Compulsory bodies: Reflections on heterosexuality and able-bodiedness

Journal of Women's History

Volumn 15, Issue 3, 2003, Pages 77-89

  Kafer, Alison ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34247453000     PISSN: 10427961     EISSN: 15272036     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jowh.2003.0071     Document Type: Article

References (29)

1. Celia Kitzinger, Sue Wilkinson, and Rachel Perkins, "Editorial Introduction: Theorizing Heterosexuality," Feminism and Psychology 2, no. 3 (1992): 293-324.
2. Adrienne Rich, "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" in Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985 (New York: Norton, 1986): 23-75, quotation on 23.
3. Rich, "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," quotation on 24.
4. See also Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia, 1997).
5. Marsha Saxton, "Disability Rights and Selective Abortion," in Abortion Wars: A Half-Century Struggle ed. Rickie Solinger (Berkeley: University of California, 1998): 374-93.
6. For information on California's sterilization program, see Aaron Zitner, "Davis' Apology Sheds no Light on Sterilizations in California," Los Angeles Times 16 March 2003;
7. For the U.S. eugenics movement in general, see, for example, Martin S. Pernick, The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of Defective Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures since 1915 (New York: Oxford, 1996);
8. and Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Vintage, 1997): 56-103.
9. On the coercive nature of prenatal screening, see Laura Hershey, "Choosing Disability," Ms. 5, no. 1 (1994): 26-32;
10. and Saxton, "Disability Rights and Selective Abortion."
11. On the Tracy Latimer case, see Anthony DePalma, "Father's Killing of Canadian Girl: Mercy or Murder?" The New York Times, 1 December 1997, A3.
12. Ellen Samuels and Susan Wendell, both of whom live with chronic illness, write about passing as nondisabled, coming out as disabled, and encountering suspicion about their disability identity from friends, family, and strangers. See Samuels, "My Body, My Closet: Invisible Disability and the Limits of Coming-Out Discourse," GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 9, nos. 1-2 (2003): 233-55;
13. and Wendell, The Rejected Body.
14. McRuer, "Compulsory Able-bodiedness," 93.
15. Susan Lonsdale, Women and Disability: The Experience of Physical Disability among Women (New York: St. Martins, 1990);
16. and Abby Wilkerson, "Disability, Sex Radicalism, and Political Agency," NWSA Journal 14, no. 3 (2002): 33-57.
17. Laura Hershey, "Queer Care," unpublished paper presented at the Queer Disability Conference, San Francisco State University San Francisco, 3 June 2002;
18. Barbara Waxman, "It's Time to Politicize Our Sexual Oppression," in The Ragged Edge: The Disability Experience from the Pages of the First Fifteen Years of The Disability Rag, ed. Barrett Shaw (Louisville, Ky.: Advocado, 1994): 86-91.
19. See also Adrienne Rich, "Seven Skins," in Midnight Savage: Poems, 1995-1998 (New York: Norton, 1999): 38-42.
20. On sexuality, psychiatric illnesses, and cognitive disabilities, see Pamela Block, "Sexuality, Fertility, and Danger: Twentieth-Century Images of Women with Cognitive Disabilities," Sexuality and Disability 18, no. 4 (2000): 239-54;
21. and Licia Carlson, "Cognitive Ableism and Disability Studies: Feminist Reflections on the History of Mental Retardation," Hypatia 16, no. 4 (2001): 124-46.
22. On the representation of sexual practices as diseased or deviant, see Peter Lewis Allen, The Wages of Sin: Sex and Disease, Past and Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000);
23. Carol Groneman, "Nymphomania: The Historical Construction of Female Sexuality," in Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture ed. Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995): 219-49;
24. and Jennifer Terry, An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and the Place of Homosexuality in Modern Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
25. On the representation of disabled people's sexuality as kinky or erotic, see Barbara Waxman Fiduccia, "Sexual Imagery of Physically Disabled Women: Erotic? Perverse? Sexist?" Sexuality and Disability 17, no. 3 (1999): 277-82.
26. On the assumption of asexuality, see Adrienne Asch and Michelle Fine, "Introduction: Beyond Pedestals," in Women with Disabilities: Essays in Psychology, Culture, and Politics ed. Michelle Fine and Adrienne Asch (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988): 1-37;
27. See also O'Toole, "View from Below,"
28. and Connie Panzarino, The Me in the Mirror (Seattle: Seal, 1994).
29. My belief in the political importance of possibilities that cannot be predicted in advance, of a political horizon that can never finally be reached, is informed by the work of Chantal Mouffe and other theorists of radical democracy. See, for example, Chantai Mouffe, The Return of the Political (London: Verso, 1993).