Rosemarie Garland-Thomson Quote
Now, Woolf calls her fictional bastion of male privilege Oxbridge, so I'll call mine Yarvard. Even though she cannot attend Yarvard because she is a woman, Judith cheerfully applies for admission at, let's call it, Smithcliff, a prestigious women's college. She is denied admission on the grounds thatthe dorms and classrooms can'taccommodate wheelchairs, that her speech pattern would interfere with her elocution lessons, and that her presence would upset the other students. There is also the suggestion that she is not good marriage material for the men at the elite college to which Smithcliff is a bride-supplying "sister school." The letter inquires as to why she hasn't been institutionalized.When she goes to the administration building to protest the decision, she can't get up the flight of marble steps on the Greek Revival building. This edifice was designed to evoke a connection to the Classical world, which practiced infanticide of disabled newborns.
Now, Woolf calls her fictional bastion of male privilege Oxbridge, so I'll call mine Yarvard. Even though she cannot attend Yarvard because she is a woman, Judith cheerfully applies for admission at, let's call it, Smithcliff, a prestigious women's college. She is denied admission on the grounds thatthe dorms and classrooms can'taccommodate wheelchairs, that her speech pattern would interfere with her elocution lessons, and that her presence would upset the other students. There is also the suggestion that she is not good marriage material for the men at the elite college to which Smithcliff is a bride-supplying "sister school." The letter inquires as to why she hasn't been institutionalized.When she goes to the administration building to protest the decision, she can't get up the flight of marble steps on the Greek Revival building. This edifice was designed to evoke a connection to the Classical world, which practiced infanticide of disabled newborns.
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About Rosemarie Garland-Thomson
Garland-Thomson co-directed a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on disability studies in 2000, which shaped the development of many scholars who now lead the field, and was a founding member and co-chair for two years of the Modern Language Association (MLA) Committee on Disability Issues in the Profession, which transformed the largest academic professional organization into a model of accessibility for organizations across the world. She established the field of feminist disability studies with seminal and definitional articles in feminist studies journals, including: "Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory", National Women’s Studies Association Journal (2002), which is reprinted in women’s studies and feminist textbooks and has been translated into Hebrew, Czech, and Turkish, and “Feminist Disability Studies: A Review Essay” in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (2005) which established a canon of feminist disability studies and set an agenda for future scholarship.
Garland-Thomson travels and speaks widely on the subject of disability studies in the US and abroad and has delivered major invited lectures and keynote addresses in: South Africa, Zimbabwe, Norway, Israel, Singapore, Sweden, Budapest, Canada, Germany, Iceland, Australia, the Netherlands, France, and England. Her extensive public intellectual work has advanced disability studies outside the university, including the following: images and ideas from her book Staring: How We Look (2009) were translated into an art exhibit at Davidson College in 2009 and was profiled in The Chronicle of Higher Education; she was selected as one of Utne Reader’s 2010 “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World". She has consulted and collaborated extensively about inclusion programs and initiatives with the Smithsonian Institution, the National Endowments for the Humanities and Arts, and the National Park Service on the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial; and her public scholarship pieces have appeared in well-known publications like The New York Times, The Huffington Post, and Al Jazeera. She is also frequently interviewed on the radio, for newspaper stories, and for documentary projects. In 2010, she received the Society for Disability Studies Senior Scholar Award for her contributions to building the field of disability studies.