Book review: Shakespeare's Military Spouses and Twenty-First-Century Warfare by Kelsey Ridge

Abstract

to re-appropriate the once-offensive term ‘queer’, so campaigners for disabled rights have seized on the term ‘crip’: ‘Let’s crip Richard and re-crip Richard and crip and re-crip Shakespeare studies – in whatever ways we can, as many times as it takes’ (p. 50). Part of this cripping is the attack on theatre as therapy, reliant as it is on ‘the medical model of disability’ (p. 89) according to which disability can be ‘cured’ and neurodiversity can ‘pass’ as neurotypicality. Loftis doesn’t mince her words: this model is rejected as ‘oppressive, dehumanizing, and fundamentally colonial in its impulses and orientation’. Typifying this approach is Kelly Hunter’s ‘Hunter Heartbeat Method’ (HHM) which, Loftis argues, teaches autistic children to ‘pass’ as neurotypical which ‘may not help to increase social acceptance for autistic identity and expression’ (p. 94). For Loftis, the idea that Shakespeare ‘can be used to fix them [...] implicitly says that autistic people are broken’ (p. 94). Moreover, the choice of text through which Hunter seeks to engage autistic children is darkly ironic: ‘Miranda’s words [in her exchange with Caliban] from The Tempest may uncomfortably haunt the image of the neurotypical adult teaching the autistic child to speak’ (p. 98). Loftis is much more positive about Hank Rogerson and Jilann Spitzmiller’s 2014 documentary, Still Dreaming, in which a group of elderly residents in the Lillian Booth Home for Actors (in New York) put on a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Loftis’s approving verdict on the film is that it ‘concludes that those who are ablebodied and neurotypical can learn to embrace disability culture and neurodiverse ways of understanding relationships, accessibility, sensory perceptions, and time’ (p. 102). She notes an appropriate parallel between the disorientation experienced in the Athenian forest and ‘the sensory perceptions of the neurodiverse actors’ (p. 108) and she argues that the film never articulates the language of theatre’s curative potential; rather it is a ‘means of strengthening [the] disability community’ (p. 117). This is an eloquently argued and important volume. Its stress, throughout, on social inclusion is passionately held. If, occasionally, it sounds overly critical to me that may well be a manifestation of my own neurotypical viewpoint. That I am now in a position to acknowledge that possibility is a testament to Loftis’s argumentative success.