Books on disability rights, activism, and theory. Check out our children's disability titles in the store as well.
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A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year for Nonfiction
"...an essential and engaging look at recent disability history."— Buzzfeed
One of the most influential disability rights activists in US history tells her personal story of fighting for the right to receive an education, have a job, and just be human.
“Disability rights activist Alice Wong brings tough conversations to the forefront of society with this anthology. It sheds light on the experience of life as an individual with disabilities, as told by none other than authors with these life experiences. It's an eye-opening collection that readers will revisit time and time again.” —Chicago Tribune
After contracting polio as a child, Sandra Gail Lambert progressed from braces and crutches to a manual wheelchair to a power wheelchair—but loneliness has remained a constant, from the wild claustrophobia of a child in body casts to just yesterday, trapped at home, gasping from pain.
In recent years, disability activism has come into its own as a vital and necessary means to acknowledge the power and resilience of the disabled community, and to call out ableist culture wherever it appears.
In this collection of essays, Lambda Literary Award-winning writer and longtime activist and performance artist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha explores the politics and realities of disability justice, a movement that centers the lives and leadership of sick and disabled queer, trans, Black, and brown people, with knowledge and gifts for all.
A CBC BOOKS BEST NONFICTION OF 2020
AN ENTROPY MAGAZINE BEST NONFICTION 2020/21
A NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY BOOK OF THE DAY (07/23/2022)
Fairy tales shape how we see the world, so what happens when you identify more with the Beast than Beauty?
A quick, easy, and educational comic book guide that will help change the way we talk about sex and sexuality for all bodies.
"This guide can help disabled people (and their partners) on their journey toward self-love, better communication, and confidence." –– Alice Wong, Founder and Director, Disability Visibility Project
All different kind
A provocation to reclaim our disability lineage in order to profoundly reimagine the possibilities for our relationship to disability, kinship, and carework
A deep dive into the spectrum of Autistic experience and the phenomenon of masked Autism, giving individuals the tools to safely uncover their true selves while broadening society’s narrow understanding of neurodiversity
The work of queer autistic scholar Nick Walker has played a key role in the evolving discourse on human neurodiversity.
Neuroqueer Heresies collects a decade's worth of Dr. Walker's most influential writings, along with new commentary by the author and new material on her radical conceptualization of Neuroqueer Theory.
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Living the Edges: A Disabled Woman's Reader, the lives of women with disabilities have not changed much. Still Living the Edges provides a timely follow-up that traces the ways disabled women are still on the edges, whether that be on the cutting edge, being pushed to the edges of society, or challenging the edges-the barriers in their way.
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From Homer to Helen Keller, from Dune to Stevie Wonder, from the invention of braille to the science of echolocation, M. Leona Godin explores the fascinating history of blindness, interweaving it with her own story of gradually losing her sight.
“[A] thought-provoking mixture of criticism, memoir, and advocacy." —The New Yorker
A Deafblind writer and professor explores how the misrepresentation of disability in books, movies, and TV harms both the disabled community and everyone else.
As a Deafblind woman with partial vision in one eye and bilateral hearing aids, Elsa Sjunneson lives at the crossroads of blindness and sight, hearing and deafness—much to the confusion of the world around her.
In Feminist, Queer, Crip Alison Kafer imagines a different future for disability and disabled bodies. Challenging the ways in which ideas about the future and time have been deployed in the service of compulsory able-bodiedness and able-mindedness, Kafer rejects the idea of disability as a pre-determined limit.
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“All too often,” wrote disabled architect Ronald Mace, “designers don’t take the needs of disabled and elderly people into account.” Building Access investigates twentieth-century strategies for designing the world with disability in mind.
A compelling account of recreating a life through writing, memory, and desire In the early evening on October 1, 2003, Christina Crosby was three miles into a seventeen mile bicycle ride, intent on reaching her goal of 1,000 miles for the riding season. She was a respected senior professor of English who had celebrated her fiftieth birthday a month before.
Barb Cook and 14 other autistic women describe life from a female autistic perspective, and present empowering, helpful and supportive insights from their personal experience for fellow autistic women. Michelle Garnett's comments validate and expand the experiences described from a clinician's perspective, and provide extensive recommendations.
