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A Cultural History of Disability in the Long Eighteenth Century ed. by D. Christopher Gabbard and Susannah B. Mintz (review)

2024; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 57; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ecs.2024.a923791

1086-315X

Lesley Thulin,

Literature Analysis and Criticism

Reviewed by: A Cultural History of Disability in the Long Eighteenth Century ed. by D. Christopher Gabbard and Susannah B. Mintz Lesley Thulin D. Christopher Gabbard and Susannah B. Mintz, eds., A Cultural History of Disability in the Long Eighteenth Century (London: Bloomsbury, 2020). Pp. 224; 15 b/w illus. $99.00 cloth, $32.35 paper. In the series preface to A Cultural History of Disability, editors David Bolt and Robert McRuer explain that their aim in the six-part survey is to explore "how disabled people have been caught up in systems of representation that, over the centuries (and with real, material effects), have variously contained, disciplined, marginalized, or normalized them," with a particular emphasis on how disabled people themselves construct and respond to these representations (xii). Unlike historians of disability who take a medicalized approach to impairment by focusing on treatment and institutionalization, Bolt and McRuer curate a "deeply and necessarily intersectional" approach to disability that attends to "gender, race, sexuality, nation, and other axes of human difference" (xi). At the same time, they cross disciplinary boundaries by drawing on disability studies, literary studies, cultural studies, history, education, theater, and visual art. Despite the series's interdisciplinary breadth and centuries-long time-frame—or perhaps because of them—Bolt and McRuer assigned the same eight chapters to each volume, comprising atypical bodies, mobility impairment, chronic pain, blindness, deafness, speech, learning difficulties, and mental health issues. This has the convenient effect of creating similarity across the tables of contents. On the other hand, the use of a fixed set of impairments as an organizing principle has its methodological limits. To their credit, Bolt and McRuer readily acknowledge that this structure is "manifestly problematic": insofar as the chapter titles center impairments, they obscure the cultural conditions that produce disability and might misleadingly imply that these impairments exist in isolation from each other (xii). Any such concerns are quickly dispelled in the fourth volume of the series, D. Christopher Gabbard and Susannah B. Mintz's A Cultural History of Disability [End Page 397] in the Long Eighteenth Century, a wide-ranging and welcome addition to the burgeoning field of eighteenth-century disability studies. Gabbard, Mintz, and their contributors are committed to challenging the medical model of disability's identification of the pathologized body, irrespective of its historical and cultural contexts, as the "locus" of disability. The volume understands disability in relation to the Enlightenment preoccupation with delimiting the category of the human, especially the attempt to define the boundary separating humans and animals. As Gabbard and Mintz compellingly put it in their concise introduction, the eighteenth century occasioned a far-reaching "hegemonic ideology of form" (6). While their use of this phrase refers to eighteenth-century aesthetics, the collection makes clear that this ideology also pervaded literature, philosophy, political theory, theology, and medicine. The long eighteenth century is often understood as a transitional period that shifted "away from ancient prejudices against physical and mental disabilities and toward medical and scientific explanations" (3). Gabbard and Mintz allude to a related account of the history of disability that traces its emergence to the invention of statistics, whereas other contributors discuss an alternative history that tracks this emergence to the establishment of welfare provisions for the poor. We find the latter explanation in the first chapter, Sara van den Berg's "Difference and Assertion," an informative survey of the ways in which people with "spectacular" disabilities fashioned themselves, and David M. Turner's "Experiences of 'Lameness' in Eighteenth-Century England," a lucid examination of the premium placed on physical mobility and its social significations. This volume is the fourth major survey of disability's cultural contexts in the period, following work by Turner as well as collections by Helen Deutsch and Felicity Nussbaum and Chris Mounsey. Gabbard and Mintz's volume expands their focus, covering 1650 to 1789 (and some incursions into the nineteenth century) and turning to France and the Americas. For example, Kristin Lindgren's "Language and Personhood in the Enlightenment" addresses both regions. In addition to discussing Charles-Michel de l'Epée's innovation in deaf education, Lindgren persuasively compares Pierre Desloges's Observations d'un Sourd et Muèt...