Band 67, Heft 1 - Special Issue: Disability Writing / Guest Editor: Anita Wohlmann

This introduction to the special issue attempts to map the intersections between disability studies on the one hand and literature and cultural studies on the other hand. We discuss concepts of disability as a social construction before we turn to literary and cultural approaches to disability, which involve controversies and questions about genre, narrative frames, recurring themes, and form. The last section gives an overview of how literary representations of disability resonate with life writing and identity theories.

Through an analysis of various negotiations of disability in House, M.D . and Grey’s Anatomy , my paper discusses the narrative and non-narrative means that make the medical drama such an appealing genre to contemporary audience members. As the most successful medical dramas of the post-millennial era, House, M.D. and Grey’s Anatomy rely heavily on the exhibition of non-normative bodies, the humorous device of re-naming patients, and the narrative construction of disability as unbearable deviance. While Laura Backstrom locates the freak show in non-fictional television formats like the talk show and documentary, my paper illustrates how the medical drama, although at times highly self-reflexive, has become another pervasive relocation of the freak show into contemporary television. In a close reading of Grey’s Anatomy , I further demonstrate how the portrayal of a disabled doctor as a series regular both manifests and challenges some of the normative perceptions of the body that the genre relies on.

This paper focuses on the US-American queer disability artist E.T. Russian and the question of how the experience of disability can be translated into artistic experience and practice. Russian’s The Ring of Fire Anthology (2014) draws attention to the insufficiency of words and language and deploys a form of literary collage that presents an empowering testimony to her life as an amputee. While the author’s account of the pitfalls entailed in prosthetics as well as gender and class struggles is captivating in itself, the force of her work resides elsewhere: the reader cannot escape the ecstasy of fragmentation and intertextuality provoked by the arrangement, or derangement, of image and text. It is Russian’s palimpsest of essays, comics, interviews, dictionary entries, erotica, lonely hearts ads, poems, and technical drawings that offers an entryway into the multiplicity and fluidity of disability experience.

This paper argues that Temple Grandin’s work serves as an intervention into the very framework of ‘disability.’ Animals in Translation suggests that the minds of people living with autism are ‘wired differently’; yet, this difference, Grandin makes clear, is by no means always a disadvantage. As a scientist in animal studies and a consultant for animal behavior, Grandin claims that persons on the autism spectrum may be ideally suited for understanding the animal mind. Describing both autism and animal behavior through the discourse of neuroscience, she takes the analogy between persons with autism and animals one step further. Both animals, especially birds, and people on the autism spectrum have long succeeded in disproving assumptions about the limitations of their mental capacity. Not so long ago, Grandin reminds us, neurologists assumed that there was ‘no inside’ to the autistic mind. It has been Grandin’s life’s work, and one of her key accomplishments, to disprove this assumption.

This article focuses on the nineteenth century as a pivotal time for the development of a Deaf identity in the United States and examines the way John Jacob Flournoy’s idea of a “Deaf-Mute Commonwealth” touches upon core themes of American culture studies and history. In employing pivotal democratic ideas such as egalitarianism, liberty, and self-representation as well as elements of manifest destiny such as exceptionalism and the frontier ideology in order to raise support for a Deaf State, the creation and perpetuation of a Deaf identity bears strong similarities to the processes of American nation-building. This article will show how the endeavor to found a Deaf state was indicative of the separationist and secessionist movements in the United States at that time, and remains relevant to Deaf group identity today.