Live boldly as a woman with ADHD This radical guide will show you how to cultivate your individual strengths, honor your neurodiversity, and learn to communicate with confidence and clarity.
This vital addition to carceral, prison, and disability studies draws important new links between deinstitutionalization and decarceration
Prison abolition and decarceration are increasingly debated, but it is often without taking into account the largest exodus of people from carceral facilities in the twentieth century: the closure of disability institutions an
In Authoring Autism Melanie Yergeau defines neurodivergence as an identity--neuroqueerness--rather than an impairment. Using a queer theory framework, Yergeau notes the stereotypes that deny autistic people their humanity and the chance to define themselves while also challenging cognitive studies scholarship and its reification of the neurological passivity of autistics.
The Ultimate Guide to Sex and Disability is the first complete sex guide for people who live with disabilities, pain, illness, or chronic conditions.
In Brilliant Imperfection Eli Clare uses memoir, history, and critical analysis to explore cure--the deeply held belief that body-minds considered broken need to be fixed. Cure serves many purposes. It saves lives, manipulates lives, and prioritizes some lives over others. It provides comfort, makes profits, justifies violence, and promises resolution to body-mind loss.
First published in 1999, the groundbreaking Exile and Pride is essential to the history and future of disability politics.
Based on the historic New York Times series, About Us features intimate, firsthand accounts on what it means, and how it feels, to live with a disability.
From the disability rights advocate and creator of the #DisabledAndCute viral campaign, a thoughtful, inspiring, and charming collection of essays exploring what it means to be black and disabled in a mostly able-bodied white America.
Keah Brown loves herself, but that hadn’t always been the case.
James Charlton has produced a ringing indictment of disability oppression, which, he says, is rooted in degradation, dependency, and powerlessness and is experienced in some form by five hundred million persons throughout the world who have physical, sensory, cognitive, or developmental disabilities.
In The Right to Maim Jasbir K. Puar brings her pathbreaking work on the liberal state, sexuality, and biopolitics to bear on our understanding of disability. Drawing on a stunning array of theoretical and methodological frameworks, Puar uses the concept of "debility"--bodily injury and social exclusion brought on by economic and political factors--to disrupt the category of disability.
Crip Theory attends to the contemporary cultures of disability and queerness that are coming out all over.
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"I read My Body Politic with admiration, sometimes for the pain that all but wept on the page, again for sheer exuberant friendships, for self-discovery, political imagination, and pluck. . . . Wonderful! In a dark time, a gift of hope.
-Daniel Berrigan, S.J.
"The struggles, joys, and political awakening of a firecracker of a narrator. . . .
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In this absorbing story of the changing life of a community, the authors of Deaf in America reveal historical events and forces that have shaped the ways that Deaf people define themselves today. Inside Deaf Culture relates Deaf people's search for a voice of their own, and their proud self-discovery and self-description as a flourishing culture.
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"I remember I believed all my problems would be solved, if only I were beautiful. Then I was beautiful."--Jonathan Mack, from his story "The Right Way to be Crippled and Naked."
An NPR Favorite Book of 2019
This is a sex book. It's a book about having sex by yourself, with one person, or with twenty people if everyone is down. It's about saying words like cunt, fuck, and come. But it's also about the things we don't talk about--the mystery, the expectations, and the bullshit that can go along with sex.
Disability, like questions of race, gender, and class, is one of the most provocative topics among theorists and philosophers today.
Featuring fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and comics by 48 writers from around the world, QDA: A Queer Disability Anthology proves that intersectionality isn't just a buzzword. It's a penetrating and unforgettable look into the hearts and souls of those defiant enough to explore their own vulnerabilities and demonstrate their own strengths.
Kirkus Reviews' Best Books of 2018 2018 Sarton Women's Book Awards finalist in Memoir Francine Falk-Allen was only three years old when she contracted polio and temporarily lost the ability to stand and walk.
Giants. Midgets. Tribal non-Westerners. The very fat. The very thin. Hermaphrodites. Conjoined twins. The disabled. The very hirsute. In American history, all have shared the platform equally, as freaks, human oddities, their only commonality their assigned role of anomalous other to the gathered throngs.