Phallacies: Historical Intersections of Disability and Masculinity

Phallacies: Historical Intersections of Disability and Masculinity, 2017

Phallacies: Historical Intersections of Disability and Masculinity is a collection of essays that focuses on disabled men who negotiate their masculinity as well as their disability. The chapters cover a broad range of topics: institutional structures that define what it means to be a man with a disability; the place of women in situations where masculinity and disability are constructed; men with physical and war-related disabilities; male hysteria, suicide clubs, and mercy killing; male disability in literature and popular culture; and more. All the authors regard masculinity and disability in the historical contexts of the Americas and Western Europe, with particular attention to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Taken together, the essays in this volume offer a nuanced portrait of the complex, and at times competing, interactions between masculinity and disability.

eds. 2017. Disability and Masculinities: Corporeality, Pedagogy and the Critique of Otherness, London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. lxxiv þ 247 pp. 83,29 € (ebook), 99,99 € (hbk). ISBN: 978-1-137-53476-7 (Print) ISBN: 978-1-137-53477-4 (epub). Brian, Kathleen M., and James W. Trent, Jr., eds. 2017. Phallacies: Historical Intersections of Disability and Masculinity, New York: Oxford University Press. xii þ 354 pp. £ 42.99 (hbk). ISBN: 978-0-19-045899-7 (Print), ISBN: 9780190459017 (epub).

Journal of Women's History, 2013

This article expands historical discussions of power and privilege by including disability as a central feature of our understanding of the past. Three primary foci frame this work. First, we seek to illustrate "disability" and "gender" as historically situated, co-constitutive concepts. As such, they carry specific values and ideas inextricably bound to broad societal forces. We also draw attention to disability and gender as entangled lived experiences. This approach responds to scholarly and societal tendencies to devalue and dislocate a spectrum of narratives and materials across eras and locations. Disability and gender as touchstones for critical analysis presents the final focus. Examples from U.S. eugenics and labor history illustrate these multiple dimensions. Engaging simultaneously with disability and gender ultimately expands methodological possibilities and historical understandings. This practice invites renewed self-reflection and imagination: what would our historical work be if it rigorously engaged with gender and disability?

Physical Disability and Sexuality, 2021

In this chapter, we will explore the intersections of disability and masculinity. We will look at how disability influences how men are viewed by others, and how men with disabilities view themselves as masculine and as sexual beings. We also look at the influence of culture on masculinity in the South African context. We draw on existing research knowledge, as well as the pictures and personal stories of some of the male participants in our research project.

A much-cited point by those who study the intersection of gender and disability is that masculinity and disability are in conflict with each other because disability is associated with being dependent and helpless whereas masculinity is associated with being powerful and autonomous, thus creating a lived and embodied dilemma for disabled men. This article maps and critically evaluates the conceptual development of this dilemma of disabled masculinity, tracing how several developments in the fields of disability studies and the critical study of men and masculinities have shaped sociological understandings of disabled masculinity. We suggest that, while social science scholarship has increasingly moved beyond a static understanding and toward a dynamic view of the articulation and interaction between masculinity and disability, there are nevertheless several problems that require attention. The most critical issue conceptually is that the focus of study has been more on masculinity and how it intersects with ‘disability’ as an almost generic category, rather than on how masculinity (or masculinities) intersect(s) differently with various types of impairment. Thus, though there is quite a bit of research on the dilemma of disabled masculinity for men who acquire a physical impairment post-childhood and for groups of men with diverse impairments studied as if they were a homogenous group, less research has been conducted with men who have specific impairments, particularly early-onset, intellectual or degenerative impairments. In this paper we urge researchers to open up the concept of intersectionality to accommodate a range of differences in bodily, cognitive, intellectual and behavioral types (impairments) in their interaction with various masculinities and to show more explicitly how context and life phase contribute to this dynamism.

Journal of Poetry …, 2012

2017

The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.

Disability & Society, 2018

2015