On the Literary Nonfiction of Nancy Mairs: A Critical Anthology (Critical Studies in Gender, Sexuality, and Culture)

Where much of the existing scholarship on Nancy Mairs has approached her essays in the context of disability studies, this book seeks to broaden the conversation through a wider range of critical perspectives and with attention to underrepresented aspects of Mairss oeuvre. With particular attention to the ways Mairs shapes her essays around a variety of “unspeakables”—such as depression, female sexuality and infidelity, mortality and death, or the struggle for faith in a post-modern world—this collection demonstrates Mairss provocative combination of bold ethics and subtle aesthetics.

Merri Lisa Johnson is Director of the Center for Womens and Gender Studies and an Assistant Professor of English and Womens Studies at the University of South Carolina Upstate. Susannah B. Mintz is an Associate Professor and Associate Chair of the Department of English at Skidmore College.

Foreword: Nancy Mairs on Nancy Mairs * Part 1: The Way In (Two Introductory Statements) * On Difficult Gifts: A Biographical Portrait of Nancy Mairs * On Counterphobic Displays: A Feminist Cripistemology of Unspeakable Embodiment * PART 2: FOUNDATIONAL STATEMENTS * Autopathography: Women, Illness, and Life-writing * “Making up the Stories as We Go Along”: Men, Women, and Narratives of Disability * Transforming the Tale: The Auto/Body/ographies of Nancy Mairs * Dismembering the Heterosexual Imaginary: The Infidelity Narrative in Nancy Mairss Remembering the Bone House * PART 3: NEW ESSAYS * On the Rhetoric of Gloom and Joy: In Turbulent Love with the World in A Troubled Guest  * On the Carnivalesque: Unruly Bodies in Nancy Mairs “On Touching by Accident" * On Depression Narratives: “Hence, into the dark, we write . . .” * On Nancys Husband George: Masculinity, Disability, and Sex after Cancer in Remembering the Bone House and Waist High in the World * On Marriage, Church, and Being a Feminist Catholic Sacraments of the Body in Ordinary Time * On Collaboration: Nancy Mairss Ethic of Community * Afterword: Staring at Nancy Mairs