Jan Grue – författare

Disability studies has engaged with discourse analysis in key works both from the UK and the USA. While the perspectives and analyses of discourse analysis have proved well suited for exploring disability, however, its methods have not been sufficiently developed in a disability studies context. Conversely, discourse analysts have traditionally been concerned with social issues and fields in which asymmetric power relations, marginalization, and discrimination play a central role, e.g. gender, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation, all of which share many analytical features with disability. But although efforts have been made to integrate disability into the discourse analysis and conversation analysis canon, the link between the two fields needs to be strengthened. This ground-breaking volume contributes to this link by thoroughly applying the analytical vocabulary of discourse analysis to issues that are central to the field of disability studies. It strengthens disability studies by supplying case studies of representations and constructions of disability and disabled people in discourse, theorizes the role played by language in the social construction of disability, and makes disability a more salient topic for discourse analysts.

Disability studies has engaged with discourse analysis in key works both from the UK and the USA. While the perspectives and analyses of discourse analysis have proved well suited for exploring disability, however, its methods have not been sufficiently developed in a disability studies context. Conversely, discourse analysts have traditionally been concerned with social issues and fields in which asymmetric power relations, marginalization, and discrimination play a central role, e.g. gender, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation, all of which share many analytical features with disability. But although efforts have been made to integrate disability into the discourse analysis and conversation analysis canon, the link between the two fields needs to be strengthened. This ground-breaking volume contributes to this link by thoroughly applying the analytical vocabulary of discourse analysis to issues that are central to the field of disability studies. It strengthens disability studies by supplying case studies of representations and constructions of disability and disabled people in discourse, theorizes the role played by language in the social construction of disability, and makes disability a more salient topic for discourse analysts.

Jan Grue had just become a father when he inherited a stack of his childhood medical records. Following a diagnosis of spinal muscular atrophy at the age of three, the raft of doctors' notes, clinical descriptions and case histories defined his body as defective and his future as bleak and limited. They conjured a childhood nothing like the one he remembered, that failed to anticipate the life he lived now. I Live a Life Like Yours is Grue's beautiful, groundbreaking search for a literary language that could better tell his story.Writing with clear-eyed wisdom and bracing frankness, Grue folds insights from art, film and literature into an expansive account of who he was expected to be, and who he became. If it is a story of frustration with negligent institutions and the pain of stigma, it is also a story of the potential of acceptance and the gift of family. Unflinching, yet always compassionate, I Live a Life Like Yours is a fierce and tender reckoning with what it means to live as a vulnerable body.

»Jag har en medfödd muskelsjukdom. Jag är rullstolsbrukare. Jag har hög utbildning. Jag har ett jobb. Jag är på ytan framgångsrik. Vad krävdes för att jag skulle komma hit?«

När Jan Grue blir pappa får han ta över en bunt papper från sina föräldrar en hyllmeter med journaler, läkaranteckningar och inlagor. Brev från myndigheter, som med jämna mellanrum undrar: Hur är pojkens tillstånd nu? Vi behöver bedöma hans hjälpbehov på nytt. Utifrån dessa papper, och sina erfarenheter av att leva med en sårbar kropp i ett modernt välfärdssamhälle, skriver Jan Grue om drömmar, arbete, framgång och tillgänglighet. Med stor kraft och precision skildrar han den uppoffring som krävs för att få leva ungefär som alla andra.

Jag lever ett liv som liknar ditt har fått ett lysande mottagande i Norge, där den tilldelades Kritikerpriset och dessutom nominerades till Nordiska rådets litteraturpris 2019.

»Ett litterärt mästerverk som rekommenderas å det starkaste.« Dagbladet »En milstolpe inom norsk sakprosa.« Morgonbladet