Heather Laine Talley’s research while affiliated with Vanderbilt University and other places

This entry traces the development of feminist disability studies (FDS), including its mutual emergence from feminist studies and disability studies. It explores tensions between the two fields and the ways that “disability” is often elided within feminist studies and “gender” and “women” are often left out of disability studies. Pointing to connections between feminist disability studies and fields such as critical body studies, symbolic interaction, critical race and ethnic studies, and fat studies, the authors show how FDS makes possible new analytical strategies and representations. Importantly, they explore how FDS can benefit from sociology, including attention to structural constraints on lived embodiments and representations. Encompassing both early and new feminist disability studies scholarship, the authors note potential connections and disjunctures between academia and activism. They also raise questions about new trajectories in FDS, including connections to queer theory and transgender studies.

This is a collection of essays that explores Oprah Winfrey’s broad reach as an industry and media brand. Contributors analyze a number of topics touching on the ways in which Oprah’s cultural output shapes contemporary America. The book examines how Oprah has fashioned a persona—which emphasizes her rural, poverty-stricken roots over other factors—that helps her popularize her unique blend of New Age spirituality, neoliberal politics, and African American preaching. She packages New Age spirituality through the rhetoric of race, gender, and the black preacher tradition. Oprah’s Book Club has reshaped literary publishing, bringing Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, and Cormac McCarthy to a broad number of readers. Oprah’s brand extends worldwide through the internet. In this book, writers analyze her positions on teen sexuality, gender, race, and politics, and the impact of her confessional mode on mainstream television news. The book also addresses twenty-first-century issues, showing Oprah’s influence on how Americans and Europeans responded to 9/11, and how Harpo Productions created a deracialized film adaptation of Zora Neale Hurston’s classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God in 2005. Throughout, it challenges readers to reflect on how Oprah the Industry has reshaped America’s culture, history, and politics.

This chapter draws on Oprah’s “Christmas Kindness” (2005) episode, released as part of The Oprah Winfrey Show: 20th Anniversary DVD Collection, to interrogate her philanthropic activities in Africa. It analyzes Oprah’s holiday adventure and her efforts to convince viewers of the “joy” of giving to needy Africans. The chapter suggests that while Oprah is “doing good,” she is simultaneously displacing political engagement on the part of viewers/consumers with a weak and ultimately ineffective version of action. Oprah-style philanthropy may bring in dollars through appeals to emotion, but it precludes direct, sustained political engagement and thus ultimately lasting structural change.

Synopsis: National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing superstar Ricky Bobby (Will Ferrell) and his racing partner and best friend Cal Noughton Jr. (John C. Reilly) win at all costs, in positions #1 and #2, respectively. That is, until flamboyant French Formula One driver Jean Girard (Sacha Baron Cohen) challenges the duo and threatens to supplant their racing dynasty. A dramatic wreck, complete with invisible fire and Ricky Bobby stripping down to his underpants, forces the beleaguered racer to confront what his winning record has cost him. After returning to his childhood home, his stern but loving mother (Jane Lynch) and long-absent badass father (Gary Cole) challenge him to question whether his multimillion-dollar endorsements, McMansion, Barbiesque wife, and cheeky kids represent what being a winner is really all about.

Feminist disability studies is an emergent interdisciplinary field of inquiry shaped by a productive yet tense dialogue between feminist studies and disability studies. It is framed as a collaborative enterprise between feminist studies, which highlights vectors through which social relations and bodies are gendered and sexed, and disability studies, which focuses on the ways socio‐medico‐legal discourses and practices construct impaired bodies as disabled (Thomson 2002). Both feminist studies and disability studies emerged out of twentieth‐century political projects emphasizing social justice and collective action. Intellectually, both fields address questions about subject formation, power, bodies, subjugated knowledges, and normalization. Feminist disability studies is kin to and stands alongside other critical, identity‐based scholarship aimed at social justice, including queer theory, critical race theory, gender studies, and ethnic studies.