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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social institutions > Customs & folklore > Folklore
Sexy Like Us: Disability, Humor, and Sexuality takes a humorous,
intimate approach to disability through the stories, jokes,
performances, and other creative expressions of people with
disabilities. Author Teresa Milbrodt explores why individuals can
laugh at their leglessness, find stoma bags sexual, discover
intimacy in scars, and flaunt their fragility in ways both
hilarious and serious. Their creative and comic acts crash,
collide, and collaborate with perceptions of disability in
literature and dominant culture, allowing people with disabilities
to shape political disability identity and disability pride, call
attention to social inequalities, and poke back at ableist cultural
norms. This book also discusses how the ambivalent nature of comedy
has led to debates within disability communities about when it is
acceptable to joke, who has permission to joke, and which jokes
should be used inside and outside a community's inner circle.
Joking may be difficult when considering aspects of disability that
involve physical or emotional pain and struggles to adapt to new
forms of embodiment. At the same time, people with disabilities can
use humor to expand the definitions of disability and sexuality.
They can help others with disabilities assert themselves as sexy
and sexual. And they can question social norms and stigmas around
bodies in ways that open up journeys of being, not just for
individuals who consider themselves disabled, but for all people.
A Feminist Mythology takes us on a poetic journey through the
canonical myths of femininity, testing them from the point of view
of our modern condition. A myth is not an object, but rather a
process, one that Chiara Bottici practises by exploring different
variants of the myth of "womanhood" through first- and third-person
prose and poetry. We follow a series of myths that morph into each
other, disclosing ways of being woman that question inherited
patriarchal orders. In this metamorphic world, story-telling is not
just a mix of narrative, philosophical dialogues and metaphysical
theorizing: it is a current that traverses all of them by
overflowing the boundaries it encounters. In doing so, A Feminist
Mythology proposes an alternative writing style that recovers
ancient philosophical and literary traditions from the pre-Socratic
philosophers and Ovid's Metamorphoses to the philosophical novellas
and feminist experimental writings of the last century.
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