Impairment or disability is often the result of living in a physical and social environment that is constructed for what Garland Thomson calls “normate” bodies (Garland Thomson 8). While these are partially based on the physical composition of “typical humans,” the meanings of these norms are culturally determined. Garland Thomson emphasizes the importance of understanding that value judgments like “disability,” “impairment,” and “limit” rely on the act of “comparing individual bodies with unstated but determining norms” that dictate expectations for how human beings should look and act (7). The rejection of the medical understanding of disability is central to its study in a humanities context instead, disability is placed alongside other cultural markers of “difference,” such as race, gender, class, ethnicity, and sexuality (Garland Thomson 5). In other words, I want to move disability from the realm of medicine into that of political minorities, to recast it from a form of pathology to a form of ethnicity.

To challenge entrenched assumptions that ‘able-bodiedness’ and its conceptual opposite, ‘disability,’ are self-evident physical conditions… Constructed as the embodiment of corporeal insufficiency and deviance, the physically disabled body becomes a repository for social anxieties about such troubling concerns as vulnerability, control, and identity. In the introduction to her text Extraordinary Bodies, Rosemarie Garland Thomson states her interest in “denaturaliz the cultural encoding” of disabled bodies by uncovering the ways in which disability is culturally constructed. The implications of these definitions are far-reaching, particularly in their capacity to grant or deny access to social services and support initiatives, making this type of scholarly discussion particularly imperative.

The dialogue happening throughout these texts is primarily interested in opening up a more productive language for talking about disability and overcoming stereotypical or reductive ways of thinking about the experiences of disabled people. Simi Linton, in particular, develops boundaries for the study of disability in a humanities context, seeking to distinguish it from the education and training that takes place in the applied fields. The three readings for this module all attempt to broach questions regarding how we can define “disability,” particularly when exploring its social, cultural, and political meanings using the tools of disability studies.

The Rejected Body by Susan Wendell