Disability Memoirs in the Academic World:

Abstract

This article aims to examine how academic memoirs by disabled women exert a specific cultural mediation in contemporary society’s perception of disability. Mary Felstiner’s Out of Joint (2007) and Simi Linton’s My Body Politic (2006) are two examples of what G. Thomas Couser has called the “new disability memoir,” as they are so highly self-aware about the issues involved in representation and disability (2009, 164). Moreover, inasmuch these texts focus to a significant degree on the narrator’s professional life, I would like to analyze them also as academic memoirs; in both, we invariably find the academic background as the platform from which they are able to build up a renewed identity. As their academic careers unfold (Linton’s in psychology and Felstiner’s in history), these women try to understand the deep changes their lives and bodies undergo with a severe impairment. In this context, I will look at the identity strategies these authors consciously use in order to become affirmative models of disability, showing the “damaging effects not of disease or impairment but, rather, of the cultural mythologies that interpret those conditions in reductive or disparaging ways” (Mintz 2005, 1). Mary Felstiner and Simi Linton live quite parallel lives. Both have Jewish family backgrounds, both are happily married, both are feminists, and both will eventually become university professors. Before all that, they also share a generational time frame. They were born in the 1940s, and it is around 1970 (Felstiner in 1969 and Linton in 1971) when, still in their twenties, they meet