The ugly laws: a beautiful book

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Acknowledgements

The author thanks Michael Dorn for inviting him to contribute this review to an AAG session and Rob Wilton for encouraging him to publish it in Social & Cultural Geography.

Notes

1. Both of these books, by Goffman and Hevey, are referenced in Schweik's book.

2. As a premier critical-disability theorist, Hahn's influence has been legion, and he is warmly acknowledged by Schweik. It is helpful to recall that Hahn played an important role in the early years of a critical-disability geography, partly through this essay in the Wolch and Dear collection, but also through a paper on the socio-spatial politics of disabled access in Los Angeles which appeared in Environment and Planning D: Society & Space (see Hahn 1986, 1989).

3. ‘…characters like Richard III, Frankenstein, Graham Greene's Raven, most villains in the James Bond films and so on, have their evilness signified by their impairment. As these stories unfold, the anti-hero's limited and semi-human consciousness glimpses their tragic existence through the cracked mirror of their hatred for themselves. They all live bitterly with the festering sore of their loss, until their self-destructive rage explodes on the world’. (Hevey 1992: 12–13)

4. Brilliantly, I think, Schweik characterises her ‘general aim’ as being ‘to interview a discourse’ (p. viii), an inspiring and novel methodological notion that I suspect would repay further reflection.

5. A nice touch is that the original document containing this key resolution is copied as a frontispiece to the book, as well as a portion of it appearing on the book's spine: in this fashion, the deep significance of these words, and of appreciating exactly what they said/read, is made apparent.

6. Even when concentrating specifically on bodily difference, Schweik masterfully deconstructs the various codings and cross-codings of the body at work in and around the ordinances, notably in her Chapter 4 when exploring the morass of cultural meanings at work in designations of ‘unsightly, unseemly, improper’, as refracted through the lenses of ‘disgust’, attributions of ‘freak’ and ‘animal’, and equations with ‘dissipations’ of all kinds (drinking, gambling and prostitution).

7. The historians and other critics who have sought to undermine Michel Foucault's critical history of ‘madness’, complete with its ‘anti-psychiatric’ impulses and influences, spring most obviously to my mind.

8. And we also hear at various points (but especially pp. 234–247) about the so-called ‘Cleveland Cripple Survey’.

9. Here, Schweik borrows in part from Cresswell's (1998, 2001) analysis of Reitman's map, albeit slightly correcting Cresswell's failure to appreciate that Reitman's separation of ‘Respect’ and ‘Ability’ was quite possibly to emphasise that in the world of ‘courts, press and police’ the tendency is indeed to respect ability, and thereby to disrespect disability (p. 310, n. 17, and also ‘map’ on p. 72).