Today’s feature is “Of ‘Sound’ and ‘Unsound’ Body and Mind: Reconfiguring the Heroic Portrait of Harriet Tubman” by Janell Hobson in Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies.
From the article‘s conclusion:
“That Tubman further describes her slave experience and discusses at length her disability in this monologue does much to complicate her iconicity in popular culture and to expand on this historical discourse for black feminist disability studies.” (208)
About the author:
Janell Hobson is Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University at Albany, State University of New York, where she currently serves as Department Chair. She is the author of Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture (Routledge, 2005, 2nd ed. 2018) and Body as Evidence: Mediating Race, Globalizing Gender (SUNY Press, 2012). She also writes and blogs for Ms. Magazine and authored several cover stories for the magazine, including “Beyoncé’s Fierce Feminism” (Spring 2013). She also writes and engages in scholarship on representations of historical figure, Harriet Tubman. Hobson is working on two projects, under contract with Routledge: a third book, When God Lost Her Tongue: Historical Consciousness and the Black Feminist Imagination, and an edited collection, The Routledge Companion to Black Women’s Cultural Histories: Across the Diaspora, from Ancient Times to the Present.
Anti-Ableist Composition 