Semester of Graduation
Summer 2018
Degree
Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
Department
English
Document Type
Thesis
Abstract
The Body in Pain / The Body in Ecstasy is a series of short lyric essays/extended poems which catalogue major discriminatory movements against disabled people in the 20th and 21st century, specifically in the United States. My work contains duel storylines, using these movements/categories of violence as frames for my own personal narrative, and connecting individual experience to larger historical structures. I do this to disrupt the notion that history is disconnected from the present, and showcase how humans are built by context, where personal and political are inexorably intertwined, and social development is tied to both the body and how the body is shaped by everyone/everything that came before. In disability studies, many theorists question the idea of “independence”, or how society conceptualizes the disabled as lacking in autonomy while considering able-bodied people as existing outside of interdependent structures. It is a privilege to be an individual, or to see oneself as individual in the larger ecosystem of reality. And a falsehood.
Date
5-30-2018
Recommended Citation
Kenny, Shannon, "The Body in Pain / The Body in Ecstasy" (2018). LSU Master's Theses. 4732.
https://repository.lsu.edu/gradschool_theses/4732
Committee Chair
Weinstein, Susan
DOI
10.31390/gradschool_theses.4732