Liverpool Studies in Health, Disability, Culture & Society – serie

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and through Knowledge Unlatched.Disabled Bodies in Early Modern Spanish Literature: Prostitutes, Aging Women and Saints examines the concepts and role of women in selected Spanish discourses and literary texts from the late fifteenth to seventeenth centuries from the perspective of feminist disability theories. This study explores a wide range of Spanish medical, regulatory and moral discourses, illustrating how such texts inherit, reproduce and propagate an amalgam of Western traditional concepts of female embodiment. It goes on to examine concrete representations of deviant female characters, focusing on the figures of syphilitic prostitutes and physically decayed aged women in literary texts such as Celestina, Lozana andaluza and selected works by Cervantes and Quevedo. Finally, an analysis of the personal testimony of Teresa de Avila, a nun suffering neurological disorders, complements the discussion of early modern women’s disability. By expanding the meanings of contemporary theories of materiality and the social construction of disability, the book concludes that paradoxically, femininity, bodily afflictions, and mental instability characterized the new literary heroes at the very time Spain was at the apex of its imperial power. Ultimately, as this study shows, the broken female bodies of pre-industrial Spanish literature reveal the cracks in the foundational principles of power and established truths.

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and through Knowledge Unlatched.Articulating Bodies investigates the contemporaneous developments of Victorian fiction and disability’s medicalization by focusing on the intersection between narrative form and body. The book examines texts from across the century, from Frederic Shoberl’s 1833 English translation of Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Crooked Man” (1893), covering genres that typically relied upon disabled or diseased characters. By tracing the patterns of focalization and narrative structure across six decades of the nineteenth century and across six genres, Articulating Bodies demonstrates that throughout the Victorian era, authors of fiction used narrative form as well as narrative theme to negotiate how to categorize bodies, both constructing and questioning the boundary dividing normalcy from abnormality. As fiction’s form developed from the massive hybrid novels of the early decades of the nineteenth century to the case-study length of fin-de-siècle mysteries, disability became increasingly medicalized, moving from the position of spectacle to specimen.

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and through Knowledge Unlatched.Examining the intersection of disability and genre in popular works of horror, crime, science fiction, fantasy, and romance published since the late 1960s, Disability, Literature, Genre is a major contribution to both cultural disability studies and genre fiction studies. Drawing on recent work on affect and emotion, the book explores how disability makes us feel, and how those feelings shape interpersonal and fictional encounters. Written in a clear and accessible style, Disability, Literature, Genre offers a timely reflection on the rapidly growing body of scholarship on disability representation, as well as an innovative new theorisation of genre. By reconceptualising genre reading as an affective process, Ria Cheyne establishes genre fiction as a key site of investigation for disability studies. She argues that genre fiction’s unique combination of affectivity and reflexivity makes it ideally suited to the production of reflexive representations of disability: representations which encourage the reader to reflect upon what they understand about disability, and potentially to rethink it. Examining the affective—and effective—power of disability representations in a wide range of popular genre fiction, this book will be essential reading for academics in disability studies, literary studies, popular culture studies, and the medical humanities.

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and through Knowledge Unlatched.Disability and the Posthuman is the first study to analyse cultural representations and deployments of disability as they interact with posthumanist theories of technology and embodiment. Working across a wide range of texts, many new to critical enquiry, in contemporary writing, film and cultural practice from North America, Europe, the Middle East and Japan, it covers a diverse range of topics, including: contemporary cultural theory and aesthetics; design, engineering and gender; the visualisation of prosthetic technologies in the representation of war and conflict; and depictions of work, time and sleep. While noting the potential limitations of posthumanist assessments of the technologized body, the study argues that there are exciting, productive possibilities and subversive potentials in the dialogue between disability and posthumanism as they generate dissident crossings of cultural spaces. Such intersections cover both fictional/imagined and material/grounded examples of disability and look to a future in which the development of technology and complex embodiment of disability presence align to produce sustainable yet radical creative and critical voices.

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and through Knowledge Unlatched.Disability and the Posthuman is the first study to analyse cultural representations and deployments of disability as they interact with posthumanist theories of technology and embodiment. Working across a wide range of texts, many new to critical enquiry, in contemporary writing, film and cultural practice from North America, Europe, the Middle East and Japan, it covers a diverse range of topics, including: contemporary cultural theory and aesthetics; design, engineering and gender; the visualisation of prosthetic technologies in the representation of war and conflict; and depictions of work, time and sleep. While noting the potential limitations of posthumanist assessments of the technologized body, the study argues that there are exciting, productive possibilities and subversive potentials in the dialogue between disability and posthumanism as they generate dissident crossings of cultural spaces. Such intersections cover both fictional/imagined and material/grounded examples of disability and look to a future in which the development of technology and complex embodiment of disability presence align to produce sustainable yet radical creative and critical voices.

