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  • Reading Embodied Citizenship: Disability, Narrative, and the Body Politic
  • Alice Hall (bio)
Emily Russell, Reading Embodied Citizenship: Disability, Narrative, and the Body Politic. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011. isbn: 978-0-813-54939-2 hbk. 253 pp. £38.95.

Emily Russell’s Reading Embodied Citizenship: Disability, Narrative and the Body Politic sets out to challenge the notions of homogeneity and independence at the heart of American liberal individualism through a focus on literary representations of physical disability. It explores a range of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century American narratives that examine encounters between physical difference and the body politic. Russell’s opening claim, about the importance of narrative in defining and shaping conceptions of disability, is well established in disability studies, but her emphasis on texts that occur at particular “crisis moments” (18) across the twentieth century offers a fresh perspective on the growing field of writing about disability and citizenship. This focus on moments of historical and “narrative collision” (5) includes an analysis of anxieties in America following the Civil War, the failures of Reconstruction, the Vietnam War, and transnational influences of the 1990s. The scope of this book is wide-ranging, examining texts from 1894 to 1998, from established literary greats such as Mark Twain and Flannery O’Connor, to lesser-known authors such as Ruth Ozeki and Ron Kovic. The monograph also draws on films, newspapers, autobiographical accounts, legal contexts, and a selection of disability studies criticism to provide a theoretical and contextual grounding for the interdisciplinary analysis.

The opening chapter on Twain explores fascinating primary material, highlighting his often-overlooked Those Extraordinary Twins (1894), and the ways in which the text uses conjoined twins as a metaphor for a body politic at war with itself, “an embodied failure of individualism” (Russell 24). Russell’s insistence that humour can provide a “fraught” but “productive way to make strange normalizing narratives” (40) offers a valuable perspective on representations of physical difference that is rarely explored in disability studies. The first chapter also establishes several key concerns that run throughout the book and help to connect this temporally and geographically disparate set of texts together: [End Page 345] disability and spectacle, the relationship between metaphor and materiality, the dangers of mass production and, perhaps most importantly of all, the “homology of physical, social, and textual bodies as the terrain for constructing social narratives of disabled citizenship” (3). Throughout this monograph, Russell confronts taboo issues, including the sexualization of disabled bodies, reproductive rights, and the notion of an uneven ideological distribution of embodiment, in which visibly different citizens marked by disability, race, gender, and sexuality carry a greater “burden of materiality” (15). Chapters one and two work well in close dialogue with each other, as Russell moves on from Twain’s novel to explore the ways in which bodies perceived as grotesque in the works of Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor are used to represent an alienating modern state. Chapter two draws on biographical information about the authors, conceptions of commerce, and modernity in the period to examine social as well as individual bodies.

There is a large temporal leap between chapter 2, which closes with an analysis of McCullers, and the opening of chapter 3, which begins with an examination of the role of war veteran Max Cleland in the 2004 presidential election. This chapter on the Vietnam War deals with less strictly “literary” material in its focus on Larry Heinemann’s Paco’s Story (1986) and the Born on the Fourth of July (1976) memoir by Ron Kovic, but it does explore a sense of the illegibility of physically disabled bodies and an undeniable crisis in twentieth-century American ideals of embodiment. Chapter 3 examines the prosthetic, “hybrid bodies” (98) of soldiers, whether attached to guns or to false limbs, and connects dominant discourses of rehabilitation to “the national desire for a uniform body” (110). Russell argues that this crisis moment, when warfare threatened notions of the body as a communicator, highlights the ways in which “the acts of interpretation required to read all bodies” (53) are key to understanding citizenship and constructing identity more widely.

Russell’s analysis of Katherine Dunn’s Geek...

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