"But You Don’t Look Sick": Dismodernism, Disability Studies and Music Therapy on Invisible Illness and the Unstable Body

Authors

  • Samantha Bassler Westminster Choir College of Rider University / The Open University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.15845/voices.v14i3.802

Keywords:

invisible illness, invisible disability, invisible body, unstable body, dismodernism

Abstract

Invisible illness poses a unique problem vis-a-vis disability and society, since invisible illness does not present itself outwardly and does not easily mark a person as having a disability. Using Lennard Davis's understanding of dismodernism as a guide, this essay explores the cognitive dissonance of invisible illness and instability in the body, examining the juxtaposition of disability studies and music therapy using the unstable and invisible difference of the body as a case study. The purpose of the essay is to propose a meeting ground between disability studies and music therapy, and suggest further avenues for working together to promote greater understanding and compassion for persons living with invisible illness.

Author Biography

Samantha Bassler, Westminster Choir College of Rider University / The Open University

Samantha Bassler, a musicologist from Brooklyn, NYC, teaches as Lecturer in Music at Rutgers University at Newark, and as Adjunct Professor at Westminster Choir College of Rider University. After receiving master’s degrees in musicology at Rutgers University and Merton College, the University of Oxford, Bassler’s PhD (The Open University, UK) looks at eighteenth-century antiquarianism and the reception history of early English music. While still a master’s student, Bassler discovered disability studies, first as an advocate for invisible illnesses, and secondly as an academic who pursued disability theory as a construct for understanding both early modern and contemporary cultures. Her primary research interests then focus on music as a cultural product, and include early music as consumed by later antiquarians, music and politics in the English Reformation, and disability and femininity in Elizabethan England. Bassler’s articles have been published in Music Theory Online and postmedieval; her next essays will appear in the Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies (Oxford University Press, 2014), and The Avid Listener (Norton, 2014, an online publication edited by Felicia Mikayawa and Andrew Dell’Antonio).

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Published

2014-10-31

How to Cite

Bassler, S. (2014). "But You Don’t Look Sick": Dismodernism, Disability Studies and Music Therapy on Invisible Illness and the Unstable Body. Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy, 14(3). https://doi.org/10.15845/voices.v14i3.802

Issue

Vol. 14 No. 3 (2014): Special Issue on Music Therapy and Disability Studies

Section

Invited Submission - Special Issue

License

Articles published prior to 2019 are subject to the following license, see: https://voices.no/index.php/voices/copyright