Scan barcode
A review by horrorbutch
Queer Disability through History: The Queer and Disabled Movements through their Personalities by Daisy Holder
2.0
Disclaimer: I received an e-ARC from netgalley in exchange for a review.
A collection of biographies of queer Disabled people in history. My favorite part of this collection was the intro, which embodied Disabled Rage in a beautiful way by standing firm against othering terms such as “handicapable” or “disabled” and the way their patronizing use is harmful to Disabled communities. Unfortunately, I did not enjoy the rest of the collection as much.
While I mostly enjoyed reading the biographies and I definitely learned something new about new queer Disabled people that I hadn’t known before, I was a bit disappointed at seeing who was missing (where are Eli Clare? Leslie Feinberg? Audre Lorde?) or at least a mention of acknowledgement of who is left out of this anthology. Furthermore, I found myself quite confused by the structure of this anthology. How (if at all) where the chapters sorted? As far as I could tell it was not structured in a temporal order or the place of origin or anything else and I feel like a clearer structure there could have made the story more interesting. Instead, it kind of felt like the author picked some queer Disabled people from history she liked and simply started writing, sorting it by whenever the research was done. Then most chapters include tangents to various ideas, either in Disability Studies or Queer Studies or an exploration of history and how things have changed. I feel like reading the chapters would have been more interesting if these ideas had been weaved into the chapters better, maybe by placing them at the front of each chapter and linking back to them in the actual biographies. Like this it would often throw me out of the stories of the people I was reading and unfortunately was not something I enjoyed. Finally, I also feel that the writing could have been edited better, leaving out personal comments by the author, as that really threw me outside of the biographies. I do think non-fiction writing can include an author voice, but here it felt too much to me.
My personal favorite chapters were the ones about Kitty Cone, as I knew parts about the ADA and how it came to be, but didn’t know about her involvement, Connie Panzariono, whose work I definitely want to check out now and Sharon Kowalski and Karen Thompson, a lesbian couple whose life changed after Sharon was disabled through a car accident and had her parents declared as her legal ward. Of the people featured in this anthology some are quite famous in queer circles (Frida Kahlo, Marsha P. Johnson, Lord Byron, Alan Turing and Michelangelo) and so I didn’t really get that much from their chapters as I knew most of what was presented here before, but if you are more interested in their lives you might get more out of there stories than I did.
All in all, I do think this book could be interesting to the right audience, which will be more you than me if you are a) not interested in academic historical writing and can handle snarky remarks by an author & b) are new to Disability studies and Queer Studies.
A collection of biographies of queer Disabled people in history. My favorite part of this collection was the intro, which embodied Disabled Rage in a beautiful way by standing firm against othering terms such as “handicapable” or “disabled” and the way their patronizing use is harmful to Disabled communities. Unfortunately, I did not enjoy the rest of the collection as much.
While I mostly enjoyed reading the biographies and I definitely learned something new about new queer Disabled people that I hadn’t known before, I was a bit disappointed at seeing who was missing (where are Eli Clare? Leslie Feinberg? Audre Lorde?) or at least a mention of acknowledgement of who is left out of this anthology. Furthermore, I found myself quite confused by the structure of this anthology. How (if at all) where the chapters sorted? As far as I could tell it was not structured in a temporal order or the place of origin or anything else and I feel like a clearer structure there could have made the story more interesting. Instead, it kind of felt like the author picked some queer Disabled people from history she liked and simply started writing, sorting it by whenever the research was done. Then most chapters include tangents to various ideas, either in Disability Studies or Queer Studies or an exploration of history and how things have changed. I feel like reading the chapters would have been more interesting if these ideas had been weaved into the chapters better, maybe by placing them at the front of each chapter and linking back to them in the actual biographies. Like this it would often throw me out of the stories of the people I was reading and unfortunately was not something I enjoyed. Finally, I also feel that the writing could have been edited better, leaving out personal comments by the author, as that really threw me outside of the biographies. I do think non-fiction writing can include an author voice, but here it felt too much to me.
My personal favorite chapters were the ones about Kitty Cone, as I knew parts about the ADA and how it came to be, but didn’t know about her involvement, Connie Panzariono, whose work I definitely want to check out now and Sharon Kowalski and Karen Thompson, a lesbian couple whose life changed after Sharon was disabled through a car accident and had her parents declared as her legal ward. Of the people featured in this anthology some are quite famous in queer circles (Frida Kahlo, Marsha P. Johnson, Lord Byron, Alan Turing and Michelangelo) and so I didn’t really get that much from their chapters as I knew most of what was presented here before, but if you are more interested in their lives you might get more out of there stories than I did.
All in all, I do think this book could be interesting to the right audience, which will be more you than me if you are a) not interested in academic historical writing and can handle snarky remarks by an author & b) are new to Disability studies and Queer Studies.