Rejecting/Perfecting/Performing (Ab)Normal Bodies: Bridging Disparate Modes of Being

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

Disability Studies holds the belief that lived bodies are disciplined and domesticated by normative structures and discourse. To live in a social world is to already know the ways one both succeeds and fails at meeting its ever-present hegemonic imperatives. It is this give and take between achieving the normalized ideal and failing to fully reflect it that this panel attempts to address by specifically challenging the medically and socially unquestioned entelechy of perfection with the actual performance of the lived body in all its (ab)normality.

Sub Unit

• Caucus on Disability Issues

Chair

• Joy Cypher, Rowan University

Individual Presentations

• Eyes without a Face: The Prerogative of Progress and the Perfection of a Rejected Life - Joy Cypher, Rowan University

• Playing Perfection: Rejection and Maintenance of the Avatar in World of Warcraft - George Boone, University of Illinois

• It’s (Not) a Big Deal: Performing 'Normality' and 'Disability' in the Context of Chronic Pain - Lorin Basden Arnold, Rowan University

• Weight-Loss Surgery and Dieting Among Fat Activists - Kathleen LeBesco, Marymount Manhattan College

• Performing This Broken Narrative: A Performative Interrogation of Living Donor Transplants as Disability Studies - Corey E. Leighton, Rowan University