Convenient Discrimination
Crips, Queers, and Other Misfits
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Publishing:6th Aug '26
£90.00
This title is due to be published on 6th August, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
Combining media studies and archival research, this book critically examines historic and contemporary examples of media representations of queerness and disability – often intersecting – to establish and demonstrate a theory of discriminatory convenience.
While social oppression is typically framed in terms of prejudice and hate, D. Travers Scott contends that discrimination against marginalized groups is often rooted in a shockingly banal perspective: they simply get in the way.
Focusing primarily on disabled persons and queer persons in addition to other marginalized demographics including non-Christians and the aged, this book draws on histories and discourses of industrialization, technology, and modernist ideals of efficiency to propose a theory of discriminatory convenience.
Convenient Discrimination places representations of queerness and disability in media texts ranging from Appalachian folk songs to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) within the context of both historic and contemporary discussions surrounding health, media, technology, and social movements to form a variety of compelling case studies. These analyses are further bolstered by Scott’s own autoethnographic accounts as a queer, formerly disabled activist-scholar.
This book skillfully combines media studies and archival research to articulate a nuanced cultural politics of convenient discrimination, ultimately demonstrating the utility of inconvenience as an analytic.
Convenient Discrimination offers a thoughtful and timely investigation into the unconscious discourses – convenience chief among them – that perpetuate discrimination in the 21st century. D. Travers Scott asks us to challenge our reliance on discourses of convenience and examine the racism, ableism, misogyny, homophobia, and other forms of hate it so often masks. Ranging in subject matter from film to autoethnography to US presidential history, Scott reaches surprising conclusions, asking new and provocative questions about how convenience functions in our rancorous, divided culture. * Jennifer Natalya Fink, Professor of English and Core Faculty of Disability Studies, Georgetown University, USA *
D. Travers Scott’s Convenient Discrimination: Crips, Queers, and Other Misfits offers a highly original intervention into debates about crip and queer oppression and marginalization. Moving beyond the media fixation on spectacular violence and symbolic annihilation, Scott argues that the social exclusion of certain bodyminds – aging, neurodivergent, disabled, resistant to rehabilitation – is driven less by hatred than by inconvenience. Misfits are grit in the machinery of neoliberal capitalism by refusing legibility, taking too much time and effort, and thwarting business as usual. Through wide-ranging objects of analysis, from theories of insanity and the use of electrotherapy to vaccine skepticism, the book traces entanglements of refusal and desire, reimagining inconvenience as a mode of resistance. * Katherine Sender, Professor of Communication, Cornell University, USA *
ISBN: 9781666960198
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
248 pages