The late Christina Crosby was a Professor of English and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Wesleyan University. She was the author of The Ends of History: Victorians and the 'Woman Question' and published essays and reviews in Victorian Studies, PMLA, College English, and elsewhere.
"A Body, Undoneis a memoir about surviving in the midst of
community, reflecting on loss, the interminable nature of grief,
and on the meaning of living on. Christina Crosby is a writer whose
intellectually expansive reflection is simply awe-inspiring. With
prose that can only be described as burning with lucidity and
precision, she takes us through the aftermath of the accident and
the gradual understanding of its implications for her physical and
psychic life. An extraordinary and luminous book."
*Judith Butler, author of Precarious Life*
"Christina Crosby insists on the challenge of living on after great
pain and loss and shows us what it is like to begin this altered
life in ones middle years. Tender, fierce, and eloquent, A Body,
Undone is a necessary, even life-altering book."
*Laura S. Levitt, author of American Jewish Loss after the
Holocaust*
"Christina Crosby has written a frank and lyrical memoir describing
her traumatic experience of becoming quadriplegic and offering
profound reflections on the role of the body in identity, on the
humbling experiences of being cared for, on privilege and class in
caregiving, and on loss of control. Crosbys eloquence and brutal
honesty make this a stunning and harrowing account of the
experience of human loss."
*Resources for Gender and Women's Studies: A Feminist Review*
"Crosby's powers of articulation, her ethical convictions, her deep
knowledge of politics, literature, and culture, her queer
commitments, and her dedication to using language to convey the
farthest limits of embodied experience combine to make A Body,
Undone a transformational read, one that underscores the basic
facts of our interdependence, precarity, and capacity to sustain
each other."
*Vela Magazine*
"[I]nher surgically incisive descriptions of how it feels to live
in her ravaged body and to redefine herself within extreme new
limits, Crosby resists both self-pity and the too-easy narrative of
hardship overcome. Instead, she asks readers to recognize how
messy, precarious, and queer, in every sense of the word, life in a
body can be."
*TheNewYorker.com*
"Most memoirs about life with a disability 'almost always move
toward a satisfying conclusion of lessons learned, Crosby writes.
But Crosby knows that there are no satisfying conclusions when one
lives 'a life beyond reason'--and that bit of wisdom alone is cause
to read this elegant and harrowing book."
*The Washington Post*
"Perhaps the most profound lesson of Crosby's book is how lonely
pain is...[she] is not the person whose suffering can be made into
a vessel for other people's metaphors. Her book's drama lies in
trying to decode who she really is."
*New Republic*
"[A Body, Undone]is fascinating and painful, humiliating and
beautiful...There's no bitterness in these pages, no anger at the
action that led to her injury."
*Mediander.com*
"[S]harp and transformative A Body, Undone is about a calamitous
accident, yes, but its also about the accident of all our lives,
and the inevitable mortality that informs every one of our
days."
*Los Angeles Review of Books*
"Part grueling diary of living with chronic pain and part
celebration of survival, this is a complicated understanding of
what it means to change your definition of living while living
through it."
*Elle*
"Conversations within feminist and Disability Studies classrooms
and contribute to our collective effort to theorize relationality,
embodiment, and interdependence."
*Disability Studies Quarterly*
"In its intellectual generosity, its frankness, and its dexterous
deployment of the resources of scholarship toward the ends of life
writing, A Body, Undone recalls other invaluable memoirs of illness
and disability by feminist academics like Susan Gubars Memoir of a
Debulked Woman and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwicks A Dialogue on Love,
though unlike those antecedents Crosby engages explicitly with the
now-robust field of disability studies."
*Feministing.com*
"Crosby discusses her reality with a candor that must be
experienced to be believed. And the reader is left to face the
truth that one's embodiment and the world that goes with it) can
change utterly and forever, in a heartbeat."
*Inside Higher Ed.*
"Our sense of ourselves cannot exist outside our bodies. As such,
Crosby's act of writing the body is a powerful act of
self-preservation."
*Inside Higher Ed.*
"Crosby weaves poetry and literary references into her her story in
an attempt to find meaning in her life. Her poignant, well-written,
and thoughtful memoir will be of interest to scholars in feminist,
gay, and disability studies."
*Journal of American Culture*
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