Dangerous Discourses of Disability, Subjectivity and Sexuality

This innovative and adventurous work uses broadly feminist and postmodernist modes of analysis to explore what motivates damaging attitudes and practices towards disability. Margrit Shildrick argues for the significance of the psycho-social imaginary, and suggests a way forward in disability's queering of normative paradigms.

MARGRIT SHILDRICK is a reader in Gender Studies at Queen's University, Belfast, UK and Adjunct Professor of theCritical Disability Studies program, York University, Toronto, Canada. She is the author of Leaky Bodies and Boundaries and Embodying the Monster, and co-editor of several books including Ethics of the Body.

"Dangerous Discourses of Disability, Subjectivity and Sexuality breaks new critical ground by bringing together three fundamental registers of difference to critically engage the fact of human bodily variation. This book asks sharp questions coming from theory, politics, and the material environment about our understandings of what it means to be a person living in a body deemed different." - Professor Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Emory University, USA

"In Dangerous Discourses Margrit Shildrick leads readers on a tour of the promise that Critical Disability Studies holds for postmodern theories of embodiment, fluidity, and subjective interconnectivity. Rather than argue on behalf of an "inclusionary" model of integration into socially-derived norms, the work takes up a more radical project of disability as integral to human differences. This turn moves disability from a marginalized condition to that which marks the possibilities of becoming - a mutating force that posits instability as a creative catalyst for alternative modes of intersubjectivity." - David T. Mitchell, Temple University, USA

"Dangeorus Discourses offers a thorough, intersectional, and post-conventional exploration of disability that goes beyond both the traditional scope of disability studies and the given binary opposing non-disabled and disabled bodies." - Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy