Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson - Böcker

Presenting thirteen essays, editors James C. Wilson and Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson unite the fields of disability studies and rhetoric to examine connections between disability, education, language, and cultural practices. The contributors span a range of academic fields including English, education, history, and sociology. Several contributors are themselves disabled or have disabled family members. While some essays included in this volume analyze the ways that representations of disability construct identity and attitudes toward the disabled, other essays use disability as a critical modality to rethink economic theory, educational practices, and everyday interactions. Among the disabilities discussed are various physical disabilities, mental illness, learning disabilities, deafness, blindness, and diseases such as multiple sclerosis and AIDS.

Editors Lewiecki-Wilson and Cellio have put together the first book to focus on the intersecting spaces, both cultural and personal, of disability and mothering. Derived from the Latin for threshold, the word "liminal" calls attention to the book’s focus on the transitional moments and spaces where the personal and social, inside and outside, self and other converge. The volume features twenty-one previously unpublished essays by new as well as established scholars and community activists. Contributors, some of whom are themselves disabled or mothers of children with disabilities, present moving personal accounts and accessible scholarship grounded in historical study, experiential and retrospective analysis, interviews, social research, and feminist and disability studies theories.In their introduction, the editors survey the theoretical frameworks of feminism and disability studies, locating the points of overlap crucial to a study of disability and mothering. Organized in five sections, the book engages questions about reproductive technologies; diagnoses and cultural scripts; the ability to rewrite narratives of mothering and disability; political activism; and the tensions formed by the overlapping identities of race, class, nation, and disability. The essays speak to a broad audience—from undergraduate and graduate students in women’s studies and disability studies, to therapeutic and health care professionals, to anyone grappling with issues such as genetic testing and counseling, raising a child with a disability, or being disabled and contemplating starting a family.