Book Log

[anotherusedpage]

I believe I have not yet in 2011 read a book by a nondisabled white heterosexual man. If I keep this up until 2014 I might just about balance out my Oxford English degree

Comments

[glittertigger]

I have no idea about her sexual orientation, but Naomi Alderman is a talented Jewish female writer and a feminist :)

[anotherusedpage]

Thanks!

[anotherusedpage]

Oh, I have in fact already read Disobedience! I'm just rubbish at remembering author names.

[highfantastical]

For me, the proportion of people I studied who weren't able-bodied white heterosexual men depends on how firm the evidence has to be in order to adjudge them queer or disabled (I can't offhand think of a single author of colour that we studied - at my college, this was the greatest deficit by far). I'm happy to count Shakespeare and Marlowe, for instance, under queer, allowing for fairly significant changes to labels! PWDs include Herbert, Pope, Sterne, Smart, Austen, Keats, Hopkins, Woolf, Plath. (Provided one accepts chronic illness as disability: five of those people experienced chronic physical illness, in addition to e.g. Woolf, where it's not really clear to what extent her physical symptoms were related to/separate from her mental health

[highfantastical]

(But - once again, for me - a huge problem is the fact that so few of the authors whom I see as disabled are widely considered to be so. It seems to be skated over vitually all the time, except when disability = pathology in the case of women writers with mental health problems. Argh.)

[highfantastical]

(I don't mean skated over by you! I hope that was obvious, but am completely neurotic about giving the wrong impression on lj. I'm thinking of all the criticism I read.)

[anotherusedpage]

Yes, absolutely. Would like to have read more about disability as disability rather than pathology. eg Margery Kempe might well have had some sort of seizure disorder and almost certainly had mental health difficulties by contemporary standards; but this is almost always only pointed out in order to dismiss her.

[thesofaofdeath]

This may be a silly question, but did you ever cover Amy Levy during your degree?

[anotherusedpage]

I don't think I actually did. *googles it*

[thesofaofdeath]

Queer Jewish proto-socialist of the Victorian era. Admittedly her letters and poems are more interesting than her novels.