery O'Conner. - Our writers review Eyal Press's Dirty Work, Steve Coll's Directorate S, and Millennial Nuns by the Daughters of Saint Paul. Plough Quarterly features stories, ideas, and culture for people eager to apply their faith to the challenges we face. Each issue includes in-depth articles, interviews, poetry, book reviews, and art.

Literature and Disability introduces readers to the field of disability studies and the ways in which a focus on issues of impairment and the representation of disability can provide new approaches to reading and writing about literary texts. Disability plays a central role in much of the most celebrated literature, yet it is only in recent years that literary criticism has begun to consider the aesthetic, ethical and literary challenges that this poses. The author explores: key debates and issues in disability studies today different forms of impairment, with the aim of showing the diversity and ambiguity of the term "disability" the intersection between literary critical approaches to disability and feminist, post-colonial, and autobiographical writing genre and representations of disability in relation to literary forms including novels, short stories, poems, plays and life writing This volume provides students and academics with an accessible overview of literary critical approaches to disability representation.

Traditionally, the public health viewpoint on disability was geared toward primary prevention of disabling conditions or events. More recently, with the movement for disability rights and the emergence of disability studies, the challenge to the field has been to promote positive health outcomes in this underserved community. Such a change in public health culture must start at the educational level, yet training programs have generally been slow in integrating this perspective-with its potential for enriching the field-into their curricula. Public Health Perspectives on Disability meets this challenge with an educational framework for rethinking disability in public health study and practice, and for attaining the competencies that should accompany this knowledge. This reference balances history and epidemiology, scientific advances, advocacy and policy issues, real-world insights, and progressive recommendations, suiting it especially to disability-focused courses, or to add disability-related content to existing public health programs. Each chapter applies awareness and understanding of disabled persons' experience to one of the core curriculum areas, including: Health services administration, Environmental health science and occupational health, Health law and ethics, The school as physical setting, Maternal, child, and family health, Disasters and disability. In Public Health Perspectives on Disability, faculty, researchers, administrators, and students in graduate schools of public health throughout the U.S. will find a worthy classroom text and a robust source of welcome-and much needed-change.

Equal accessibility to public places and services is now required by law in many countries. For the vision-impaired, specialised technology often can provide a fuller enjoyment of the facilities of society, from large scale meetings and public entertainments to reading a book or making music. This volume explores the engineering and design principles and techniques used in assistive technology for blind and vision-impaired people. This book maintains the currency of knowledge for engineers and health workers who develop devices and services for people with sight loss, and is an excellent source of reference for students of assistive technology and rehabilitation.

Winner, Body and Embodiment Award presented by the American Sociological Association Imagine yourself without a face-the task seems impossible. The face is a core feature of our physical identity. Our face is how others identify us and how we think of our 'self'. Yet, human faces are also functionally essential as mechanisms for communication and as a means of eating, breathing, and seeing. For these reasons, facial disfigurement can endanger our fundamental notions of self and identity or even be life threatening, at worse. Precisely because it is so difficult to conceal our faces, the disfigured face compromises appearance, status, and, perhaps, our very way of being in the world. In Saving Face, sociologist Heather Laine Talley examines the cultural meaning and social significance of interventions aimed at repairing faces defined as disfigured. Using ethnography, participant-observation, content analysis, interviews, and autoethnography, Talley explores four sites in which a range of faces are "repaired:" face transplantation, facial feminization surgery, the reality show Extreme Makeover, and the international charitable organization Operation Smile,. Throughout, she considers how efforts focused on repair sometimes intensify the stigma associated with disfigurement. Drawing upon experiences volunteering at a camp for children with severe burns, Talley also considers alternative interventions and everyday practices that both challenge stigma and help those seen as disfigured negotiate outsider status. Talley delves into the promise and limits of facial surgery, continually examining how we might understand appearance as a facet of privilege and a dimension of inequality. Ultimately, she argues that facial work is not simply a conglomeration of reconstructive techniques aimed at the human face, but rather, that appearance interventions are increasingly treated as lifesaving work. Especially at a time when aesthetic technologies carrying greater risk are emerging and when discrimination based on appearance is rampant, this important book challenges us to think critically about how we see the human face.

Incorporating scholarship that addresses the social, economic, cultural, and historical facets of the experience of disability in South Asia, this book presents the reader with a comprehensive, cogent, and nuanced view of the constructions of disability in this region. In doing so, it focuses on the lived experiences of people with disabilities and their families, analyzing such disabling barriers as poverty, caste, and other inequities that limit their access to education, employment, equity, and empowerment. It addresses the interpretations of disability within different South Asian contexts including policy, family, educational systems, films, and literary narratives. Situated in an interdisciplinary perspective that spans areas such as cultural studies, law, disability studies in education, sociology, and historiography, South Asia and Disability Studies presents a rich and complex understanding of the disability experience in South Asia. The organization of topics parallels the discourse in areas within disability studies such as identity construction, language, historical constructions of disability, and cultural representations of disability.

Grouped around four central themes - illness and impairment, disabling processes, care and control, and communication and representations - this collection offers a fresh perspective on disability research, showing how theory and data can be brought together in new and exciting ways. Disability Research Today starts by showing how engaging with issues around illness and impairment is vital to a multidisciplinary understanding of disability as a social process. The second section explores factors that affect disabled people, such as homelessness, violence and unemployment. The third section turns to social care, and how disabled people are prevented from living with independence and dignity. Finally, the last section examines how different imagery and technology impacts our understandings of disability and deafness. Showcasing empirical work from a range of countries, including Japan, Norway, Italy, Australia, India, the UK, Turkey, Finland and Iceland, this collection shows how disability studies can be simultaneously sophisticated, accessible and policy-relevant. Disability Research Today is suitable for students and researchers in disability studies, sociology, social policy, social work, nursing and health studies.

Making Rights a Reality? explores the way in which disability activists in the United Kingdom and Canada have transformed their aspirations into legal claims in their quest for equality. It unpacks shifting conceptualizations of the political identity of disability and the role of a rights discourse in these dynamics. In doing so, it delves into the diffusion of disability rights among grassroots organizations and the traditional disability charities. It then shows how the diffusion of this rights model of disability can explain how and why disability activists have deployed legal strategies in pursuit of their goals. The book draws on a wealth of primary sources including court records and campaign documents and encompassing interviews with more than sixty activists and legal experts. While showing that the disability rights movement has had a significant impact on equality jurisprudence in two countries, the book also demonstrates that the act of mobilizing rights can have consequences, both intended and unintended, for social movements themselves.

Language is integral to our social being. But what is the status of those who stand outside of language? The mentally disabled, "wild" children, people with autism and other neurological disorders, as well as animals, infants, angels, and artificial intelligences, have all engaged with language from a position at its borders. In the intricate verbal constructions of modern literature, the 'disarticulate'--those at the edges of language--have, paradoxically, played essential, defining roles. Drawing on the disarticulate figures in modern fictional works such as Billy Budd, The Sound and the Fury, Nightwood, White Noise, and The Echo Maker, among others, James Berger shows in this intellectually bracing study how these characters mark sites at which aesthetic, philosophical, ethical, political, medical, and scientific discourses converge. It is also the place of the greatest ethical tension, as society confronts the needs and desires of "the least of its brothers." Berger argues that the disarticulate is that which is unaccountable in the discourses of modernity and thus stands as an alternative to the prevailing social order. Using literary history and theory, as well as disability and trauma theory, he examines how these disarticulate figures reveal modernity's anxieties in terms of how it constructs its others.