Eleven titles about disability as an ethics of care

Jodi-Ann Burey (she/her) is a writer and critic who works at the intersections of race, culture, and health equity. She is the author of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work.

At Electric Lit Burey tagged eleven books "that in one way or another touch on disability identity." One entry on the list:

Easy Beauty by Chloé Cooper Jones

This gripping memoir from philosopher and two-time Pulitzer finalist Chloé Cooper Jones is part travelogue, part philosophical text, and part search for beauty anywhere and everywhere: a Beyonce concert in Milan; a tennis tournament in Palm Springs; a bar in Brooklyn. Cooper Jones reckons with chronic physical pain, as well as the pain of navigating a society that dismisses visible illness, disability and difference as “less than”—less capable, less worthy, and less beautiful. Not one page in my copy of Easy Beauty is without marginal notes or lines and lines of yellow highlight. In one well-marked section, Cooper Jones discusses the beauty and value we are told broken Greek statues possess, despite disfigurement. She contrasts that to the ire hurled at Marc Quinn’s Alison Lapper Pregnant, a 12 foot marble, naked and pregnant figure of Alison Lapper, an artist who was born without arms and shortened legs. Cooper Jones reminds us: “... Quinn’s sculptures are not of broken forms, but of whole forms, whole people, complete bodies.”

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue