20th century american culture
A01=Gelya Frank
american culture
anthropology
Author_Gelya Frank
Category=DNBM
Category=JBSF
Category=JBSF1
Category=JHMC
Category=VFJD
crisis of representation
cultural biography
cultural studies
disability culture
disability rights movement
disability studies
disabled women
empathy
epistemology
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_health-lifestyle
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ethics
ethnography
feminism
feminist rights moment
friendship
gender studies
life history
material world
mirror phenomenon
mixed genre ethnographic writing
morality
narrative ambiguity
popular culture
time
Product details
- ISBN 9780520217164
- Weight: 499g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 30 May 2000
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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In 1976, Gelya Frank began writing about the life of Diane DeVries, a woman born with all the physical and mental equipment she would need to live in our society - except arms and legs. Frank was 28 years old, DeVries 26. This remarkable book - by turns moving, funny, and revelatory - records the relationship that developed between the women over the next twenty years. An empathic listener and participant in DeVries' life, and a scholar of the feminist and disability rights movements, Frank argues that Diane DeVries is a perfect example of an American woman coming of age in the second half of the twentieth century. By addressing the dynamics of power in ethnographic representation, Frank - anthropology's leading expert on life history and life story methods - lays the critical groundwork for a new genre, 'cultural biography'. Challenged to examine the cultural sources of her initial image of DeVries as limited and flawed, Frank discovers that DeVries is gutsy, buoyant, sexy - and definitely not a victim.
While she analyzes the portrayal of women with disabilities in popular culture - from limbless circus performers to suicidal heroines on the TV news - Frank's encounters with DeVries lead her to come to terms with her own 'invisible disabilities' motivating the study. Drawing on anthropology, philosophy, psychoanalysis, narrative theory, law, and the history of medicine, "Venus on Wheels" is an intellectual tour de force.
Gelya Frank is a cultural anthropologist on the faculty of the Departments of Occupational Science & Occupational Therapy and Anthropology at the University of Southern California. She is the coauthor of Lives: An Anthropological Approach to Biography (1981).
