The first critical study of personal narrative by women with
disabilities,
Unruly Bodies examines how contemporary
writers use life writing to challenge cultural stereotypes about
disability, gender, embodiment, and identity.
Combining the analyses of disability and feminist theories,
Susannah Mintz discusses the work of eight American
autobiographers: Nancy Mairs, Lucy Grealy, Georgina Kleege, Connie
Panzarino, Eli Clare, Anne Finger, Denise Sherer Jacobson, and May
Sarton. Mintz shows that by refusing inspirational rhetoric or
triumph-over-adversity narrative patterns, these authors insist on
their disabilities as a core--but not diminishing--aspect of
identity. They offer candid portrayals of shame and painful medical
procedures, struggles for the right to work or to parent, the
inventive joys of disabled sex, the support and the hostility of
family, and the losses and rewards of aging. Mintz demonstrates how
these unconventional stories challenge feminist idealizations of
independence and self-control and expand the parameters of what
counts as a life worthy of both narration and political activism.
Unruly Bodies also suggests that atypical life stories can
redefine the relation between embodiment and identity
generally.