New Books in Disability Studies

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Zhiying Ma, "Between Families and Institutions: Mental Health and Biopolitical Paternalism in Contemporary China" (Duke UP, 2025)
In contemporary China, people diagnosed with serious mental illnesses have long been placed under the guardianship of close relatives who decide on their hospitalization and treatment. Despite attempts at reforms to ensure patient rights, the 2013 Mental Health Law reinforced the family's rights and responsibilities. In Between Families and Institutions, Zhiying Ma examines how ideological, institutional, and technological processes shape families' complicated involvement in psychiatric care. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in psychiatric hospitals, community mental health teams, social work centers, and family support groups as well as interviews with policymakers and activists, Ma maps the workings of what she calls "biopolitical paternalism"--a mode of governance that sees vulnerable individuals as sources of risk, frames risk management as the state's paternalistic intervention, and shifts responsibilities for care and management onto families. Ma outlines the ethical tensions, intimate vulnerabilities in households, and health disparities across the population that biopolitical paternalism produces. By exploring these implications, Ma demonstrates the myriad ways biopower enables, inhibits, and transforms medical care in China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Alexandra F. Morris, "Disability in Ptolemaic Egypt and the Hellenistic World: Plato’s Stepchildren" (Routledge, 2024)
Through a thoughtful investigation, Disability in Ptolemaic Egypt and the Hellenistic World: Plato’s Stepchildren (Routledge, 2024) reveals often-overlooked narratives of disability within Ptolemaic Egypt and the larger Hellenistic world (332 BCE to 30 BCE). Chapters explore evidence of physical and intellectual disability, ranging from named individuals; representations of people and mythological figures with dwarfism, blindness and vision impairments; cerebral palsy; mobility impairments; spinal disability; and medicine, healing, and prosthetics. Morris examines the historiographical ways in which disability has been approached, and how ancient disability histories are (mis)represented in various contemporary spaces. It uses terminology informed by the disability community and offers guidance for disability inclusivity in curatorial and pedagogical museum and university contexts, as well as prioritizing disability as an essential area of research in ancient world studies and assisting readers with the identification of ancient disability artefacts. The first-book length treatment of the subject, Disability in Ptolemaic Egypt and the Hellenistic World provides a much-needed resource for students and scholars of ancient Egypt, Egyptology, Classics, Classical Studies, and disability in the ancient world. It is also suitable for researchers in Disability Studies, practitioners in broader Ancient World Studies, and museum and heritage professionals. It is accessible to disabled people curious about their own history, as well as nondisabled people interested in disability history and those interested in a more accurate view of ancient Egyptian history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Michael Rembis, "Writing Mad Lives in the Age of the Asylum" (Oxford UP, 2025)
The asylum--at once a place of refuge, incarceration, and abuse--touched the lives of many Americans living between 1830 and 1950. What began as a few scattered institutions in the mid-eighteenth century grew to 579 public and private asylums by the 1940s. About one out of every 280 Americans was an inmate in an asylum at an annual cost to taxpayers of approximately $200 million. Using the writing of former asylum inmates, as well as other sources, Writing Mad Lives in the Age of the Asylum (Oxford UP, 2025) reveals a history of madness and the asylum that has remained hidden by a focus on doctors, diagnoses, and other interventions into mad people's lives. Although those details are present in this story, its focus is the hundreds of inmates who spoke out or published pamphlets, memorials, memoirs, and articles about their experiences. They recalled physical beatings and prolonged restraint and isolation. They described what it felt like to be gawked at like animals by visitors and the hardships they faced re-entering the community. Many inmates argued that asylums were more akin to prisons than medical facilities and testified before state legislatures and the US Congress, lobbying for reforms to what became popularly known as "lunacy laws." Michael Rembis demonstrates how their stories influenced popular, legal, and medical conceptualizations of madness and the asylum at a time when most Americans seemed to be groping toward a more modern understanding of the many different forms of "insanity." The result is a clearer sense of the role of mad people and their allies in shaping one of the largest state expenditures in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries--and, at the same time, a recovery of the social and political agency of these vibrant and dynamic "mad writers." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Mary Zaborskis, "Queer Childhoods: Institutional Futures of Indigeneity, Race, and Disability" (NYU Press, 2024)
Queer Childhoods: Institutional Futures of Indigeneity, Race, and Disability (NYU Press, 2024) explores how the institutional management of children's sexualities in boarding schools affected children's future social, political, and economic opportunities Tracing the US's investment in disciplining minoritarian sexualities since the late nineteenth century, Mary Zaborskis focuses on a ubiquitous but understudied figure: the queer child. Queer Childhoods examines the lived and literary experiences of children who attended reform schools, schools for the blind, African American industrial schools, and Native American boarding schools. In mapping the institutional terrain of queer childhoods in educational settings of the late nineteenth- and twentieth-century, the book offers an original archive of children's sexual and embodied experiences. Zaborskis argues that these boarding schools--designed to segregate racialized, criminalized, and disabled children from mainstream culture--produced new forms of childhood. These childhoods have secured American futures in which institutionalized children (and the adults they become) have not been considered full-fledged citizens or participants. By locating this queerness in state archives and institutions, Queer Childhoods exposes a queer social history entangled with genocide, eugenics, and racialized violence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Whitney Dirks, "Monstrosity, Bodies, and Knowledge in Early Modern England" (Amsterdam UP, 2024)
Whitney Dirks joins Jana Byars to talk about her new book, Monstrosity, Bodies, and Knowledge in Early Modern England: Curiosity to See and Behold (Amsterdam University Press, 2024). In 1680, the poor cottager Mary Herring gave birth to conjoined twins. At two weeks of age, they were kidnapped to be shown for money, and their deaths shortly thereafter gave rise to a four-year legal battle over ownership and income. The Herring twins' microhistory weaves throughout this book, as the chapter structure alternates between the family's ordeal and the broader cultural context of how so-called 'monstrous births' (a contemporary term for deformed humans and animals) were discussed in cheap print, exhibited in London's pubs and coffeehouses, examined by the Royal Society, portrayed in visual culture, and litigated in London's legal courts. This book ties together social and medical history, Disability Studies, and Monster Studies to argue that people discussed unusual bodies in early modern England because they provided newsworthy entertainment, revealed the will of God, and demonstrated the internal workings of Nature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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