The Disabled Child Memoirs of a Normal Future

By:

Apgar, Amanda [auth]

Material type: Text

TextLanguage: English Series: Publication details: University of Michigan Press 2023Description: 1 electronic resource (214 p.)Content type:

text

Media type:

computer

Carrier type:

online resource

ISBN:

9780472055692
9780472075690
mpub.12221256

Subject(s):

Disability: social aspects
Society & culture: general
childhood, disability, special needs, parental memoir, parents of children with disabilities, care, neoliberalism, gender studies, disability studies, childhood studies, studies of memoir, queer theory, sexuality studies, crip theory, feminist disability studies, autobiography, narrative theory, medical humanities, literature and medicine, disability life-writing, feminist, queer, crip, disability justice, settler colonialism, whiteness, the good life

Online resources:

Summary: When children are born with disabilities or become disabled in childhood, parents often experience bewilderment: they find themselves unexpectedly in another world, without a roadmap, without community, and without narratives to make sense of their experiences. The Disabled Child: Memoirs of a Normal Future tracks the narratives that have emerged from the community of parent-memoirists who, since the 1980s, have written in resistance of their children's exclusion from culture. Though the disabilities represented in the genre are diverse, the memoirs share a number of remarkable similarities; they are generally written by white, heterosexual, middle or upper-middle class, ablebodied parents, and they depict narratives in which the disabled child overcomes barriers to a normal childhood and adulthood. Apgar demonstrates that in the process of telling these stories, which recuperate their children as productive members of society, parental memoirists write their children into dominant cultural narratives about gender, race, and class. By reinforcing and buying into these norms, Apgar argues, "special needs" parental memoirs reinforce ableism at the same time that they're writing against it.

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Holdings
Item type	Home library	Collection	Call number	Materials specified	Status	Date due	Barcode
Electronic-Books	OPJGU Sonepat- Campus	E-Books Open Access			Available

Open Access Unrestricted online access star

When children are born with disabilities or become disabled in childhood, parents often experience bewilderment: they find themselves unexpectedly in another world, without a roadmap, without community, and without narratives to make sense of their experiences. The Disabled Child: Memoirs of a Normal Future tracks the narratives that have emerged from the community of parent-memoirists who, since the 1980s, have written in resistance of their children's exclusion from culture. Though the disabilities represented in the genre are diverse, the memoirs share a number of remarkable similarities; they are generally written by white, heterosexual, middle or upper-middle class, ablebodied parents, and they depict narratives in which the disabled child overcomes barriers to a normal childhood and adulthood. Apgar demonstrates that in the process of telling these stories, which recuperate their children as productive members of society, parental memoirists write their children into dominant cultural narratives about gender, race, and class. By reinforcing and buying into these norms, Apgar argues, "special needs" parental memoirs reinforce ableism at the same time that they're writing against it.