Disability Culture and Politics – serie

Disabling Barriers analyzes issues relating to disability at different moments in Canadian and American history. In this volume, legal scholars, historians, and disability-rights activists demonstrate that disabled people can change their social status by transforming the political and legal discourse surrounding disablement.

Employing tools from the fields of law and history, this original contribution explores how disabled people have been portrayed and treated in a variety of contexts, including within the labour market, the workers' compensation system, the immigration process, and the legal system (both as litigants and as lawyers). It deepens our knowledge of the role of people with disabilities within social movements in disability history. The contributors encourage us to rethink our understanding of both the systemic barriers disabled people face and the capacity of disabled people to effect positive societal change.

Intersex and/as/is/with disability. The connections between intersex and disability deserve nuanced attention if we are to strengthen intersex human rights claims and understand the experiences of intersex people living with the disabling consequences of medical intervention.

Cripping Intersex examines three key themes: the medical management of people with intersex characteristics; the mainstream fascination with sport sex-testing policies and procedures; and the eugenic implications of preimplantation genetic diagnosis. Celeste E. Orr investigates how intersex and interphobia intersect with disability and ableism to propose a new approach to intersex studies and activism. The integration of feminist disability studies with intersex studies provides tools to break down the traditional sex dyad and the entrenched cultural mandate against intersex traits.

This necessary work offers a radical new understanding of intersex-with-disability, pushing analyses of intersex histories, experience, and embodiment further than feminist or queer theory can do alone.

Into the twenty-first century, millions of disabled people and people experiencing mental distress were segregated from the rest of society and confined to residential institutions. Deinstitutionalization – the closure of these sites and integration of former residents into the community – has become increasingly commonplace. But this project is unfinished. Sites of Conscience explores use of the concept of sites of conscience, which involves place-based memory activities such as walking tours, survivor-authored social histories, and performances and artistic works in or generated from sites of systemic suffering and injustice. These activities offer new ways to move forward from the unfinished deinstitutionalization project and its failures. Covering diverse national contexts, this volume proposes that acknowledging the memories and lived experiences of former residents – and keeping histories and social heritage of institutions alive rather than simply closing sites – holds the greatest potential for recognition, accountability, and action.

Into the twenty-first century, millions of disabled people and people experiencing mental distress were segregated from the rest of society and confined to residential institutions. Deinstitutionalization – the closure of these sites and integration of former residents into the community – has become increasingly commonplace. But this project is unfinished. Sites of Conscience explores use of the concept of sites of conscience, which involves place-based memory activities such as walking tours, survivor-authored social histories, and performances and artistic works in or generated from sites of systemic suffering and injustice. These activities offer new ways to move forward from the unfinished deinstitutionalization project and its failures. Covering diverse national contexts, this volume proposes that acknowledging the memories and lived experiences of former residents – and keeping histories and social heritage of institutions alive rather than simply closing sites – holds the greatest potential for recognition, accountability, and action.

As global rates of autism diagnosis rise, dominant cultural representations continue to define autism as a tragic neurological disorder. And mothers – as primary caregivers and advocates – are centrally implicated in the impulse to find both cause and cure. How should we care about autism and autistic people?

Unmothering Autism emerged from Patty Douglas's desire to understand a contradiction: she and her two sons (one autistic) experienced beauty living together, while their public encounters with doctors, school professionals, and agencies were fraught and sometimes violent. In this book, Douglas offers a critical history of popular and biomedical assumptions about autism, expressed through shifting social constructs that blame or valorize maternal care. Throughout, she also intersperses her own insights and shares conversations she has had with other "autism mothers."

Unmothering Autism theorizes an "ethics of disruption," reorienting us to autism and autistic people as valuable and fundamentally human. It centres the previously marginalized perspectives of mothers and autistic individuals to affirm their knowledge of living well together in, and through, difference.