Book Donna
Book Donna
Disabled Bodies and Ableist Acceptance (SociologicalImagesSeeingIsBelieving)
_Cross-posted at Cyborgology._
(Photo by Howard Schatz)
My post today comes from a class on ableism and disabled bodies that I taught
earlier this past semester in my Social Problems course. Its inception came
from the point at which I wanted to introduce my students to Donna Haraway’s
concept of cyborgs, because I saw some useful connections between one and the
other.
My angle was to begin with the idea of able-bodied society’s instinctive, gut-
level sense of discomfort and fear regarding disabled bodies, which is
outlined in disability studies scholar Fiona Kumari Campbell’s book _Contours
of Ableism._ Briefly, Campbell distinguishes between _disableism,_ which are
the set of discriminatory ideas and practices that construct the world in such
a way that it favors the able-bodied and marginalizes the disabled,
and_ableism,_ which is the set of constructed meanings that set disabled
bodies themselves apart as objects of distaste and discomfort. In this sense,
disabled bodies are imbued with a kind of _queerness_ – they are Other in the
most physical sense, outside and beyond accepted norms, unknown and
unknowable, uncontrollable, disturbing in how difficult they are to pin down.
Campbell identifies this quality of unknowability and uncontainability as
especially, viscerally horrifying.
Campbell connects more directly to Haraway’s cyborgs when she ...
SociologicalImagesSeeingIsBelieving
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