75 pages • 2 hours read
Ed. Alice WongDisability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century
Nonfiction | Anthology/Varied Collection | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Essay Topics
Analyze the symbols and motifs present in “Taking Charge of My Story as a Cancer Patient Where I Work.” Choose two: stories, drooling, hands, mouths, colleagues, food, medical terminology, and exhaustion. What is the thematic significance of each symbol? Why do you think Cejas drew attention to these elements? What do these symbols mean?
Choose two essays from this book that are in ideological tension with each other. Compare and contrast them. In what way do these two authors disagree? In what ways do they differ from each other? What common goals and/or values do these essays/authors express?
Choose one of the essays that are addresses to congress and/or the senate: “We Can’t Go Back” and “The Antiabortion Bill You Aren’t Hearing About.” What rhetorical choices are being made to support the author’s arguments? Are they effective? How and why?
How is “visibility” defined in this text? Why is it important for disability and disabled people to be visible?
What kinds of assistive technologies are discussed in Disability Visibility? Pick at least two essays that talk about assistive technology and consider the following questions: What makes these technologies important to the author? What are some of the problems associated with using these assistive technologies? How do these technologies shape their users’ daily experiences?
Consider two or more of the following essays: “Common Cyborg,” “Canfei to Canji,” “We Can’t Go Back,” “Gaining Power Through Communication Access,” “The Fearless Benjamin Lay,” and “On the Ancestral Plane.” How does each of these contributions interface with disabled history? What is the significance of disabled history in this book?
When taken as a whole, what do these essays “say” about contemporary academia and academic institutions? Does this book present a general consensus on this topic? What barriers and opportunities do academia pose for disabled people as a social group?
What is the importance of clothing in these essays? How do these writers interface with clothes (both literally and conceptually) in these essays?
When taken as a whole, does Disability Visibility favor a particular model of disability (e.g., medical, social, rights-based, charity, etc.)? Why or why not?
What is the importance of art and the arts industry in these essays? How do these authors write about art by, for, and/or about disabled people? How do these authors write about creating and consuming art as disabled people? When answering this question, consider essays such as “If You Can’t Fast, Give,” “There’s a Mathematical Formula That Proves I’m Ugly,” “Common Cyborg,” “Radical Visibility,” “How to Make a Paper Crane from Rage,” “Why My Novel Is Dedicated to My Disabled Friend Maddy,” Falling/Burning,” “Time’s Up for Me, Too,” and “The Beauty of Spaces Created for and by Disabled People.”