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and through Knowledge Unlatched.Articulating Bodies investigates the contemporaneous developments of Victorian fiction and disability’s medicalization by focusing on the intersection between narrative form and body. The book examines texts from across the century, from Frederic Shoberl’s 1833 English translation of Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Crooked Man” (1893), covering genres that typically relied upon disabled or diseased characters. By tracing the patterns of focalization and narrative structure across six decades of the nineteenth century and across six genres, Articulating Bodies demonstrates that throughout the Victorian era, authors of fiction used narrative form as well as narrative theme to negotiate how to categorize bodies, both constructing and questioning the boundary dividing normalcy from abnormality. As fiction’s form developed from the massive hybrid novels of the early decades of the nineteenth century to the case-study length of fin-de-siècle mysteries, disability became increasingly medicalized, moving from the position of spectacle to specimen.

How shall we know insanity from sanity?Making Madness Visible offers a cultural history of the many ways insanity has been visualised, and how such representations have shaped our understanding of mental disorder itself.From medieval depictions of the fool, to the early modern “stone of folly” and convulsive dances, to the walls of the asylum and modern brain scans, visual tropes have long governed how societies distinguish sanity from insanity. Yet these images do more than illustrate. They define, marginalise, and other. By making madness visible, they mark the insane as aberrant and apart – while at the same time also exposing the instability of those very boundaries.Tracing this restless history of visualisation, Dr Alvise Sforza Tarabochia shows how madness has continually troubled borders between reason and unreason, norm and deviance, humanity and inhumanity.Bringing together visual culture, medical history, and cultural analysis, Making Madness Visible demonstrates that the visualisation of mental disorders has never been neutral. Images have not simply reflected ideas of madness – they have actively shaped its treatment

Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open intiative.Assembling Crip Archives offers the first sustained study of how autobiographical graphic narratives of disability and illness function as archives of embodied knowledge. Bringing together disability studies, crip theory, and comics theory, Coral Anaid Díaz Cano examines how cartoonists use the formal affordances of comics to document, contest, and reimagine lived experiences of illness, impairment, and care.Through close readings of Tangles, Stitches, Marbles, and Dancing After TEN, the book shows how graphic memoirs assemble alternative records that challenge the authority of medical and scientific narratives. These works do not simply depict illness or disability; they produce generative acts of recordkeeping, preserving affective traces, relational encounters, and bodily knowledge that resist biomedical objectivity. Díaz Cano argues that comics’ interplay of word, image, repetition, and absence enables the creation of ‘crip archives’ that foreground vulnerability, dependency, collaboration, and non-normative temporalities.Attentive to questions of race, gender, care, and authorship, Assembling Crip Archives situates graphic life writing within broader debates about visibility, access, and epistemic authority. The book makes a major contribution to comics studies and disability humanities, demonstrating how drawn self-representation becomes a powerful method for thinking about embodiment, memory, and the politics of knowledge.

Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open initiative.Theater and performance have played vital political and pedagogical roles in the history of HIV/AIDS advocacy and activism in the Global North. From the shoestring dissident work of the 1980s and 1990s to contemporary educational plays challenging extant stigma surrounding HIV, the stage has long provided a space for identificatory community and activism. However, the nature and purpose of HIV/AIDS theatre has changed significantly over the past four decades or so. While the introduction of anti-retroviral therapies in the 1990s altered the trajectory of the pandemic and positively impacted many lives, the simultaneous consolidation of neoliberal hegemony generated a range of new and heightened challenges for theater makers, activists, and advocates hoping to improve the lives of people with HIV. Drawing on cultural materialist and Western Marxist traditions – most notably Gramscian political theory – this book examines the extent to which the stage has been able to offer a space for counterhegemony in the context of the pandemic. In establishing a genealogy of HIV/AIDS theater that incorporates both close dramaturgical analysis and wider materialist considerations, it elucidates how neoliberalism has established an ever-stronger grip on the genre and its messaging. In so doing, it poses wider questions about theater’s role as a political strategy in the contemporary context of neoliberal hegemonic crisis.

Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open intiative.Mad Fictions is the first book to place African literature in conversation with mad studies and disability studies, offering a groundbreaking reassessment of how madness is represented in African fiction. Challenging dominant readings that reduce madness to a metaphor for collective suffering, Femi Eromosele insists that it is both a site of personal distress and a locus for social justice discourse.The book argues that the simultaneous ubiquity and invisibility of madness in African literary scholarship stems from the dominance of nationalist frameworks in the production of political legibility. It explores the way African writers situate madness at the intersection of the individual and collective body, alternatively upholding and dissolving the boundaries between selfhood and national belonging. Throughout, it explores topics including:Psychiatric power and violence.The imbrication of madness and the nation.The political conditions for the emergence of a Mad discourse.The possibility of narrating a life in the grip of mental distress.The importance of Indigenous and psychiatric epistemologies.Eromosele pushes for an attentiveness to the links between reading practices and sites of exclusion embedded in both culture and politics, a relationship he describes as ‘narrative comorbidity’.Mad Fictions reorients critical discussions toward the lived realities of mental distress, while challenging the nationalist paradigms that have long dominated African literary scholarship.Cover art: "..deny that!" Acrylic on canvas, 2023. Nontokozo Tshabalala, myportfolio.com.

Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open initiative.Decolonizing Disease explores how pandemics both expose and entrench global inequalities. Tracing the environmental, racialized, and (neo)colonial dimensions of public health crises, Claire Chambers examines how pandemics from the 1918 flu to Ebola, HIV/AIDS, and Covid-19 have exacerbated social divisions rather than exerting a levelling effect.The book interrogates the intersections of disease, the climate crisis, and political fault lines of race, class, and gender. Chambers creates a new framework for understanding ‘pathogenic novels’, fiction that resists colonial legacies while grappling with pandemic-era anxieties. The term carries dual connotations relating to the emergence of diseases and to innovative narrative forms responding to them.Chambers brings together a compelling range of authors, from Phaswane Mpe to Hari Kunzru, to illuminate how literature has responded to past and present pandemics from twenty-first century perspectives. The writing confronts xenophobia, misinformation, and ecological collapse while envisioning alternative futures.Decolonizing Disease argues that literature serves as both a critique and a remedy – offering insight, resistance, and the possibility of re-worlding in times of crisis. In an age of epidemiological neoliberalism and post-West global shifts, this urgent study stakes a claim for the role of fiction in challenging systemic injustices and imagining healthier and more equitable futures.

From concerns of an ‘autism epidemic’ to the MMR vaccine crisis, autism is a source of peculiar fascination in the contemporary media. Discussion of the condition has been largely framed within medicine, psychiatry and education but there has been no exploration of its power within representative narrative forms. Representing Autism is the first book to tackle this approach, using contemporary fiction and memoir writing, film, photography, drama and documentary together with older texts to set the contemporary fascination with autism in context. Representing Autism analyses and evaluates the place of autism within contemporary culture and at the same time examines the ideas of individual and community produced by people with autism themselves to establish the ideas of autistic presence that emerge from within a space of cognitive exceptionality. Central to the book is a sense of the legitimacy of autistic presence as a way by which we might more fully articulate what it means to be human.

From concerns of an ‘autism epidemic’ to the MMR vaccine crisis, autism is a source of peculiar fascination in the contemporary media. Discussion of the condition has been largely framed within medicine, psychiatry and education but there has been no exploration of its power within representative narrative forms. Representing Autism is the first book to tackle this approach, using contemporary fiction and memoir writing, film, photography, drama and documentary together with older texts to set the contemporary fascination with autism in context. Representing Autism analyses and evaluates the place of autism within contemporary culture and at the same time examines the ideas of individual and community produced by people with autism themselves to establish the ideas of autistic presence that emerge from within a space of cognitive exceptionality. Central to the book is a sense of the legitimacy of autistic presence as a way by which we might more fully articulate what it means to be human.

The term ‘idiot’ is a damning put down, whether deployed on the playground or in the board room. People stigmatized as being ‘intellectually disabled’ today must confront variants of the fear and pity with which society has greeted them for centuries. In this ground-breaking new study Patrick McDonagh explores how artistic, scientific and sociological interpretations of idiocy work symbolically and ideologically in society. Drawing upon a broad spectrum of British, French and American resources including literary works (Wordsworth’s ‘The Idiot Boy’, Dickens Barnaby Rudge, Conrad’s The Secret Agent), pedagogical works (Itard’s The Wild Boy of Aveyron, Sequin’s Traitement moral, hygiene et education des idiots, and Howe’s On the courses of Idiocy), medical and scientific papers (Philippe Pinel, Henry Maudsley, William Ireland, John Langdon Downs, Isaac Kerlin, Henry Goddard) and sociological writings (Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, Beames’ The Rookeries of London, Dugdal’s The Jukes), Idiocy: A Cultural History offers a rich study of the history and representation of mental disability.

