Unimaginable Bodies: Intellectual Disability, Performance and Becomings (Transgressions: Cultural Studies and Education),Used

Product Description To move beyond the theory and practice divide, to leave the mindbody distinction behind us, to affirm lives rather than negate them, are among the most wise principles of our age. They are lessons learned from Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari: we still do not know what bodies can do, because we still think of bodies and minds in restrictive and hierarchical ways. Yet few, very few works push through to the other side or even show us what it might look like, instead of merely preparing a cerebral path, and in so doing falling back into older modes of thinking and outdated cultural models. The great achievement of Anna HickeyMoody's book on intellectual disabilities, dance and philosophy is then to have shown us a way to truly think of disability as ability, creatively, within multiple cultures and in changing environments. In offering a thoughtful, sensitive and genuinely practical immersion in the work of the Restless dance ensemble, she puts Deleuze and Guattari's concepts to work so that we may not only understand them, but also discover a world where they find a setting suited to a novel emphasis on multiple differences resistant to simple ordering and judgement. This allows for a powerful critique of medical discourses in their reliance on terminologies based around impairment and lack. HickeyMoody demonstrates the cost of defining levels of ability against norms and around the concept of wholeness. More importantly, though, thanks to her work on dance she shifts the academic, political and ethical frame for living in a world of different abilities away from classification and coping, and towards forms of affirmation sensitive to the power to challenge limits embodied by senses, affects and ideas. This book will change disciplines, not only because it makes us think in new ways, but because it releases minds and bodies too long devalued in bygone ones. Professor James Williams, the University of Dundee Unimaginable Bodies draws on the thought of Spinoza, and Deleuze and? Guattari, in novel ways in order to confront medical and sociological? categories of intellectual disability. When this philosophical? approach? is? coupled with HickeyMoody's fascinating reflections on her work with? Restless Dance Company, the ethics.? This vital and empowering book promises to transform mundane sense(s)?of? ability and disability. Professor Moira Gatens,? University of? Sydney 'Unimaginable Bodies is an indispensable study that deepens our understanding of disability and corporeality and offers us a luminous reframing of longstanding questions about bodies, ethics, senses, movement, and power.' Gerard Goggin , University of New South Wales, Australia Author biography: Dr. Anna HickeyMoody is a lecturer in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. She is interested in how we can reframe questions of social justice, and as such, her research intersects across cultural studies of youth, disability and gender. Drawing on philosophy and the arts, Anna is interested in how bodies marked as somehow being 'disadvantaged' might be thought in new ways. She is coauthor of Masculinity beyond the Metropolis (Palgrave) and coeditor of Deleuzian Encounters (Palgrave). Review 'To move beyond the theory and practice divide, to leave the mindbody distinction behind us, to affirm lives rather than negate them, are among the most wise principles of our age. They are lessons learned from Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari: we still do not know what bodies can do, because we still think of bodies and minds in restrictive and hierarchical ways. Yet few, very few works push through to the other side or even show us what it might look like, instead of merely preparing a cerebral path, and in so doing falling back into older modes of thinking and outdated cultural models. The great achievement of Anna HickeyMoody's book on intellectual disabilities, dance and philosophy is then to have show