| Kommentar |
Moodle: https://moodle.hu-berlin.de/course/view.php?id=135506
This course approaches disability as a cultural-social category in American society, analyzing how disability intersects with race, gender, class, and sexuality. We examine a wide range of representations of disability from the 16th Century, 19th Century Progressive Era to contemporary times, including legal wording of the "unsightly" in the "Ugly Laws" of the 19th century, activist writings, art, novels, films like Crip Camp, and contemporary reality shows. Drawing on foundational disability studies scholarship by Lennard J. Davis, Douglas Baynton, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Robert McRuer, and others, we trace the evolution from medical to social-political models of disability while investigating how 19th-century concepts of "normality" and visual constructions of the disabled body have shaped American institutions.
With significant focus on the 19th century and the emergence of industrial capitalism, we investigate how new conceptions of time and efficiency gave way to disability as a measure of the norm, examining pivotal moments like the rise of asylums, the eugenic movement, disability rights activism of the 1970s, and the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The course includes guest lectures and visits to sites such as the T4 Memorial and the Deutsches Blinden Museum. Later in the semester, we turn to feminist care theory, particularly Eva Feder Kittay's scholarship on dependency, examining how care work has been disproportionately performed by women of color whose labor has been both essential to and rendered invisible within disability systems. Through engagement with crip theory, primary sources, and cultural artifacts, we analyze how these gendered and racialized care arrangements have sustained both capitalist production and social hierarchies, while exploring how care serves as both a site of control and a foundation for resistance within disabled communities.
Course requirements (for both SE and SPJ) include active class participation, in-class presentations (“spezielle Arbeitsleistungen”), independent project work and a symposium presentation (MAP).
The Moodle Key will be announced through Agnes // Please register in Agnes.
Readings:
→ We will partly work with excerpts, which we will upload on Moodle. |
