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Brenda Jo Brueggemann,
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Georgina Kleege
What Her Body Taught (or, Teaching about and with a Disability): A Conversation

Judy Rohrer
Toward a Full-Inclusion Feminism: A Feminist Deployment of Disability Analysis

Wendy Kozol
Miss Indian America:
Regulatory Gazes and the Politics of Affiliation

Phoebe Farris
Contemporary Native American Women Artists:
Visual Expressions of Feminism, the Environment, and Identity (Art Essay)

Roberta Murphy
Spectography (Fiction)

Andrea Smith
Native American Feminism, Sovereignty, and Social Change

Suzanne Owens
Asleep (Poetry)

Jacqueline deVries
Rediscovering Christianity after the Postmodern Turn (Review Essay)

Rosetta Marantz Cohen
Word Problems (Poetry)

Anne E. Fernald
A Feminist Public Sphere? Virginia Woolf’s Revisions of the Eighteenth Century

Greg Nicholl
The Visit; Moments Lifted (Poetry)

Allison Whittenberg
Ride the Peter Pan (Fiction)

Laura Hinton
No. 25 from "Winter Dreams" (Dirge) (Poetry)

News and Views

Cover Art

Helen Hardin, Medicine Woman, 1981. Four-color etching.

In this issue of Feminist Studies we offer our readers essays, commentaries, and creative writing that speak to the concept of alterity, the challenges of living/being in (but sometimes not necessarily of) the system, whether in terms of "mainstream feminisms," white patriarchal culture, Western religions, or disabled and nondisabled bodied sensibilities. Readers will find that each piece in the following pages suggests strategies for resistances and/or disruptions of institutionalized "norms" by offering alternate readings or counter-narrative scripts which make available new interventions and pedagogical possibilities. In challenging conventional assumptions, our authors use the politics of visibility to expose exclusions and insist upon accommodations and reciprocity. They demand as well that the academy and its scholarship be more consistently linked with and shaped by nonacademic settings and activisms.

At the head of this issue are two articles that repond to the call for feminists to pay greater attention to disability studies. Our lead article exemplifies a feminist theory of disability in which the theory emerges out of practice and lived experience. In "What Her Body Taught (or, Teaching about and with a Disability): A Conversation," Brenda Jo Brueggemann, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, and Georgina Kleege focus on their challenges and strategies as feminist scholars and teachers with disabilities in the classroom. Key to their discussion is the function of different structures–pedagogical and institutional–that both enable and deter their efforts. In the classroom, students "forgetting"about their disabilities or "normalizing" them seems to erase the "productive tension" through difference that their presence introduces. Their goal is not to "erase" disability, but rather to reconfigure students’ understandings of disability as not having a "master status"– to change the way disability "matters" to the students. On the topic of technology in the classroom what becomes immediately clear is that types of technology that work to aid some teachers with disabilities exclude others. Brueggemann suggests the need to think more radically about technology as not just a means of providing certain types of "access" for teachers and students with disabilities but also as creating possibilities for what can happen in a classroom when the presumption is that people learn in vastly different ways. Throughout their interaction they demonstrate that introducing disability and people with disabilities into college classrooms "changes and challenges the rhetoric of higher learning."

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