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The last decades have seen by an upsurge of autobiographical writing as well as of multimedia self-representations by disabled persons. This seminar focuses on British women’s autobiographies and vlogs from 2010 to the present which narrate life stories shaped by physical and psychiatric disabilities. “Disability” will be introduced as a fluid, intersectional identity category (a category intersecting with gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity/race) that challenges the binary opposition between “disabled” and “non-disabled”, “normal” or “able-bodied”. Some of the authors and vloggers we discuss explicitly identify as disabled whereas others do not. We investigate works by British authors and vloggers with the exception of Annie Elainey.
The seminar deals with the broader subject of disability as a new category in cultural and literary studies as well as with disability autobiography as a new multimodal genre. We analyse specific autobiographies and vlogs, investigating their narrative structures and exploring their responses to the ableist, mentalist, sexist, racist and heteronormative representations of women with physical and psychiatric disabilities in medical discourse and the media. Furthermore, we discuss if (and how) the selected self-representations produce and perform unexpected, novel, and controversial images of bio- and neurodiversity.
Memoirs:
(please acquire or borrow)
- Joanne Limburg: The Woman Who Thought Too Much. A Memoir of Obsession and Compulsion (London: Atlantic Books, 2010), verbal/print (on OCD)
- Jeanette Winterson: Why Be Happy when You Could Be Normal? (London: Vintage 2011), verbal/print (on mental distress)
- Jessica Thom: Welcome to Biscuit Land (London: Souvenir Press, 2012), verbal/print (on Tourette's)
- Katie Green: Lighter Than My Shadow (London: Jonathan Cape, 2013), graphic memoir/print (on anorexia)
- Francesca Martinez: What the **** Is Normal? (London: Virgin Books, 2014), verbal/print (on cerebral palsy)
Vlogs by:
Annie Elainey, Claudia Boleyn, Jessica Kellgren-Fozard, Gem Hubbard, Grace F Victory, Hannah Hodgson, Krystal-Bella, Katy Gough, and KatzClaws
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