of an inclusive and diverse community, which the disability rights movement and other civil rights movements sought out and, to a remarkable degree, achieved. Learn about this.” —Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Emory Convocation address, 2013
I
f you are fortunate enough to receive an email from Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Emory professor of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, you will no doubt note this caveat beneath her signature: “Because this message was composed using dictation rather than keyboarding, it probably contains distinctive mistakes. Dictation never misspells, but it frequently uses the wrong words and misspells names. Thank you in advance for reading creatively, considering the larger context when my words are confusing or hilarious, and tolerating missing salutations and random capitalizations.” That sort of wry, intelligent, here-I-am humor is typical of Garland-Thomson, who was born with a total of six fingers and one arm that is half the length of the other and does not type. In the emerging academic field of disability studies, where much of her scholarship is focused, she is something of a rock star. Garland-Thomson has many titles. One of the more recent is codirector of the Disability Studies Initiative (DSI) at Emory, a broad-based program created in 2013 to spotlight and support the study of disability. Garland-Thomson leads the initiative with Benjamin Reiss, a fellow professor of English whose research focuses on connections between literature, medicine, and disability in nineteenth-century American culture. The DSI is at the forefront of a national, interdisciplinary movement that builds on wide-ranging academic research to challenge assumptions about human difference and shared definitions of life well and fully lived. One of the objectives, says Garland-Thomson, is to expand the umbrella known as “diversity studies” to encompass variations in physical, sensory, and cognitive ability, as well as other kinds of identity. “Although much recent scholarship explores how difference and identity operate in such politicized constructions as gender, race, and sexuality, cultural and literary criticism has generally overlooked the related perceptions of corporeal otherness we think of variously as ‘monstrosity,’ ‘mutilation,’ ‘deformation,’ ‘crippledness,’ or ‘physical disability,’ ” she writes in the first chapter of her seminal 1997 book Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. “Yet the physically extraordinary figure these terms describe is as essential to the cultural project of American self-making as the varied throng of gendered, racial, ethnic, and sexual figures of otherness that support the privileged norm.” The book is one of five that Garland-Thomson has written, edited, or co-edited; she also is currently pursuing a master’s degree in bioethics at Emory.
SPRING 2015
15-EU-EMAG-0023 Emory Magazine Spring 2015.indb 27
magazine
27
4/27/15 5:34 PM