Images of disability pervade language and literature, yet disability is, as sex was in the Victorian world, the ubiquitous unspoken topic in today's culture. The twenty-five essays in Disability Studies provide perspectives on disabled people and on disability in the humanities, art, the media, medicine, psychology, the academy, and society.

Drawing on examples from art, media, fashion, history and memoir, cultural critic Rosemarie Garland-Thomson tackles a basic human interaction which has remained curiously unexplored, the human stare. In the first book of its kind, Garland-Thomson defines staring, explores the factors that motivate it, and considers the targets and the effects of the stare. While borrowing from psychology and biology to help explain why the impulse to stare is so powerful, she also enlarges and complicates these formulations with examples from the realm of imaginative culture. Featuring over forty...