Section
Disability
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The Hypochondriac’s Complaint
“Today, health anxiety is characterized largely by the patient’s relationship with healthcare. The hypochondriac is at once suspicious of medical authority and eager for it to advance.”
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Speak, Mario?
If video games work generally as showcases of players’ ability, then why has the ability to speak fluently been relatively unnecessary for the medium’s icons?
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What If the Body Politic Kept the Score?
Bringing story and social action back into the healing process is the unfinished work of addressing existential suffering.
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Stomaching Wellness
“The wellness industry’s promotion and legitimization of ableist self-perceptions makes it an especially dangerous force in the lives of the chronically ill.”
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Heal Thyself?
How do current social and political arrangements limit our opportunities for feeling better?
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Public Thinker: Jaipreet Virdi on Disability History & Deaf Futures
“Disabled people have long made their own hacks.”
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What Future for Health Activism?
A more critical consciousness of the connections between family, health, race, and gender was brewing among food allergy advocates in the exceptionally catastrophic summer of 2020.
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Spatial Abolition and Disability Justice
Revealing the multiple histories of disability justice can expand how we think of and design the places we build.
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“I Can’t Make You See What I See”: Talking with Cyree Jarelle Johnson and Jesse Rice-Evans
“Writing about lupus is like writing about ghosts. What do you say about something featureless?” [none-for-homepage]
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We Must Heal Each Other
At some point, it became a mark of privilege to talk about “self-care.” Once unknown outside the niches of trauma therapists and burned-out activists, the concept has become so mainstream that it’s now regularly used as shorthand for celebrity beauty routines. Meanwhile, corporate elites promote self-care among employees in hopes of cutting their losses in…
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Autism Aesthetics
About 10 years ago, I began to get impatient with disability studies. The field was still relatively young, but it seemed devoted almost entirely to analyzing how disability was represented—in art, in culture, in politics, et cetera—especially in the case of physical disability. This, I thought, fell short of the field’s promise for literary studies.…
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A History of Reading: Alan Marshall and Helen Keller
On May 9, 1933, the day before the Nazis burned her book as part of their action …
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Design with Disability
The “Accessible Icon” by Brian Glenney and Sara Hendren began as design activism: the artists defaced existing disability access symbols with red and orange vinyl stickers. Today, their so-called “active wheelchair” logo has been adopted as the new standard by institutions and cities around the world. This clean, “accurate” image greeted visitors to the Access…
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Staging Disability: An Interview with Martyna Majok
Martyna Majok just won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her original play Cost of …
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Disability and the Romance Novel
In the world of romance, love can and does heal all wounds. The scars of loss or romantic betrayal, the traumatic aftereffects of abuse or neglect …
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Am I Not a Dragon and a Brother
Here’s what everyone will tell you about the award-winning Temeraire series that Naomi Novik has just completed: it’s the Napoleonic Wars (1803–15)—with dragons. The series has expressive, pitch-perfect writing, glorious steampunk details, and jaw-dropping adventures. Fans of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey–Maturin novels will relish Novik’s accounts of slashing battles and brilliant military maneuvers taking place both…
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Disability Narratives
Ask most people living with a disability to name their least favorite question and “what happened to you?” will be high on the list. “Wanting to educate yourself about disability and learn more is great, but there’s a time and a place,” writes Erin Tatum in Everyday Feminism magazine. “You should have enough sensibility and…
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Through the Looking Glass
Although the numbers are at epidemic levels (in the United States, it is estimated to affect 1 in 68 children and 1 in 42 boys),1 autism remains a singular experience—as unique as each individual. Reaching a formal diagnosis is often a complex task. According to the Autism Society, it typically involves a team of doctors and…
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A World Where We Are All Autistic
On a memorable spring evening in 2002, the philosopher Peter Singer welcomed disability rights advocate Harriet McBryde Johnson to speak at Princeton University. The event was controversial, given that Singer had publicly claimed that parents should be allowed to euthanize children with severe disabilities, and that Johnson was herself severely disabled. Born with muscular dystrophy…
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The Whole World Blind
To experience the full effect of the installation please use a blindfold, or at the very least close your eyes and do not open them until you are done listening. Listen in a gallery-like space or library (where you will be safe while blindfolded) through an mp3 player or on a computer. And use the…
