Care and Disability

Care and Disability is an edited collection offering critical perspectives on representations of care and disability, by emerging and established scholars across multiple periods, regions, and genres of literary studies. The authors demonstrate the range of fields in which care ethics can elucidate alternative cultural and social dynamics, including Indigenous, African American, and Asian texts, and historical eras that predate the modern medical profession. This collection is committed to drawing out the changing racial, gendered, classed, and sexual elements of care, emphasizing how care communities develop as alternatives to the heteronormative couple and the nuclear family. Drawing from the care ethics and disability theory, the work in this volume demonstrates the possibilities inherent in this new cutting-edge field. It will be of interest to all scholars and students of disability studies, care ethics, sociology, narrative medicine, Romanticism, eighteenth-century studies, transatlantic nineteenth-century studies, film, and contemporary race studies.

D. Christopher Gabbard is a professor of English at the University of North Florida, whose work focuses on the intersection of disability studies and British eighteenth-century studies. Talia Schaffer is a Distinguished Professor of English at Queens College, CUNY, and the Graduate Center, CUNY, whose work focuses on gender, disability, and domesticity in the Victorian novel.

0.Introduction. Section One - Care Collectives: Choosing Kin. 1.Caring Characters: Esther's Effacement in Bleak House. 2.Socrates's Bath: Toward a Poetics of Attendance. 3.Ancestral Care Work: Reimagining Disability Justice for Black Crip Queers. Section Two - Critiquing Family Caregiving. 4."The Very Staff of My Age, My Very Prop": Care as Prosthesis in Shakespeare. 5.The Networked Family: Care and Form in Avni Doshi's Burnt Sugar. 6."Negotiating Care and Control: Impairment, Caregiving, and Surveillance in William Godwin's Mandeville". Section Three - Articulating Care. 7."[G]ood people will take care of me": Capacity and Care in the 'Left-Hand Penmanship' Contest of 1865-1867. 8.'Mary's Washing-Tub Tales': Disability and Communities of Care in Mary Prince's History. 9."Anile Dotage?" Communities of Care in William Wordsworth's "The Idiot Boy". Section Four - Nineteenth-Century, North American, Indigenous Voices of Disability: An Alternative Care Ethic". 11."Disability and Collective Care in Charlotte Forten's Civil War Writings". 12.Ethics of Care, Disability, and Sex Work as Care Work in Tsai Ming-liang's I Don't Want to Sleep Alone and Days". 13.From Double Bind to Monkeys' Wedding: Care Work in Octavia E. Butler's Dawn.