Anna Hickey-Moody

Vicki Crowley

From the critique of ‘the medical model’ of disability undertaken during the early and mid-1990s, a ‘social model’ emerged, particularly in the caring professions and those trying to shape policy and practice for people with disability. In education and schooling, it was a period of cementing inclusive practices and the ‘integration’ and inclusion of disability into ‘mainstream’. What was lacking in the debates around the social model, however, were the challenges to abledness that were being grappled with in the routine and pragmatics of self-care by people with disabilities, their families, carers and caseworkers. Outside the academy, new forms of activity and new questions were circulating. Challenges to abledness flourished in the arts and constituted the lived experience of many disability activists. Disability Matters engages with the cultural politics of the body, exploring this fascinating and dynamic topic through the arts, teaching, research and varied encounters with ‘disability’ ranging from the very personal to the professional. Chapters in this collection are drawn from scholars responding in various registers and contexts to questions of disability, pedagogy, affect, sensation and education. Questions of embodiment, affect and disability are woven throughout these contributions, and the diverse ways in which these concepts appear emphasize both the utility of these ideas and the timeliness of their application. This book was originally published as a special issue of Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education.

Pedagogy, media and affect

Disability Matters

Barbara Pini

Cassandra Loeser

In recent years, attending to diversity in the cultivation of embodied identity has been given additional impetus as a result of intersectionality theory. Despite this, a key gap remains in terms of knowledge about masculinity and disability. This book addresses this lacuna through ten empirical chapters organised through the inter-related themes of corporeality, pedagogy and the critique of otherness. Each of the chapters positions the subject of masculinity and disability as a site of cultural pedagogy by affirming different ways of knowing of masculinity beyond dominant ideologies that normalise a particular masculine body and relegate disabled masculinities to the position of abnormal ‘Other’. Part One focuses on pedagogy. Through the materialities of ‘medicalized colonialism’, imprimaturs of ‘relational genealogies’, ‘compounding differences’ and an analytical exposition of some of the neo-colonial conditions of the Global South within spatially-considered places of the Global North, Chapter 1 examines the denial of human rights to the Indigenous Anishinaabe community of Shoal Lake 40 in Canada. Chapter 1 theorises masculine corporeality in terms that take seriously First Nations', national and transnational body politics seriously. Chapter 2 examines the ways that movement and affect serve as a form of pedagogy for boys with autism spectrum in schools. Part Two’s focus on corporeality includes an examination of the nexus of disability and diagnosis in the context of transgender men’s experiences of mental health, and a discussion of the ways that intersex individuals who identify as men and have experienced ‘genital normalising surgery’ actively negotiate pluralised masculinities. The focus on media in Part Three encompasses a study of the mis-interpellation of the disabled male subject in Australian male literature, research on the discursive strategies utilised in media representations of disabled veterans in Turkey, and an analysis of the political implications of depictions of masculinity, disability and sexualities in a variety television program. Part Four’s theme of self-stylisation takes up the questions of men’s reconstructions of masculinity in light of Lyme Disease, the potential pleasures of heterosexuality for young men with a hearing disability in the realm of Australian-Rules Football, and the diverse ways that disabled men negotiate patriarchal masculinity in intimate relationships.

Vicki Crowley

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