Legacy: Special issue, "Women Writing Disability"
Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers is soliciting papers for a special issue devoted to the intersection of women, women writers, and disability. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson observes that many parallels exist between the "social meanings attributed to female bodies and those assigned to disabled bodies." To this extent it would be hard to imagine early twentieth-century psychoanalysis without "women's diseases" like hysteria or nervous disorders. Female sexuality and reproduction have, historically, been monitored by a male medical and psychoanalytic profession. Building design, fashion, and juridical definitions of identity have reinforced the idea that, as Iris Marion Young says, "women in sexist society are physically handicapped." Concepts of aesthetic perfection and beauty are often figured around idealized (often naked) female bodies for which marked or disabled bodies are considered aberrant. Much western literature is formed...