Cultural Locations Of Disability

by Snyder, Sharon L.

• ISBN13: 9780226767321
• ISBN10: 0226767329
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-05-15
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

InCultural 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.

Author Biography

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

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
Introduction: Cultural Locations of Disability	3	(34)
Part I. Dis-locations of Culture
ONE Masquerades of Impairment: Charity as a Confidence Game	37	(32)
TWO Subnormal Nation: The Making of a U.S. Disability Minority	69	(31)
THREE The Eugenic Atlantic: Disability and the Making of an International Science	100	(33)
Part II. Echoes of Eugenics
FOUR After the Panopticon: Contemporary Institutions as Documentary Subject	133	(23)
FIVE Body Genres and Disability Sensations: The Challenge of the New Disability Documentary Cinema	156	(29)
Part III. Institutionalizing Disability Studies
SIX Conclusion: Compulsory Feral-ization	185	(20)
Notes	205	(12)
Works Cited	217	(20)
Index	237