Esme Cleall, "Colonising Disability: Impairment and Otherness Across Britain and Its Empire, c. 1800-1914" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
New Books in Disability Studies
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The Importance of Visibility in the Public Sphère
In this chapter, I argue that the popularity of the fricsture justified the significance of visibility as a contemporary social concern. In order to make this theoretical argument, what I needed to do in this chapter was really rooted through individuals and to bring their stories to the fore. And it will be noted that many of these performers, all in fact except for Joseph Merrick, were not only disabled or having some form of physical anomaly, but were also people of colour and often from colonial sites. This fact tells us something important about the relationship between disability and race in the constitution of bodily anomaly.
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