Critic speak is tough, but we've got you covered.
Quote :Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity
Disability studies has arisen in the past twenty years to focus an organized critique on the constricted, inadequate, and inaccurate conceptualizations of disability that have dominated academic inquiry. Above all, the critique includes a challenge to the notion that disability is primarily a medical category. Consequently, disability studies contests the current academic division of labor in which the study of the phenomenon rests in the specialized applied fields (rehabilitation, special education, health, and so on) and the rest of the academic is largely exempt from meaningful inquiry into the subject of disability. By refusing the medicalization of disability and by reframing disability as a designation having primarily social and political significance, disability studies points to the inadequacy of the entire curriculum with respect to the study of disability.
Linton here is basically throwing shade on the academy for dropping the ball when it comes to disability studies.
Sure, she says: the university has been a leader in the decades following the Civil Rights movements when it comes to women's, gender, post-colonial, and racial and ethnic studies. The university has devoted much-needed critical attention to exploring and restoring those voices that have been silenced through political, economic, and cultural oppression.
But when it comes to disability, she says, the academy in the last twenty years has simply participated in the same marginalization and oppression that society at large has committed against the disabled.
This has happened, she says, because of the academy's insistence that the study of disability be conducted not by humanities or cultural studies divisions, but by the "applied" fields, such as the fields of health, education, social work, and law.
Linton, of course, doesn't want to remove disability studies from these fields because work in these divisions has made and continues to make tangible improvements in the lives of disabled people in everything from healthcare accessibility to education and employment opportunities to community access.
But here's what annoys Linton: when we look at disability only as a subject for these applied fields, then we're really just endorsing the idea that disability is an objective, organic, and medical problem to be "fixed" through these applied sciences.
The reality is, according to Linton, that disability is also—and maybe above all—cultural. It's the result of how we think and talk about bodies, minds, and people. And it's only when we begin to explore these social and cultural aspects of disability that we can begin to fully understand what it is.
So, until the academy gets its act together and starts incorporating disabilities studies into humanities divisions, exploring it alongside and with such important fields as feminist studies, African-American studies, ethnic studies, history, psychology, etc., we will never have the kind of understanding we need to ensure justice and equality for people with impairments.
In other words, step it up, academy (literary theory and cultural studies, especially)! Disability studies needs you and you need it!
Quote :Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity
Disabled people, and I will immediately identify myself as one, are a group only recently entering everyday civic life. A host of factors have typically screened us from public view. We have been hidden—whether in the institutions that have confined us, the attics and basements that sheltered our family's shame, the "special" schools and classrooms designed to solve the problems we are thought to represent, or riding in segregated transportation, those "invalid" coaches, that shuttle disabled people from one of those venues to another. The public has gotten so used to these screens that as we are now emerging, upping the ante of the demands for a truly inclusive society, we disrupt the social order. We further confound expectations when we have the temerity to emerge as forthright and resourceful people, nothing like the self-loathing, docile, bitter, or insentient fictional versions of ourselves the public is more used to […] We have come out not with brown woolen lap robes over our withered legs or dark glasses over our pale eyes but in shorts and sandals, in overalls and business suits, dressed for play and work—straightforward, unmasked, and unapologetic.
Take that, cure/cover/kill! Yeah, we have to quote from Claiming Disability twice, because this passage is just too important not to share, Shmoopers.
Basically, Linton is asserting that the days of the Ugly Laws and of hiding the disabled in hospitals and special schools and back bedrooms are over.
Instead of trying to mask disabilities and to segregate those who have them, the disabled are increasingly demanding full access to their communities, workplaces, and schools. And, in so doing, they are living full and fulfilling public lives, while neither denying nor being defined by their disabilities.
For Linton, the modern age of disability studies is the age in which impairment is simply a fact of the body, an example of the many forms in which bodies come. It is nothing to be ashamed of or restricted by. It simply is the body as the body is.