Disability Pride Reading Recommendations
Author: Rachel Lawyer, Library Instruction Assistant | rachel.lawyer@usu.edu
July is Disability Pride Month which commemorates the anniversary of the passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act of July 1990. Since then Disability Pride Month has celebrated all people with disabilities, and their many different identities and cultures, as well as the fight against ableism. Celebrate and learn with these books available through USU libraries. There is also a Disability Pride Month display in the Merrill-Cazier Library in collaboration with the USU Disability Resource Center through July.
About Us: Essays from the Disability Series of the New York Times edited by Peter Catapano and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson
Since its 2016 debut, the popular New York Times' "Disability" column has transformed the national dialogue around disability. Now, echoing the refrain of the disability rights movement, "Nothing about us without us," this landmark collection gathers the most powerful essays from the series that speak to the fullness of human experience-stories about first romance, childhood shame and isolation, segregation, professional ambition, child-bearing and parenting, aging and beyond. Reflecting on the fraught conversations around disability-from the friend who says "I don't think of you as disabled," to the father who scolds his child with attention differences, "Stop it stop it stop it what is wrong with you?"-the stories here reveal the range of responses, and the variety of consequences, to being labeled as "disabled" by the broader public. Here, a writer recounts her path through medical school as a wheelchair user-forging a unique bridge between patients with disabilities and their physicians. An acclaimed artist with spina bifida discusses her art practice as one that invites us to "stretch ourselves toward a world where all bodies are exquisite." With these notes of triumph, these stories also offer honest portrayals of frustration over access to medical care, the burden of social stigma and the nearly constant need to self-advocate in the public realm.
Capitalism and Disability: Selected Writings by Marta Russell
Spread out over many years and many different publications, the late author and activist Marta Russell wrote a number of groundbreaking and insightful essays on the nature of disability and oppression under capitalism. In this volume, Russell’s various essays are brought together in one place in order to provide a useful and expansive resource to those interested in better understanding the ways in which the modern phenomenon of disability is shaped by capitalist economic and social relations.
Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha explores the politics and realities of disability justice, a movement that centres the lives and leadership of sick and disabled queer, trans, Black, and brown people, with knowledge and gifts for all. Leah writes passionately and personally about creating spaces by and for sick and disabled queer people of colour, and creative "collective access" -- access not as a chore but as a collective responsibility and pleasure -- in our communities and political movements. Bringing their survival skills and knowledge from years of cultural and activist work, Piepzna-Samarasinha explores everything from the economics of queer femme emotional labour, to suicide in queer and trans communities, to the nitty-gritty of touring as a sick and disabled queer artist of colour.
Demystifying Disability: What to Know, What to Say, and How to be an Ally by Emily Ladau
People with disabilities are the world’s largest minority, an estimated 15 percent of the global population. But many of us—disabled and nondisabled alike—don’t know how to act, what to say, or how to be an ally to the disability community. Demystifying Disability is a friendly handbook on the important disability issues you need to know about, including:
- How to appropriately think, talk, and ask about disability
- Recognizing and avoiding ableism (discrimination toward disabled people)
- Practicing good disability etiquette
- Ensuring accessibility becomes your standard practice, from everyday communication to planning special events
- Appreciating disability history and identity
- Identifying and speaking up about disability stereotypes in media
The Disability Studies Reader edited by Lennard J Davis and Rebecca Sanchez
The fifth edition of The Disability Studies Reader addresses the post-identity theoretical landscape by emphasizing questions of interdependency and independence, the human-animal relationship, and issues around the construction or materiality of gender, the body, and sexuality. Selections explore the underlying biases of medical and scientific experiments and explode the binary of the sound and the diseased mind. The collection addresses physical disabilities, but as always investigates issues around pain, mental disability, and invisible disabilities as well. Featuring a new generation of scholars who are dealing with the most current issues, the fifth edition continues the Reader’s tradition of remaining timely, urgent, and critical.
Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space by Amanda Leduc
Fairy tales shape how we see the world, so what happens when you identify more with the Beast than Beauty?
If every disabled character is mocked and mistreated, how does the Beast ever imagine a happily-ever-after? Amanda Leduc looks at fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm to Disney, showing us how they influence our expectations and behaviour and linking the quest for disability rights to new kinds of stories that celebrate difference.
Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life by Margaret Price
In Mad at School, scholar and disabilities activist Margaret Price asks: How might our education practices change if we understood disability to incorporate the disabled mind? Mental disability (more often called "mental illness") is a topic of fast-growing interest in all spheres of American culture, including popular, governmental, aesthetic, and academic. Mad at School is a close study of the ways that mental disabilities impact academic culture. Investigating spaces including classrooms, faculty meeting rooms, and job searches, Price challenges her readers to reconsider long-held values of academic life, including productivity, participation, security, and independence. Ultimately, she argues that academic discourse both produces and is produced by a tacitly privileged "able mind," and that U.S. higher education would benefit from practices that create a more accessible academic world.
Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity by Steve Silberman
A groundbreaking book that upends conventional thinking about autism and suggests a broader model for acceptance, understanding, and full participation in society for people who think differently. What is autism: a devastating developmental disorder, a lifelong disability, or a naturally occurring form of cognitive difference akin to certain forms of genius? In truth, it is all of these things and more--and the future of our society depends on our understanding it. WIRED reporter Steve Silberman unearths the secret history of autism, long suppressed by the same clinicians who became famous for discovering it, and finds surprising answers to the crucial question of why the number of diagnoses has soared in recent years. Going back to the earliest days of autism research and chronicling the brave and lonely journey of autistic people and their families through the decades, Silberman provides long-sought solutions to the autism puzzle, while mapping out a path for our society toward a more humane world in which people with learning differences and those who love them have access to the resources they need to live happier, healthier, more secure, and more meaningful lives.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn’t heard him, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom.
These friends, intimates since childhood, borrow money, beg favors, and, before even graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster, Ichigo. Overnight, the world is theirs. Not even twenty-five years old, Sam and Sadie are brilliant, successful, and rich, but these qualities won’t protect them from their own creative ambitions or the betrayals of their hearts.
Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love.
True Biz: A Novel by Sara Novic
True biz (adj./exclamation; American Sign Language): really, seriously, definitely, real-talk
True biz? The students at the River Valley School for the Deaf just want to hook up, pass their history finals, and have politicians, doctors, and their parents stop telling them what to do with their bodies. This revelatory novel plunges readers into the halls of a residential school for the deaf, where they’ll meet Charlie, a rebellious transfer student who’s never met another deaf person before; Austin, the school’s golden boy, whose world is rocked when his baby sister is born hearing; and February, the hearing headmistress, a CODA (child of deaf adult(s)) who is fighting to keep her school open and her marriage intact, but might not be able to do both. As a series of crises both personal and political threaten to unravel each of them, Charlie, Austin, and February find their lives inextricable from one another—and changed forever.