Mixing rigorous social theory with concrete analysis, Reading and Writing Disability Differently unpacks the marginality of disabled people by addressing how the meaning of our bodily existence is configured in everyday literate society.

Tanya Titchkosky begins by illustrating how news media and policy texts reveal dominant Western ways of constituting the meaning of people, and the meaning of problems, as they relate to our understandings of the embodied self. Her goal is to configure disability as something more than a problem, and beyond simply a positive or a negative, and to treat texts on disability as potential sites to examine neo-liberal culture. Titchkosky holds that through an exploration of the potential behind limited representations of disability, we can relate to disability as a meaningful form of resistance to the restricted normative order of contemporary embodiment.

Incorporating a textual analysis of ordinary depictions of disability, this innovative study promises to represent embodied differences in new ways and alter our imaginative relations to the politics of the body.

Tanya Titchkosky teaches Disability Studies in the Department of Humanities, Social Science and Social Justice Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, as well as in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto. She is a member of the Women and Gender Studies Institute of U of T, and of the Honorary Research Association of the University of New Brunswick.

Tanya Titchkosky's profile page

"Titchkosky has written an important book that examines and showcases 'disability meaning making.' Her book has made a significant contribution to the literature not only on disability, but on the broader discourse of diversity, difference and change."

Elizabeth DePoy, Review of Disability Studies vol 06:02:2010