The cultural work of American freak shows, 1835-1940. The spectacle of the extraordinary body
Constituting the average man
Identification and the longing for distinction
From freak to specimen : "The Hottentot Venus" and "The Ugliest Woman in the World"
The end of the prodigious body.

Benevolent maternalism and the disabled women in Stowe, Davis, and Phelps. The maternal benefactress and her disabled sisters
The disabled figure as a call for justice : Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's cabin
Empowering the maternal benefactress
Benevolent maternalism's flight from the body
The female body as liability
Two opposing scripts of female embodiment : Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the iron mills
The triumph of the beautiful, disembodied heroine : Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The silent partner.

Disabled women as powerful women in Petry, Morrison, and Lorde. Revising Black female subjectivity
The extraordinary woman as powerful woman : Ann Petry's The street
From the grotesque to the cyborg
The extraordinary body as the historicized body : Toni Morrison's disabled women
The extraordinary subject : Audre Lorde's Zami : a new spelling of my name
The poetics of particularity.