Disability history has two broad goals. First, it seeks to better understand the nature and consequences of disability by uncovering its hidden history and documenting the forgotten historical lives of disabled people. Second, it aims to promote disability as ‘a useful category of historical analysis’ by showing what a disability perspective can bring to the study of the past more generally. Phallacies: Historical Intersections of Disability and Masculinity furthers both of these goals. However, in this review I concentrate on its contribution to the first goal, since that is the most relevant to disability studies.
Written by a multidisciplinary team of authors and divided into four parts, the book consists of 15 chapters (11 on North American topics and four primarily on Europe or Argentina) and an introduction. The titles of the four parts give a good indication of the book’s major themes: ‘Is He Normal?’; ‘War, Manhood, and Disability’; ‘Disabled Man as “Less than a Man”’; and ‘Men and Boys as “Supercrips”’.
The main feature and achievement of the book that is of interest to disability studies scholars will probably be its multifaceted examination of shifting understandings and representations of masculinity and disability, and how these have affected the lives of disabled men and boys historically, often in challenging ways. Far from being passive victims, however, many of the essays show how disabled men and boys confronted, and frequently used, hegemonic gender ideologies to defend their masculine identities from the threat posed by disability. For instance, Beth Linker and Whitney E. Laemmli make a good case that disabled American cartoonist Fred B. Woolsey used sexualised ‘depictions of “delicious looking Florence Nightingales’’’ in the 1940s and 1950s to normalise the ‘paraplegic male in his sexual desire’ by insinuating that ‘they were no different than nondisabled men’ in this regard (140). Whether or not such strategies worked or were sensible in the long run is another matter. The important point, as Linker and Laemmli realise, is to remember that disabled men attempted them. Histories of disability that fail to do this risk perpetuating the popular and harmful association of disability with helplessness.
As Robert Bogdan’s fascinating and richly illustrated chapter on nineteenth and twentieth-century American begging cards demonstrates, even those who might willingly present themselves as helpless seldom were. Sometimes disabled men used disability stereotypes strategically for their own purposes, undermining them in the process. Purchased by beggars to give to passers-by in the hope of encouraging a ‘donation’, many of the cards examined by Bogdan picture disabled beggars in poses designed to evoke pity. Yet these images did not always simply reproduce dominant ideas about disability. As ‘active participant[s] in the production of the cards’ (197), beggars were able to subvert the tropes they drew on by introducing subtle modifications that conveyed a more positive message about their lives. By stressing disabled people’s historical agency like this, Bogdan’s chapter, along with others in the book, remind us that disabled people were challenging mainstream society’s views and treatment of them long before the rise of the modern Disability Rights Movement.
Another strength of the book is the impressive range of historical sources and methods its authors use. In addition to cartoons and begging cards, other visual documents, such as advertisements and artworks, are examined. Films, memoirs, novels, institutional records and newspaper reports also feature prominently, and there are many other sources listed in the book’s notes. As Kathleen M. Brian observes in her stimulating chapter on nineteenth-century narratives about suicide clubs, disability historians face many challenges, and they have had to approach the past ‘creatively, expansively, and beyond the “official” archive’ (238). By showcasing a wide array of sources and methods, Phallacies offers a useful sampling of some the ways they have gone about this. Consequently, disability scholars without backgrounds in history who want to enrich their work with historical material could use this as a ‘guidebook’ for inspiration about how to proceed.
The book is full of other valuable insights for disability studies. From Meghan Henning’s examination of ancient texts, we learn that the ‘suffering body’ in early Christianity often ‘represented a failure to attain normative masculinity’ (288). This is an interesting angle on the ‘disability as suffering’ theme common in western discourses about disabled people that others will surely build on. Engaging chapters by Jessica Meyer (on disability and caregiving in First World War Britain) and by Ivy George and James W. Trent Jr (on the death of an American baby with Down syndrome in 1944) illuminate the nature and significance of hierarchies of disability and how these can affect the lives of disabled people in radically different ways (for example, 163–164 and 229–230). Although too numerous to detail here, other chapters similarly raise important points that have ramifications for disability theory.
Perhaps the biggest shortcoming of the volume taken as a whole is its chronological bias. As David Serlin suggests in his helpful introduction, the roots of modern understandings and experiences of disability go back far beyond the nineteenth century (12). Yet, with the exception of Henning’s contribution on early Christianity, the assembled chapters focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This means readers get an incomplete picture of the historical development of the attitudes, practices and structures responsible for ‘disabling’ people with impairments. Despite this minor criticism, however, people interested in disability will get a lot out of Phallacies. I certainly did.
History of Science and Ideas, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland
[email protected]
© 2018 Daniel Blackie
https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2018.1457491