Susan M. Schweik
Forfatter af The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public
Om forfatteren
Susan M. Schweik is Professor of English and co-director of the Disability Studies Program at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of A Gulf So Deeply Cut: American Women Poets and the Second World War.
Værker af Susan M. Schweik
Satte nøgleord på
Almen Viden
- Køn
- female
Medlemmer
Anmeldelser
Statistikker
- Værker
- 1
- Medlemmer
- 72
- Popularitet
- #243,043
- Vurdering
- 4.7
- Anmeldelser
- 1
- ISBN
- 5
Schweik writes of the intersectionality of her model, “Gender, race, sexuality, religion, and national identity are inexorably intertwined with disability and class in the culture(s) of ugly law, producing a variety of ugly identities, both at each specific moment of ordinance enforcement…and in the broader social order that framed, ignored, fought over, and accepted the state and city codes” (pg. 141). The laws’ most flagrant violation of due process involved the interpretation of female beauty. The laws examined women’s “lack of attraction and beauty,” as well as “leanness and stoutness, shortness and tallness,” if they were awkward, the condition of their hair, the size of their breasts, and whether or not they dressed pleasantly (pg. 145). In attempting to limit the mobility of women, the laws created categories for which any women could face arrest. Schweik continues, “Cities across the country…embedded the ugly law specifically within a matrix of codes concerning local purity: decency and exhibition, gender and sexuality…These patterns of codification make clear that the ugly law was intrinsically tied to laws of sex and gender” (pg. 144). While male vagrancy and “ugliness” usually involved missing limbs or severe injury, many laws defined female ugliness in terms of variance from idealized female beauty, equating the display of these differences with prostitution and other women whom society viewed as out of their place (pg. 145). These laws, which defined any physical or sexual aberrance as criminal, reinforced notions of white male superiority.… (mere)