Body Language - 9780367890087

Taylor & Francis

As much as we may like to evade them, illness and disability inescapably attend human embodiment \u2013 we are all vulnerable subjects. So it might seem natural and inevitable that the most universal, most democratic, form of literature \u2013 autobiography \u2013 should address these common features of human experience. Yet for the most part, autobiographical writing expressive of illness and disability remained quite uncommon until the second half of the twentieth century, when it flourished concurrently with successive civil rights movements. Women\u2019s liberation, with its signature manifesto Our Bodies Ourselves, supported the breast cancer narrative; the gay rights movement encouraged AIDS narrative in response to a deadly epidemic; and the disability rights movement stimulated a surge in narratives of various disabilities. Conversely, the narratives helped to advance the respective rights movements. Such writing, then, has been representative in two senses of the term: aesth.