Imprinting Our Image

By April D'Aubin

Even if you have surpassed information overload, a historic new book, Imprinting Our Image, edited by Diane Driedger and Susan Gray, demands your attention. The book stands as the first anthology with a wide representation of women authors with disabilities from developing countries. In this global tour de force, 30 writers from 17 countries provide dramatic insights into previously unexplored areas of women’s experience.

Mrs. E., a Brazilian, illustrates how the stigma of leprosy persuaded her to forego marriage. Zhang Li, of the People’s Republic of China, describes her personal odyssey which began with learning how to write holding a pencil in her mouth and which culminated in the international publication of her poetry and prose. Both Ntiense Ben Edemikpong of Nigeria, in a treatise against female genital mutilation, and Australian Leslie Hall’s attack on beauty pageants, condemn their societies’ objectification of women’s bodies and illuminate the negative affects of patriarchy’s hegemony over the bodies of women.

As this sampling indicates, the book’s authors tackle a wide range of issues germane to both the women’s and the disability rights movements. Driedger, a former Disabled Peoples’ International (DPI) staff person, assembled a globally representative group of authors from this network as well as an Advisory Committee comprised of a former senator, a journalist and an administrator -- all of whom have disabilities.

Seven years of work culminates in Imprinting Our Image. The behind-the-scenes story warrants a book of its own. In accepting the book for publication, feminist publisher gynergy books recognized that its significance transcended the personal to the geo-political.

Developing world women with disabilities also have recognized the power of the personal. In 1991, Susan Gray, a doctoral candidate at the University of Manitoba (who shares her own story of disability in the book), travelled to El Salvador as a COPOH consultant for a functional literacy seminar for women with disabilities. Hearing her describe the book’s history, these women were inspired by the book’s self-help message. They resolved to write their own accounts and, indeed, some have triumphed as writers, with their work appearing in newspapers and on radio. Imprinting Our Image’s strong self-help message will illustrate for readers, just as it did for the Salvadorian writing students, the power of using the personal story to stimulate political and personal change.

Imprinting our Image is available for $12.95 from gynergy books.