Face of Our Fear (1991)

Overview

A richly conceived essay about the evolving image of disability. Dwoskin begins with the declaration that the historically distorted images of people with disabilities constitute a “negation of selfhood”. He then traces this concerted effort through two thousand years of Western culture, beginning with the Greek notion of the idealized body and its opposite, the fabulous races. Using contemporary films clips, literary quotations, performance, and pictorial records, Face Of Our Fear looks at the Court’s infatuation with “monsters” during the Middle Ages, the “charity cripples” of the Enlightenment, the freakshows of the nineteenth century, each a resort to oppressive stigmatization.