Description: In Freak Inheritance, both leading authors and emerging voices use cutting-edge disability and cultural theories to expose the operations of eugenicist thought in historical and contemporary culture. It is the follow-up to the field-defining Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (1996).
Review Quotes: "legacy of 'freaks, ' those whose bodies do not conform to the cultural norms that define appearance and social value. Both an overview of eugenics, which aims to normalize and regulate bodies and their range of performances, and forms of morphological resistance to eugenics, this is an original and forceful collection on the capacities of extraordinary bodies for creation and defiance, and the external forms of constraint and containment that regulate many of them. Bodies resist what we make of them - they are what they become, whether we understand or identify with them or not. This book addresses such resistance as much as it does this containment."" -- Elizabeth Grosz, author of The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics and the Limits of Materialism