This volume focuses on popular film, television, and online representations of contested corporealities and contributes to visual culture studies, disability studies, critical pedagogy, and medical humanities. Emphasizing unruly embodiments that transgress and transform, the volume conceptualizes visual culture as a space of query and accountability. In their introduction, the editors underline how spaces of cultural production provide necessary contexts for analyzing the social impact of contested corporealities. Contributors, in turn, offer new perspectives on technologies, disability, and cultural production. Eunjung Kim argues that life-size dolls in contemporary art films show how acts of caring for radically passive bodies can emerge as both erotic and beautiful; Nicole Markotic critiques the prioritizing of death as the most desirable, logical outcome in biopics of disability; and Katherine W. Sweaney's article on the online anatomization of an amnesiac's brain reminds us of the high stakes for medicine and science in the public display of knowledge-making. Working at the intersection of fat and critical race studies, Scott Stoneman discusses the body politics of the film Precious. Katerie Gladdys and Deshae E. Lott reflect on their lyrical installation about life with mechanical ventilation, and Ann Fudge Schormans and Adrienne Chambon examine how image-making by persons with intellectual disabilities can intervene in ableist-defined social space. With attention to queer theory and transnationalism, Michael Gill considers the British web-based RTV program, The Specials, where young men labeled as intellectually disabled fashion their erotic self-understandings as they discuss and appreciate an ensemble of Thai kathoey performers. Concentrating on the global politics of organ transplantation, Donna McCormack critically examines feature films that mediate questions of community, ethics, and mobility. The volume is further enriched by the inclusion of an interview in which Danielle Peers, Melisa Brittain, and Robert McRuer discuss the significance of crip possibilities in art and academia. This book was originally published as a special issue of The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies.

This volume focuses on popular film, television, and online representations of contested corporealities and contributes to visual culture studies, disability studies, critical pedagogy, and medical humanities. Emphasizing unruly embodiments that transgress and transform, the volume conceptualizes visual culture as a space of query and accountability. In their introduction, the editors underline how spaces of cultural production provide necessary contexts for analyzing the social impact of contested corporealities. Contributors, in turn, offer new perspectives on technologies, disability, and cultural production. Eunjung Kim argues that life-size dolls in contemporary art films show how acts of caring for radically passive bodies can emerge as both erotic and beautiful; Nicole Markoti critiques the prioritizing of death as the most desirable, logical outcome in biopics of disability; and Katherine W. Sweaney's article on the online anatomization of an amnesiac's brain reminds us of the high stakes for medicine and science in the public display of knowledge-making. Working at the intersection of fat and critical race studies, Scott Stoneman discusses the body politics of the film "Precious." Katerie Gladdys and Deshae E. Lott reflect on their lyrical installation about life with mechanical ventilation, and Ann Fudge Schormans and Adrienne Chambon examine how image-making by persons with intellectual disabilities can intervene in ableist-defined social space. With attention to queer theory and transnationalism, Michael Gill considers the British web-based RTV program, "The Specials," where young men labeled as intellectually disabled fashion their erotic self-understandings as they discuss and appreciate an ensemble of Thai "kathoey" performers. Concentrating on the global politics of organ transplantation, Donna McCormack critically examines feature films that mediate questions of community, ethics, and mobility. The volume is further enriched by the inclusion of an interview in which Danielle Peers, Melisa Brittain, and Robert McRuer discuss the significance of crip possibilities in art and academia.

This book was originally published as a special issue of "The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies.""

From reality television to film, performance, and video art, autobiography is everywhere in today's image-obsessed age. With contributions by both artists and scholars, Embodied Politics in Visual Autobiography is a unique examination of visual autobiography's involvement in the global cultural politics of health, disability, and the body. This provocative collection looks at images of selfhood and embodiment in a variety of media and with a particular focus on bodily identities and practices that challenge the norm: a pregnant man in cyberspace, a fat activist performance troupe, indigenous artists intervening in museums, transnational selves who connect disability to war, and many more.

The chapters in Embodied Politics in Visual Autobiography reflect several different theoretical approaches but share a common concern with the ways in which visual culture can generate resistance, critique, and creative interventions. With contributions that investigate digital media, installation art, graphic memoir, performance, film, reality television, photography, and video art, the collection offers a wide-ranging critical account of what is clearly becoming one of the most important issues in contemporary culture.

Witnessing AIDS addresses testimonial literature produced in response to the AIDS pandemic, focusing on texts by four individuals: filmmaker, painter, activist, and writer Derek Jarman; writer Jamaica Kincaid; anthropologist and media theorist Eric Michaels; and journalist Amy Hoffman. Sarah Brophy outlines the critical framework for interpreting the emphasis on unresolved grief in the emerging body of work. Brophy challenges the tendency to treat AIDS testimonial literature as a Genre particular to gay men. By examining Kincaid's and Hoffman's memoirs, in conjunction with the diaries of Michaels and Jarman, Brophy expands the territory of mourning beyond one group of people, an exercise that Brophy feels is important -- as well as fundamental -- to understanding the depth of personal grief and the ways we respond to grief in literature. In a clear and accessible style, Witnessing AIDS illustrates how memoirs and diaries are used as self-theorizing documents that approach personal testimony as an intervention in cultural memory. The aim of Brophy's work is to develop a framework for reading, one that begins to grasp the significance of unresolved grief in AIDS, its effect upon testimonial writing, and to engage rather than deflect. Visceral investment in the mundane intimacies of illness, death, and grief resituates a number of critical debates at new and provocative intersections as the strategy for understanding continues.