E-Book Overview
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's 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.
E-Book Content
Venus on Wheels
Venus on Wheels two decades of dialogue o n d i s a b i l i t y, b i o g r a p h y, and being female in america g e lya f r a n k
university of california press Berkeley Los Angeles London
University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2000 by the Regents of the University of California Portions of this book appeared elsewhere in earlier versions: “‘Becoming the Other’: Empathy and Biographical Interpretation,” Biography 8:3 (Summer 1985): 189–210. © 1985 by the Biographical Research Center; used by permission. “The Ethnographic Films of Barbara G. Myerhoff: Anthropology, Feminism, and the Politics of Jewish Identity,” in Women Writing Culture, ed. R. Behar and D. A. Gordon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 207–32. Used by permission. “Jews, Multiculturalism, and Boasian Anthropology,” American Anthropologist 99:4 (December 1997): 731–45. Used by permission of the American Anthropological Association; not for further reproduction. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Frank, Gelya, 1948–. Venus on wheels : two decades of dialogue on disability, biography, and being female in America / Gelya Frank. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-520-21715-2 (alk. paper).—ISBN 0-520-21716-0 (pbk. : alk paper) 1. DeVries, Diane. 2. Physically handicapped women—United States—Social conditions. 3. Physically handicapped women— United States—Biography. 4. Handicapped women—United States— Biography. 5. Handicapped—United States—Psychology. 6. Sociology of disability—United States. 7. Discrimination against the handicapped—United States. I. Title. HV3021.W66F73 2000 362.4´3´092 98-50444 [b]—dc21 CIP r99 Manufactured in the United States of America 08 10
07 06 05 9 8 7 6
04 03 02 5 4 3 2
01 1
00
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).
In memory of Hilda Kuper Ethnographer, novelist, playwright, biographer, teacher, friend
Contents Photographs follow page 42 Acknowledgments 1. My Introduction to Diane
ix 1
2. The Crisis of Representation: Why It Is Time for Cultural Biography
12
3. “There’s Nothing about the Disabled Woman and the Disabled Culture”—Diane DeVries, 1976
24<