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E-book Cripping Girlhood

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Penilaian

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In 2017 I was riding a bus in Los Angeles that was barreling down Sunset Boulevard when I came across a curious bus bench billboard. The billboard was an image of a young, white girl with Down syndrome. Her light brown hair was braided and pulled back. This drew my attention to her youthful face, painted in its entirety as an American flag. She was holding a paint brush and gazing at herself in the mirror. Is she admiring her work, I wondered? It appeared that she was in the intimate space of her bedroom. I noticed that behind her was a dresser and lamp, and next to her, hanging alongside the mirror were red, white, and blue beads and a bronze sports medal. I wondered what the image was trying to tell me. As I fumbled around in my backpack for my phone to take a picture, I took note of the hashtag hiding unobtru-sively in the corner, “#WeAreAmerica.” Next to it was the phrase, “Love Has No Labels.” I felt ambivalent as I pondered my encounter with the image of the disabled girl that was at once spectacular and mundane.I begin Cripping Girlhood with this scene of encounter because I suggest that it illustrates the workings of a new representational politics of disabled girlhood. In the 2010s, the disabled girl curiously emerges across a range of different sites in the United States’ mediascape. No longer represented solely through discourses of risk, pathologization, and vulnerability, and taking drastically different forms than in Jerry Lewis Telethons or in advertising for the March of Dimes, the disabled girls that come to hypervisibly materialize in the recent cultural imaginary are pageant queens, social media influenc-ers, and disability rights activists. Unlike decades previous, these spectacular disabled girls are not only figures to be looked at, but to be listened to.Cripping Girlhood is interested in what happens and what it means when certain disabled girl subjects gain cultural recognition and visibility as “American girls, too,” to use the words of Melissa Shang, who in 2014 created a viral Change.org petition imploring American Girl to create a disabled doll of the year. The book explores the promise and peril of this newfound cultural visibility for select disabled girls. In examining representations and self-representations of disabled girls and girlhoods across the mediascape at the beginning of the twenty-first century, spanning HBO documentaries to TikTok, Cripping Girlhood uncovers the variegated ways the figure of the disabled girl is imbued with meaning and mobilized as a spectacular repre-sentational symbol. Frequently, the book suggests, the figure of the excep-tional disabled girl emerges at this moment in media culture as a resource to work out post-Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and neoliberal anxi-eties about citizenship, labor, the family, healthcare, and the precarity of the bodymind. She often operates in service of US disability exceptionalism as “representational currency” signaling a mythic achievement of tolerance and acceptance of disability, marking the United States as departing from and mastering linear teleologies of progress (McRuer 2018, 44).The book is equally invested in the stories that disabled girls have to tell about themselves. In examining closely disabled girls’ self-representational practices, Cripping Girlhood goes beyond a critique of the figure of the excep-tional disabled girl, or the privileged disabled girl subject who is granted entrance into the national imaginary, to explore how disabled girls, more than symbolic figures to be used in others’ narratives, circulate their own capacious re-envisioning of what it means to be a disabled girl. The book reveals the cultural and political work that disabled girls’ self-representational practices perform, from cultivating disability community through generating intimacy online, to affirming the value of care labor and interdependence across the species barrier.Cripping Girlhood offers a new theorization of disabled girls and girlhoods. The book does so by advancing “cripping girlhood” as a heuristic. The project calls on the radical potential of crip, a term reclaimed and used by disability activists, cultural workers, and scholars (Clare 1999; Sandahl 2003; McRuer 2006, 2018; Kafer 2013). Crip has come to signify many things at once: an “in-your-face” and prideful reclamation of disability, a capacious and flexible term encompassing all sorts of non-normative embodiments, and, according to Eli Clare (1999), a “word to help forge a politics” (70). I utilize crip throughout the coming pages as a term that recognizes the political and cultural power of disabled girls and girlhoods, even in the most quotidian of scenes. To cripor cripping, in the simplest of characterizations, is a practice that interrogates or unsettles assumptions about disability and disabled people, and specifically in the case of this book, assumptions about disabled girls and girlhoods. As a heuristic, I mobilize “cripping girlhood,” in two distinct but intimately con-nected ways. First, I examine how disabled girls crip girlhood. In a range of cultural sites that I explore throughout the book, but most centrally on You-Tube and TikTok, I show how disabled girls actively upend what we think we know about them and their experience, recasting the meanings ascribed to their bodyminds in their own terms. Second, I mobilize “cripping girl-hood” as an analytical practice in which, throughout each chapter, I uncover how ablenationalist logics, racialized and cis-heteronormative discourses of ideal girlhood, and normative affects collide to facilitate the recognition and cultural valuation of certain disabled girl subjects more than others.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

305.908 TOD c

Penerbit

USA : University of Michigan Press., 2024

Deskripsi Fisik

231 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9780472076741

Klasifikasi

305.908

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Disabled Persons

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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