Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Emory University

From a very young age we are told not to stare, and one hallmark of maturation is the ability to resist (or at least hide) our staring behavior. And yet, rarely do we master the impulse. Despite the complicated role it plays in our development, and its unique brand of visual enticement, staring has not been considered before as a suitable object fo...

In this open peer commentary, we concur with the three target articles’ analysis and positions on abortion in the special issue on Roe v. Wade as the exercise of reproductive liberty essential for the bioethical commitment to patient autonomy and self-determination. Our proposed OPC augments that analysis by explicating more fully the concept cruci...

The article is an edited transcription of a three-way conversation, or trialogue, chronicling a collective participation in the emergence and growth of disability studies over the past thirty years. The authors divide their memories into specific sites or “rooms,” both public and private, where they discover the power and pleasure of uniting to cre...

This article uses multiple interwoven personal narratives to explicate the relationships among several concepts crucial to bioethics brought into focus by Robert Perske's 1972 article on "The Dignity of Risk," including dignity, risk, paradox, disability, autonomy, uncertainty, diagnosis, and prognosis. The use of personal narrative as a form of ev...

This chapter considers the hypothetical healthy newborn as a representation, an aspirational abstract ideal rendered through a variety of discourses. Exploring the cultural work of the hypothetical healthy newborn figure can help clarify the moral conflict at the heart of a pregnant woman's dual obligation to her own best interests and the best int...

During the COVID-19 crisis, many nation-states did not consult or substantively take into consideration treaties protecting the rights of people with disabilities when developing their pandemic responses. This commentary outlines three of the more important considerations for international pandemic lawmaking—both for specific instruments and wider...

In this essay, we suggest practical ways to shift the framing of crisis standards of care toward disability justice. We elaborate on the vision statement provided in the 2010 Institute of Medicine (National Academy of Medicine) “Summary of Guidance for Establishing Crisis Standards of Care for Use in Disaster Situations,” which emphasizes fairness;...

This article considers the existential and eugenic risks of gene editing with CRISPR-Cas9. It brings forward epistemological and phenomenological questions concerning what CRISPR technology suggests about the limits of being human. By illuminating the paradoxical relationship between our "then self" and "now self," it considers the fragility of our...

With close attention to the film Wonder, this article examines how a narrative of community acceptance offers sustaining relationships for people with unusual facial appearance. This article argues that premodern responses of wonder can help reframe modern understandings of looking different.

This chapter proposes that recognizing the lived experience of disability as an informing principle of full moral personhood is essential to understanding what is required for human flourishing, which is a concept that ultimately supports a wide spectrum of human embodied existence. An attitude of humility and welcome toward the human experience of...

Background The views of people with genetic conditions are crucial to include in public dialogue around developing gene editing technologies. This qualitative study sought to characterize the attitudes of people with inherited retinal conditions (retinitis pigmentosa [RP] and Leber congenital amaurosis [LCA]) toward gene editing. Methods Individua...

Disabled women in literature seldom have erotic lives. Think of poor, crippled laura wingfield in Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie , waiting passively alongside her anxious mother to be taken up by a man. Or consider Gertie McDowell in James Joyce's Ulysses , the object of Leopold Bloom's voyeuristic fantasies, limping along, herself sexual...

One of the most recent and original adaptations of Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) is the ballet version choreographed by Liam Scarlett and performed by the Royal Ballet in 2016 and the San Francisco Ballet in 2017 and 2018. What emerges from this translation is an economical, emotionally wrench...

Companion volumes 'Classic Readings on Monster Theory' and 'Primary Sources on Monsters' gather a wide range of readings and sources to enable us to see and understand what monsters can show us about what it means to be human. The first volume introduces important modern theorists of the monstrous and aims to provide interpretive tools and strategi...

A crucial challenge for critical disability studies is developing an argument for why disabled people should inhabit our democratic, shared public sphere. The ideological and material separation of citizens into worthy and unworthy based on physiological variations imagined as immutable differences is what I call eugenic world building. It is justi...

Perhaps the best opening line in disability studies comes from Georgina Kleege: “Writing this book made me blind.” Following this honorable tradition, I begin my explication of disability studies through my own experience with a similar starting point: “Feminism made me disabled.” Honoring as well the tradition of making theory through narrative, I...

The plenary session at SDS 2013 on “Reflections on the Fiftieth Anniversary of Stigma” marked the fiftieth anniversary of Erving Goffman’s Stigma, which remains one of the most cited and influential works in the field. The panelists, whose essays appear in this forum, discuss Stigma’s origins and uses over the past decades, how the book has affecte...

At the 2012 Modern Languages Association conference, President Michael Bérubé affirmed his chosen theme of “access” by announcing at the Presidential Forum that disability studies could no longer be described as an emerging field of study. It has, declared Bérubé, EMERGED! Publications over the last three years, such as those under review here, con...

The Editors One of the most hotly debated concepts in contemporary bioethics, eugenics is often reduced to an evil of Nazism that should have been discarded long ago. In this video dialogue, two leading scholars of eugenics-Ruth Schwartz Cowan and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson-contextualize and complicate the current discussion of eugenic practices. Be...

This article offers the critical concept misfit in an effort to further think through the lived identity and experience of disability as it is situated in place and time. The idea of a misfit and the situation of misfitting that I offer here elaborate a materialist feminist understanding of disability by extending a consideration of how the particu...

Re-Presenting Disability addresses issues surrounding disability representation in museums and galleries, a topic which is receiving much academic attention and is becoming an increasingly pressing issue for practitioners working in wide-ranging museums and related cultural organisations. This volume of provocative and timely contributions, brings...

In her deeply wise meditation on the question of continuity in human identity, the medieval historian Caroline Walker Bynum offers us the elegant concept that "shape carries story." Her inquiry arose from her own personal experience of observing her father's shift in identity over 10 years of living with progressive dementia. Bynum acknowledges thr...

On December 1, 1854, a Mexican Indian woman named Julia Pastrana was exhibited in New York's Gothic Hall on Broadway. A broadside advertisement for her exhibition described her as a "Marvelous Hybrid or Bear Woman." The theater chronicler, George C. D. O'Dell, who saw her exhibition, called her "somewhat between an human being and an ourang-outang....

In 1997 I was asked to organize humanities outreach activities at the University of California, Irvine. The result was the formation of Humanities Out There (HOT). In our workshops, faculty members and graduate students supervise teams of undergraduates in order to take the methods and materials of the university into the larger community. I believ...

Rosemarie Garland Thomson is an associate professor of English at Howard University. She is the author of Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. 1. Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1963). 2. G. Thomas Couser, Recovering Bodies:...

American Literature 71.4 (1999) 828-829 Even though “the study of marginalization in the form of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation has moved to the center of literary and cultural studies,” notes G. Thomas Couser in this exemplary study, “the most widespread form of marginalization—illness and disability”—has received little critical atte...

Preface and AcknowledgmentsPart 1. Politicizing Bodily Differences1. Disability, Identity, and Representation: An Introduction2. Theorizing DisabilityPart 2. Constructing Disabled Figures: Cultural and Literary Sites3. The Cultural Work of American Freak Shows, 1835-19404. Benevolent Maternalism and the Disabled Women in Stowe, Davis and Phelps5. D...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brandeis University, 1993. Includes bibliographical references (p. 279-293). "UMI: 9317095." UNCLASSIFIED MICROFILM AND ARCHIVAL COPIES ALSO AVAILABLE. Photocopy.