Reviewed by: Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance Karen Dearborn Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance. Edited by Carrie Sandahl and Philip Auslander . Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005; pp. 352. $75.00 cloth, $27.95 paper. Bodies in Commotion, edited by Carrie Sandahl and Philip Auslander, brings together twenty-two essays from multiple scholarly perspectives to explore the relatively uncharted territory of disability as performance. Much more than a volume about disabled artists or depictions of disability onstage, this collection applies a performance studies lens to widen and complicate traditional understandings of both disability and performance. Taken as a whole, the anthology provocatively opens previously unexamined notions of embodiment and identity and invites the reader to question philosophies and beliefs about what it means to be human. For readers new to the field of disability studies, the editors' introduction expediently links disability to Irving Goffman's "performance of everyday life" and Judith Butler's "performativity." The editors note that "the notion that disability, too, is performed (like gender, sex, sexuality, race, and ethnicity) and not a static 'fact' of the body is not widely acknowledged or theorized" (2). They track the genealogies of disability studies and performance studies and argue that the commotion of joining the two affords new pathways for both disciplines. Navigating from essay to essay is akin to embarking on a whirlwind tour of twenty-two countries in twenty-two days. Many of the authors are well-established scholars with numerous books and essays already in publication. Each chapter examines a pivotal issue and pulls the reader into a unique world delineated by disability, performance, and scholarly approach. For example, section 1, "Taxonomies: Disability and Deaf Performances in the Process of Self Definition," begins with Brenda Jo Bruggleman's examination of rhetoric—"the art of performing persuasion"—recast on bodies that operate outside established norms for articulate, proper, and persuasive orators. She examines three different rhetorical performances: "Storm Reading," an eighty-minute piece created and performed by actor Neil Marcus; "I Am Ordered To Now Talk," a work by the sign-language poetry group, Flying Words Project; and the complicated rhetorical position of the sign-language interpreter as both "speaker" and "listener" occupying the space between deaf orator and hearing audience. The next essay moves from speaking to looking: in "Dares to Stare: Disabled Women Performance Artists and the Dynamics of Staring," Rosemarie Garland Thompson maneuvers from gaze theory to Foucault's notions of surveillance [End Page 697] to map the politics of the stare as cast on the disabled body to expose the dynamic relationship between spectator and spectacle in the theatre of three female performance artists. The third essay, by Jessica Berson, tracks shifts and developments in the use of sign language in theatrical productions. In the final essay of this section, Jim Ferris explores how a group of visibly disabled performers employ varying degrees of aesthetic distance to creatively mediate the similarities and differences between able-bodied audiences and themselves. Subsequent sections include "Disability/Deaf Aesthetics," "Audiences and the Public Sphere," "Rehabilitating the Medical Model," "Performing Disability in Daily Life," and "Reading Disability in Dramatic Literature." As the titles imply, the politics of spectatorship, art-making, and identity are paramount. Section 2 examines CandoCo, a British dance company comprised of able/disabled dancers; National Theatre of the Deaf; dancer/choreographer Cathy Weis; and P.H.*reaks, a now-defunct people's theatre. Each essay raises questions about who gets to perform, for whom the performances are designed, and by what criteria performances are judged. Section 3 challenges the dominant cultural trope that casts disability as a medical problem in search of a cure. For readers unfamiliar with disability studies, this section is a must. Several themes articulated in the earlier sections reemerge for fuller examination. These essays contrast a medical approach to disability that casts the individual as a victim of unfortunate circumstances with more recent approaches that "accept impairments as natural, inevitable, human differences" and therefore worthy of investigation from the perspective of minority identity and social construction (129). Akin to Thompson's earlier arguments about the stare, Petra Kuppers enlists Foucault to discuss how the diagnostic gaze operates on the...