Sex, Identity, Aesthetics: The Work of Tobin Siebers and Disability Studies

by Jina B. Kim (Editor), Joshua Kupetz (Editor), Crystal Yin Lie (Editor), Cynthia Wu (Editor)

Overview

The late Tobin Siebers was a pioneer of, and one of the most prominent thinkers in, the field of disability studies.  His scholarship on sexual and intimate affiliations, the connections between structural location and coalitional politics, and the creative arts has shaped disability studies and continues to be widely cited.  Sex, Identity, Aesthetics: The Work of Tobin Siebers and Disability Studies uses Siebers’ work as a launchpad for thinking about contemporary disability studies.  The editors provide an overview of Siebers’ research to show how it has contributed to humanistic understandings of ability and disability along three key axes: sex, identity, and aesthetics.  The first section of the book explores how disability provides a way for scholars to theorize a wider range of intimacies and relationalities, arguing that disabled people seek sexual access and revolution in ways that transgress heteronormative dictates on sexual propriety.  The second part of the book works outward from Siebers’ work to looks at how disability broadens our concepts of social location and political affiliations.  The final section examines how disability challenges traditional notions of artistic beauty and agency.  Rather than being a strictly commemorative collection meant to mark the end of a major scholar’s career, this collection shows how Siebers’ foundational work in disability studies remains central to and continues to inspire scholars in the field today.   

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780472038497
Publisher:	University of Michigan Press
Publication date:	10/12/2021
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Jina B. Kim is Assistant Professor of English and the Study of Women and Gender at Smith College.

Joshua Kupetz is Assistant Director of the English Department Writing Program at the University of Michigan.

Crystal Yin Lie is Assistant Professor of Comparative World Literature at California State University, Long Beach.

Cynthia Wu is Professor of Gender Studies and Asian American Studies at Indiana University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: Reimagining Disability Studies Jina B. Kim Joshua Kupetz Crystal Yin Lie Cynthia Wu 1

Part I Sex

1 Witnessing "Disability Experience on Trial": Toward Critique and Emancipation Allison Weiner Heinemann 23

Part II Identity

2 It Depends: Academic Labor and the Materiality of the Body Cynthia Wu 41

3 Cracks Filled with Images: Mental Disability, Trauma, and Crip Rhetoric in Cereus Blooms at Night Jennifer Marchisotto 58

4 Ghosts of Disability in Naomi Shihab Nye's Transfer Therí A. Pickens 77

5 Crawling Upstairs: Identity and Ideology in Tobin Siebers's Disability Theory Thomas Abrams 96

Part III Aesthetics

6 Words and Images: Networks of Relationality in Deaf, Blind, and DeafBlind Aesthetics Rebecca Sanchez 113

7 Musical Modernism and Its Disability Aesthetics Joseph N. Straus 124

8 Staging the Asylum: Javier Téllez's Disability Aesthetics Leon J. Hilton 141

9 Disability Aesthetics: A Pedagogy for Teaching a Revisionist Art History Amanda Cachia 161

Contributors 173

Index 177

What People are Saying About This

Michael Davidson

“Sex, Identity, Aesthetics is an excellent tribute to Tobin Siebers, one of the most important theorists of disability studies. The volume offers a sustained critical engagement with a major scholar’s legacy with new and challenging applications of his work to specific projects and issues in current cultural theory.”
—Michael Davidson, author of Invalid Modernism: Disability and the Missing Body of the Aesthetic

 

Margaret Price

“A splendid collection with far-ranging reach and an array of topics and methodologies. It offers focused engagement with the ideas of a hugely important scholar, yet is also a map for moving beyond that scholar’s work.  Sex, Identity, Aesthetics represents a re-affirmation of deep values in disability studies—generosity, mentorship, and accountability.”
—Margaret Price, The Ohio State University