Points of Contact
Disability, Art, and Culture
A richly diverse collection of essays, memoir, poetry and photography on aspects of disability and its representation in art
Description
Points of Contact brings together contributions by leading writers, artists, scholars, and critics to provide a remarkably broad and consistently engaging look at the intersection of disability and the arts. The contributions include essays and memoirs by a wide range of disabled and nondisabled writers, including Bell Gale Chevigny, Sandra Gilbert, Joseph Grigely, Georgina Kleege, Victoria Ann Lewis, Carol Poore, Tobin Siebers, and Rosemarie Garland Thomson among others; poetry by Brooke Horvath, Joan Seliger Sidney, William Stafford, and others; fiction by Stephen Dixon, Michael Downs, Georgina Kleege, Dallas Wiebe, and others.
The collection covers a broad range of subjects and concerns that lie at the intersection of disability and the arts, including fetal alcohol syndrome, education, and identity; representations of disability in the visual arts and the complicated position of the disabled spectator; the impact of cancer on the patient and the caregiver; the similarities between beauty pageants and freak shows; Alzheimer's disease; prosthetic devices; the mechanized disabled body; disability and performance; and profiles of Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan, Christopher Reeve, Franklin Roosevelt, and sado-masochistic performance artist Bob Flanagan.
Points of Contact: Disability, Art, and Culture was originally published as a special double issue of the well regarded literary magazine, the Michigan Quarterly Review. Now available in a single, convenient paperback volume, its broad range of perspectives on disability and its entertaining and engaging selections will appeal to general readers, scholars, and students alike.
Susan Crutchfield is lecturer in English, University of Michigan. Marcy Epstein teaches literature at The Roeper School and women's studies at Henry Ford Community College.
Reviews
" Points of Contact does what a good anthology should do--explores, informs, and invites to expand."
- Adele Gorelick
--Adele Gorelick , Disabilities Studies Quarterly, Summer 2001
"This readable collection of essays, poems, and stories covers such diverse subjects as fetal alcohol syndrome, beauty pageants and freak shoes, the arts, and famous people with disabilities."
- Sally Rosenthall
--Sally Rosenthall, Disability Resources Monthly, Volume IX, No. 5
"This is an unconventional sort of scholarly text, in that the majority of the pieces are, in essence, outsider art rather than academic material. The pieces themselves also push all sorts of boundaries of identity and expression."
- Martha Rose
--Martha Rose, ISIS, Vol. 93: 3 (2002)
"This is an important book in a series from the University of Michigan Press that is theorizing and historicizing disability in many areas of the critical landscape. Points of Contact is valuable for scholars less familiar with disability studies who wish to acquaint themselves with the art and theory of an emerging field in the humanities, as well as for more established disability studies practitioners. It is a rich source of reading from within disability culture that can be enjoyed for its own sake, and individual pieces can also be easily adapted for introducing a disability perspective into already established courses on literature, drama, performance studies, history, art, and anthropology."
- Ann M. Fox, Davidson College
--Modern Drama