Its interdisciplinarity, broad-ranging perspectives, and deeply enacted connection to material politics ought to make this an exciting and illuminating read for those interested in cultural studies, disability, or both. In this intersection, there is the potential for the best kind of acculturation, a mutually transformative and progressive growth.
Coherent, direct, and informative, Keywords for Disability Studies will undoubtedly generate questions and provide valuable resources for students and scholars alike in nearly any discipline for the foreseeable future.
The volume engages some of the most pressing debates of our time, such as prenatal testing, euthanasia, accessibility in public transportation and the workplace, post-traumatic stress, and questions about the beginning and end of life.
The essays approach disability as an embodied condition, a mutable historical phenomenon, and a social, political, and cultural identity. Visit keywords. Skip to content Home Keywords american studies anthropology disability studies Keywords for Disability Studies. Paradoxically, such quarantining sometimes promoted social cohesiveness within and even across different types of institutions.
A patient-run literary journal published in a public nineteenth-century asylum for the insane, for example, records a visit by students from a school for the blind; another article in the journal speculates on the increased susceptibility of blind and deaf people to mental illness, showing an appreciation for the shared social vulnerability of all of these groups. Such institutional dispatches suggest a flickering awareness of institutionalization as the grounds for identifying a common set of experiences.
Such connections were the grounds for political activism. As with segregation, colonialism, and apartheid, shared experiences of social separation and political disenfranchisement ultimately galvanized many people with disabilities and their supporters toward a common purpose.
However, before the s, politicized protests against the oppressive features of institutionalization and discrimination were scattered and generally did not speak for broad categories of disability. And when the league approached leaders of the Deaf community to make common cause, they were rebuffed on the grounds that the Deaf were not disabled or unemployable Burch , Major legislation and policy initiatives in the United States and worldwide reflect this shift, with profound implications for governments, businesses, and citizens—disabled and nondisabled alike.
Although the social model predominates, in much recent scholarship, disability refers to a subjective state, the condition not only of identifying as disabled but also of perceiving the world through a particular kind of lens. Despite the lingering popular sense that disability represents deficiency or defect of body or mind, the cultural or, alternately, biocultural model of disability as a relationship between body and society is gaining increasing legitimacy in law, policy, and the social environment worldwide.
Whereas too often the experience of disability entered the historical record only through the words of those who tried to cure, tame, correct, or end it, disability studies scholarship is now focused on building—as well as excavating from the past—a rich and self-conscious record of the perspectives of disabled people themselves.
Each of these political-cultural-academic movements began with a first wave of identifying and resisting oppressive structures, which was followed by attempts to recover a cultural heritage as a backdrop for individual and collective expression in the present.
Intersectional modes of analysis point to the common interests, struggles, and pleasures these movements can promote. While some scholars and activists claim or assume that disability is a category that cuts across cultures, others have noted that disability studies rests on assumptions derived from and specific to the Western world, and that its histories and archives continue to have a strongly Euro-American orientation.
Disability scholarship and activism in Europe and North America have long sought independence for people with disabilities, a demand that arose in reaction against being treated as passive, voiceless, and dependent. In the s, the independent living movement was born in Berkeley, California, and quickly took hold throughout the United States and Europe, with the goal of achieving greater autonomy and inclusion by providing people with disabilities with personal assistants and adaptive technology.
However, as Eva Kittay has noted, largely overlooked in the quest for autonomy is the fact that the independence of disabled consumers is contingent on the labor of personal assistants who are almost always immigrant women, sometimes with unclaimed disabilities of their own.
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