Joking with disability: what's the difference between the comic and the tragic in disability discourses?

Stronach, Ian and Allan, Julie (1999) Joking with disability: what's the difference between the comic and the tragic in disability discourses? Body and society, 5 (4). pp. 31-45. ISSN 1357-034X

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Abstract

This article discusses the discourses of disability through a parallel 'disabling' of its own text. It draws on literary as well as sociological sources in order to interrogate the nature and relations of the 'tragic', the 'heroic' and the 'comic'. The authors offer the conclusion that the comic is never quite absent from the discourse of tragedy (after Kundera), and turn that insight back on their own text, in an attempt to refuse the solemnities and closures of their own narrative.