At least 50 million people worldwide have epilepsy. Representing Epilepsy, the latest volume in LUP’s acclaimed Representations series, seeks to understand the epileptic body as a literary or figurative device intelligible beyond a medical framework. Jeannette Stirling argues that neurological discourse from the late-nineteenth century through to the mid-twentieth century is as much forged by the cultural conditions and representational politics of the times as it is by the science of western medicine. Along the way she explores narratives of epilepsy depicting ideas of social disorder, tainted bloodlines, sexual deviance, spiritualism and criminality in works as diverse as David Copperfield and The X Files.This path-breaking book will be required reading for cultural disability studies scholars and for anyone seeking greater understanding of this common condition.‘Representing Epilepsy offers a clever exploration of the cultural history of this condition, based on an effective interdisciplinary approach. It will be of particular interest to scholars and students in the field of Medical Humanities, as well as to all those involved in the care of people with epilepsy, who wish to improve their understanding of the socio-cultural repercussions of the condition.’ Maria Vaccarella, King’s College London

From the late eighteenth century to the present day, public exhibitions featuring displays of human anatomy have proven popular with a wide range of audiences, successfully marketed as educational facilities for medical professionals as well as improving entertainments for the general public. Partly a product of the public sanitation and health reform movements that began in the eighteenth century, partly a form of popular spectacle, early public anatomical exhibitions drew on two apparently distinct cultural developments: firstly, the professionalisation of medicine from the mid 1700s and the increasingly central role of practical anatomy within it; secondly, the rise of a culture of public spectacles such as world fairs, public museums, circuses and side shows, and the use of new visual technologies these spaces pioneered. Such spectacles often drew on medical discourses as a way of lending legitimacy to their displays of human bodies, while their popularity also helped make the then-contentious practice of anatomy publicly acceptable.This book examines the cultural work performed by such exhibitions and their role in (re)producing new ways of seeing and knowing the body over the modern era. While public anatomical exhibitions might seem to occupy a marginal position in the history of popular culture and that of medicine, their distinctive intermixing of the medical and the spectacular has made them an influential and intensely productive cultural space, an important site of emergence for new ideas about bodily health and care. This book traces the influential role of such exhibitions in popularising a distinctly modern idea of the body as something requiring constant work and careful self-cultivation—an idea which continues to play a central role in the contemporary fascination with practices and possibilities of self-improvement. Through a series of representative case studies—including eighteenth-century exhibitions of anatomical Venuses, nineteenth-century anatomical museums “for men only” that served as quack clinics for sexual disorders, traditional and contemporary freak shows, and the recent public display of real human remains in Body Worlds and other such exhibitions—Anatomy as Spectacle traces how these exhibitions taught their spectators to see their bodies as something requiring constant self-monitoring and management, constructing an embodied modern subject who is always responsible, productive, temperate, and focused on self-improvement.

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library.Disability Studies and Spanish Culture is the first book to apply the tenets of Disability Studies to the Spanish context. In particular, this work is an important corrective to existing cultural studies of disability in Spain that tend to largely ignore intellectual disabilities. Taking on the representation of Down syndrome, autism, alexia/agnosia as well as childhood disability, its chapters combine close readings of a number of Spanish cultural products (films, novels, the comic/graphic novel and the public exhibition) with a broader socio-cultural take on the state of disability in Spain. Fraser is just as comfortable with the work of disability theorists who advocate a social model of disability (such as Lennard J. Davis, Licia Carlson, Eva Feder Kittay, David T. Mitchell, Sharon L. Snyder and more) as he is with the analysis of film and literature in the Spanish context. While researchers and students of cinema will be particularly interested in the book’s detailed analyses of the formal aspects of the films, comics, and novels discussed, readers from backgrounds in history, political science and sociology will all be able to appreciate discussions of contemporary legislation, advocacy groups, cultural perceptions, models of social integration and more. The book is directed, also, toward those readers more familiar with the growing field of Disability Studies itself—making the argument that the specific case of Spanish culture and society speaks to shifts in the social attitudes and theoretical understandings of disability more broadly considered.