Disability Matters: Loving Our Own Bones and Lingering With Difference

Abstract

Julia Watts Belser’s Loving Our Own Bones is a book with transformative potential, a book that shows “how disability experience can shape our inner lives, how disability can offer insights into the textures and tenor of spiritual life … [how] disability can be a generative force, a goad to creativity, a source of embodied knowledge” (5). The demand Loving Our Own Bones makes on its readers is that we simply linger with disability. The promise here is that lingering with disability without rushing to rationalize it, domesticate it, judge it, fix it can be a portal to a vast and glorious imaginative terrain. The promise here is the recovery of “an uncanny kind of freedom” (2) in which the norms and conventions, the shoulds and the oughts, are subject to revision or at least to relativization against the broader horizon of human diversity.