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Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide.

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Print Price: $100.99

Format:
Hardback
368 pp.
163 mm x 236 mm

ISBN-13:
9780190458997

Copyright Year:
2018

Imprint: OUP US


Phallacies

Historical Intersections of Disability and Masculinity

Edited by Kathleen M. Brian and James W. Trent, Jr.

Phallacies: Historical Intersections of Disability and Masculinity is a collection of essays that focuses on disabled men who negotiate their masculinity as well as their disability. The chapters cover a broad range of topics: institutional structures that define what it means to be a man with a disability; the place of women in situations where masculinity and disability are constructed; men with physical and war-related disabilities; male hysteria, suicide clubs, and mercy killing; male disability in literature and popular culture; and more. All the authors regard masculinity and disability in the historical contexts of the Americas and Western Europe, with particular attention to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Taken together, the essays in this volume offer a nuanced portrait of the complex, and at times competing, interactions between masculinity and disability.

Readership : The growing interdisciplinary field of Disability Studies. Historians of education, medicine, allied health sciences, and the social sciences. Scholars and readers of gender studies. Scholars and readers of masculinity studies. Scholars and readers of American studies. Scholars and readers of U.S. and Western European history.

Reviews

  • "That masculinity is an embodied practice has become epigrammatic to researchers. But what about when that body is damaged, incomplete, disfigured, partial, or somehow other? In this breakthrough interdisciplinary collection, 17 scholars and writers -- historians, literary and media scholars, contemporary writers -- explore the intersection of disabilities and masculinities, enabling us to "see" that embodiment, both the normative and the problematized, anew."

    --Michael Kimmel, SUNY Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies, Executive Director, Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities

  • "Phallacies provides an essential map to multiple locations where disabilities and masculinities have materialized, from clinics, to courtrooms, to theatres, to public streets, to private domestic spaces. The importance of studying disability at the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, and class has been firmly established in the vibrant, interdisciplinary field of disability studies. However, more than any other, this anthology makes it possible to pursue that study historically, in thick, nuanced, comparative, and expansive ways."

    --Robert McRuer, PhD, Professor, Department of English, The George Washington University; author, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability

Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Contributor Biographies
Introduction, David Serlin
Part I: Is He Normal?
1. "Disability's Other: The Production of 'Normal Men' in Midcentury America", Anna Creadick
2. "Henry Darger and the Unruly Paper Dollhouse Scrapbook", Mary S. Trent
3. "Black and Crazy: The Antinomian Black Male in North American Consciousness", Lawrence E. Holcomb
4. "Masculinity or Bust: Gender and Impairment in Russ Meyer's Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!", Murray K. Simpson
Part II: War, Manhood, and Disability
5. "Marketing Disabled Manhood: Veterans and Advertising since the Civil War", John Kinder
6. "'Half a Man': The Symbolism and Science of Paraplegic Impotence in World War II America", Beth Linker and Whitney E. Laemmli
7. "'A Blind Man's Home-Coming': Masculinity, Disability and Male Care-giving in First World War Britain", Jessica Meyer
Part III: Disabled Man as "Less than a Man"
8. "Hysteria in the Male: Images of Masculinity in Late Nineteenth-Century France", Daniela S. Barberis
9. "Down and Out: American Male Beggars' Presentations, 1860s-1930s", Robert Bogdan
10. "Death on a Silver Platter: Masculinity, Disabilities, and the Noxon Murder Trials of 1944", Ivy George and James W. Trent Jr.
Part IV: Men and Boys as "Supercrips"
11. "Mythological Pedagogies; or, Suicide Clubs as Eugenic Alibi", Kathleen M. Brian
12. "Making Useful Men: The Roman Rosell Institute and Asylum for the Blind, 1933-1950", Rebecca Ellis
13. "Weeping and Bad Hair: The Bodily Suffering of Early Christian Hell as a Threat to Masculinity", Megan Henning
14. "Porgy and Dubose", Susan Schweik
15. "Ernest Hemingway: Ernest Hemingway, the Man, the Girl, and the Genius", Carolyn Slaughter
Contributor Biographies
Index

There are no Instructor/Student Resources available at this time.

Kathleen M. Brian, PhD, is a Lecturer in the Liberal Studies Department at Western Washington University. Brian's recent work has appeared in the Journal of Literary and Disability Studies, the History of Psychiatry, and the Bulletin of the History of Medicine.

James W. Trent, Jr., PhD, is a Visiting Scholar in the Heller School at Brandeis University. He is author of The Manliest Man: Samuel G. Howe and the Contours of Nineteenth-Century American Reform (2012) and Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Intellectual Disability in the United States (2016).

Making Sense in the Social Sciences - Margot Northey, Lorne Tepperman and Patrizia Albanese
Disability and Development - Misa Kayama and Wendy Haight

Special Features

  • Addresses an under-explored topic that is applicable to the academic disciplines of history, gender studies, American studies, sociology, cultural studies, disability studies, social work, psychology, etc.
  • Examines the intersections between masculinity and disability across the past 60 years.
  • Integrates material on several types of disabilities -- psychiatric disabilities, blindness, physical disabilities, intellectual disability, and war-related disabilities.
  • Weaves issues of class and race into their narratives of masculinity and disability, and addresses clinical and policy implications.
  • Synergistically integrates critiques related to gender, disability, cultural history, sociology, and women's studies in diverse and creative ways.