Includes bibliographical references (pages [173]-189) and index.
Contents
The disabled figure in culture -- The disabled figure in literature -- The gap between representation and reality -- An overview and a manifesto -- Feminist theory, the body, and the disabled figure -- Sociocultural analyses of the extraordinary body -- The disabled figure and the ideology of liberal individualism -- The disabled figure and the problem of work -- The spectacle of the extraordinary body -- Constituting the average man -- Identification and the longing for distinction -- From freak to specimen : "The Hottentot Venus" and "The Ugliest Woman in the World" -- The end of the prodigious body -- The maternal benefactress and her disabled sisters -- The disabled figure as a call for justice : Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's cabin -- Empowering the maternal benefactress -- Benevolent maternalism's flight from the body : Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's cabin -- The female body as liability -- Two opposing scripts of female embodiment : Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the iron mills -- The triumph of the beautiful, disembodied heroine : Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The silent partner -- Revising black female subjectivity -- The extraordinary woman as powerful woman : Ann Petry's The street -- From the grotesque to the cyborg -- The extraordinary body as the historicized body : Toni Morrison's disabled women -- The extraordinary subject : Audre Lorde's Zami : a new spelling of my name -- The poetics of particularity.