This article uses a photograph of the famous American blind advocate Helen Keller window-shopping in Paris during the late 1930s to meditate on and, ultimately, to challenge the scholarly literature that limits the way we understand the concept of the flâneur, the celebrated street-walker who has been an icon of urban modernity since the 19th century. The article re-evaluates narratives of urban modernity by suggesting that, in terms of charting genealogies of modern subjectivity, the sensorial and tactile experiences of disabled people should be included alongside the able-bodied privileges of the flâneur. The photograph of Keller is juxtaposed with the image of a group of disabled veterans to explore how the gendered dimensions of disability were deployed in French visual culture in the interwar period. The article closes with a meditation on the possible limits of representing disability in the contemporary French public sphere.
This special section of Catalyst maps the central nodes of the emerging field of crip technoscience, which we situate at the intersection of feminist technoscience studies and critical disability studies. Crip technoscience marks areas of overlap between these fields as well as productive disciplinary and political tensions. Our section brings together critical perspectives on disability and science and technology in order to grapple with historical and contemporary debates related to digital and emerging technologies, treatments, risk, and practices of access, design, health, and enhancement.
In the last quarter of the 1930s, Carney Landis, an associate professor of psychology at Columbia University affiliated with the Psychiatric Institute of New York, headed a Committee for Research in Problems of Sex-funded research project in which he conducted interviews with 100 women between the ages of 18 and 35 who self-identified as physically disabled. Landis interviewed the women about their sex lives, their sexual identities, and their relationship to their bodies and published the results in 1942 under the title The Personality and Sexuality of the Physically Handicapped Woman. The book represents conventional psychosexual presumptions about disabled women's stunted personality and frustrated sexuality stemming from the absence of a Freudian "sexual moment." Yet, the original research notes, housed at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, reveal that many of these women engaged in acts of erotic touching that played a far more dynamic and complex role in the development of their sexual subjectivities than Landis or his researchers could recognize. This article examines how touch and tactility produced meanings for Landis' research subjects and thus illuminated forms of sexual subjectivity not regularly associated with either histories of disability or histories of sexuality. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).
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