Abstracts Unpacked!

Abstracts Unpacked! Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. “Misfits: A Feminist Materialist Disability  Concept.”  Ethics of Embodiment.  Spec. issue of Hypatia 26.3 (Summer  2011): 591-609.             Use this as a means of composing an abstract for your own paper

 Read the following abstract carefully, not so much for its content as for what it’s doing in communicating what sorts of things it covers:

This article offers the critical concept misfit¹ in an effort to further think through the lived identity and experience of disability² as it is situated in place and time. The idea of a misfit and the situation of misfitting that I offer here elaborate a materialist feminist understanding of disability³ by extending a consideration of how the particularities of embodiment interact with the environment in its broadest sense, to include both its spatial and temporal aspects⁴. The interrelated dynamics of fitting and misfitting constitute a particular aspect of world-making involved in material-discursive becoming⁵. The essay makes three arguments: the concept of misfit emphasizes the particularity of varying lived embodiments and avoids a theoretical generic disabled body; the concept of misfit clarifies the current feminist critical conversation about universal vulnerability and dependence; the concept of misfitting as a shifting spatial and perpetually temporal relationship confers agency and value on disabled subjects⁶.

¹ In unpacking the abstract, we can see that, for instance, when the abstract announces, “This article offers the critical concept misfit,” it is calling attention to the concept of a word with a negative connotation (“misfit”) that is used to define certain members of society. 

² By following that with, “in an effort to further think through the lived identity and experience of disability,” the author then includes her project and article as part of the scholarly work that is theorizing the notion of identity and who focus on one particular identity (“disability”) within the field of identity studies. 

³ When the abstract says, “The idea of a misfit and the situation of misfitting that I offer here elaborate a materialist feminist understanding of disability,” it then locates this article more precisely within the academic conversation amongst feminists who study the materiel conditions of people’s lives, in order to understand how the environments people move between and among in their daily lives influence the ways in which those lives can be lived (what the advantages and constrictions the world places on groups and individuals). 

⁴ When the author then adds, “by extending a consideration of how the particularities of embodiment interact with the environment in its broadest sense, to include both its spatial and temporal aspects,” she lets readers know that she is adding to that scholarly conversation by examining the ways in which the bodies of those people designated as “misfits” are affected in space and time.  

⁵ When she then says, “The interrelated dynamics of fitting and misfitting constitute a particular aspect of world-making involved in material-discursive becoming,” she’s further adding to the conversation by interrogating how those who are seen as “fit” (able-bodied) and those who are not (“disabled”) are constructed and thereby constrained by the very ways in which our culture talks, reads, and therefore thinks about them. 

⁶ Finally, the author advances the three-part thesis that her paper will argue for:  “The essay makes three arguments: the concept of misfit emphasizes the particularity of varying lived embodiments and avoids a theoretical generic disabled body; the concept of misfit clarifies the current feminist critical conversation about universal vulnerability and dependence; the concept of misfitting as a shifting spatial and perpetually temporal relationship confers agency and value on disabled subjects.”