Cultural Locations of Disability

Mitchell, David T.,Snyder, Sharon L.

ISBN 10: 0226767329 / ISBN 13: 9780226767321

Published by University of Chicago Press, 2006

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Synopsis:

In Cultural Locations of Disability, Sharon L. Snyder and David T. Mitchell trace how disabled people came to be viewed as biologically deviant. The eugenics era pioneered techniques that managed "defectives" through the application of therapies, invasive case histories, and acute surveillance techniques, turning disabled persons into subjects for a readily available research pool. In its pursuit of normalization, eugenics implemented disability regulations that included charity systems, marriage laws, sterilization, institutionalization, and even extermination. Enacted in enclosed disability locations, these practices ultimately resulted in expectations of segregation from the mainstream, leaving today's disability politics to focus on reintegration, visibility, inclusion, and the right of meaningful public participation.

Snyder and Mitchell reveal cracks in the social production of human variation as aberrancy. From our modern obsessions with tidiness and cleanliness to our desire to attain perfect bodies, notions of disabilities as examples of human insufficiency proliferate. These disability practices infuse more general modes of social obedience at work today. Consequently, this important study explains how disabled people are instrumental to charting the passage from a disciplinary society to one based upon regulation of the self.

About the Author: Sharon L. Snyder and David T. Mitchell are faculty in the Department of Disability and Human Development and the Interdisciplinary PhD Program in Disability Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Together they have made four documentary films, authored three books, and led seminars in disability as a matter of pedagogy, politics, culture, and history.

Bibliographic Details

Title: Cultural Locations of Disability
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Publication Date: 2006
Binding: Paperback
Condition: Good