“Masking Disclosure speaks to the value of ambiguity, resistance, discomfort, and challenge in thinking about the stories people tell about themselves to and with others. While grounded in disability studies, it offers intersectional connections and ways of deepening analysis and attention to other forms of identity negotiation.” —Stephanie Kerschbaum, author of Signs of Disability
“Although Masking Disclosure is about disability and disclosure, it also teaches us much about silence and speech, masking, identity, and embodiment, all from an accessible perspective. Tacke expertly navigates shifts in attitudes around health and autonomy, and the language we use for our own identities in relation to biomedical ‘expertise.’”—Jay Dolmage, author of Disabled Upon Arrival: Eugenics, Immigration, and the Construction of Race and Disability
Adopts a rhetorical framework to understand the amplified complications and stakes of communication within the context of disability and trauma disclosures.
Elizabeth Tacke’s Masking Disclosure: Women Negotiating Disability and Trauma makes a significant intervention in disability studies scholarship by exploring how women navigate the complex terrain of disclosing disability and trauma. Situated within the fields of feminist disability studies, trauma studies, rhetoric, and life writing, the book draws on narrative and ethnographic data from self-identified women with disabilities to investigate how participants in small writing and reading groups engage in forms of “masking” disclosure—agentic, tactical, and embodied forms of disclosure that simultaneously reveal and conceal aspects of themselves.
Tacke proposes four rhetorical forms of masking that use different techniques to disguise, distance, soften, or co-construct the specifics of the stories we tell about ourselves. Discussing not only how and why participants enact disclosures but also the rhetorical context of those disclosures and their content and form, Tacke argues that masking disclosure affords representation, legitimization, and healing for individuals. At the same time, more critical attunement to how masked disclosures operate can help us sustain the productive ambiguity of masking, respect the rhetoricity of those often denied it, and center relational forms of care and justice.
Elizabeth Tacke is Associate Professor of English and Allied Faculty of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Eastern Illinois University. She is a critical feminist disability studies scholar who also specializes in cultural rhetorics, life writing studies, critical prison studies, and teacher education.
Contents
List of IllustrationsPreface Disclosing Exigence: My Path to Masking
INTRODUCTION Threads of Disclosure: Mapping the Rhetorical Complexities of Masking
CHAPTER 1 Moving the “I” of My Story to the Margins: Parallel Masking
CHAPTER 2 “Trying On” Disclosure: Generic Masking
CHAPTER 3 Inviting Productive Ambiguity: Figurative Masking
CHAPTER 4 Adopting Emotional Distance: Affective Masking
CONCLUSION Building Care: Finding Recognition in Community Spaces
Acknowledgments
Appendices
Works Cited
Index
