Full Description
While social oppression is typically framed in terms of prejudice and hate, D. Travers Scott contends that discrimination against marginalized groups is often rooted in a shockingly banal perspective: they simply get in the way.
Focusing primarily on disabled persons and queer persons in addition to other marginalized demographics including non-Christians and the aged, this book draws on histories and discourses of industrialization, technology, and modernist ideals of efficiency to propose a theory of discriminatory convenience.
Convenient Discrimination places representations of queerness and disability in media texts ranging from Appalachian folk songs to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) within the context of both historic and contemporary discussions surrounding health, media, technology, and social movements to form a variety of compelling case studies. These analyses are further bolstered by Scott's own autoethnographic accounts as a queer, formerly disabled activist-scholar.
This book skillfully combines media studies and archival research to articulate a nuanced cultural politics of convenient discrimination, ultimately demonstrating the utility of inconvenience as an analytic.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Counting in the Ivory Tower
1. Toward a Theory of Convenience: A Special Interest in Entanglements
2. Charles Guiteau, Criminal Insanity, and Intra-actions of Directional Convenience
3. The Convenient Solution of Electroshock: Efficacy and Functional Pleasures of Accomplishment
4. Inconvenient Populations: GenX, 'Trainables,' and Olds
5. Rehabilitation Skepticism: The Cinematic Imaginary of Mark Bingham, the Refusal of Franklin Hardesty
6. Inconvenience Gain: Three Examples from The Great Inconvenience
Bibliography
About the Author
Index
