My Body Politic
University of Michigan Press, 2006

About the book
Reviews of My Body Politic
Simi Linton reads selections from My Body Politic: one (text version); two (text version)
Recent events for My Body Politic
Book Simi Linton for an event
My Body Politic: An Illustrated History
Conversation with Simi Linton
Readers Guide to My Body Politic

About the book
Simi Linton’s story begins in the midst of the turmoil over Vietnam and concludes with a meditation on the war in Iraq, and our wounded veterans. Her story is as much a cultural as a political one, and so she reveals close encounters with Jimi Hendrix, Salvador Dali and James Brown, and then, as she becomes immersed in disability culture, introduces us to an exciting cast of disabled actors, writer, painters and dancers who inhabit her world.

My Body Politic weaves a tale that shows disability to be an ordinary part of the twists and turns of life, and simultaneously, a unique vantage point on the world.

Hitchhiking from Boston to Washington, DC in 1971 to protest the war in Vietnam, Simi Linton was injured in a car accident that paralyzed her legs and took the lives of her young husband and her best friend.

My Body Politic opens with her struggle to resume a life in the world. She then takes us along on the road she traveled – with stops in Berkeley, Paris, Havana, and back to her home in Manhattan – as she learns what it means to be a disabled person in America.
Along the way she completed a PhD, remarried, and became deeply committed to the disability rights movement. The book is populated with richly drawn portraits of Linton’s disabled comrades, people of conviction and lusty exuberance who dance, play – and organize – with passion and commitment.