Disability Studies 2.0

<i>Literary Bioethics: Animality, Disability, and the Human</i> by Maren Tova Linett

We argue the need for coalition between trans and disability studies and activism, and that Disability Studies gives us the tools for this task. Our argument rests upon six facets. First and foremost, we explicitly acknowledge the existence of trans disabled people, arguing that Disability Studies must recognise the diversity of disabled people’s lives. Second, we consider how the homogenisation of womanhood, too often employed in transmisogonist arguments particularly when coming from those claiming to be feminists, harm both non-disabled trans women and cis disabled women. This leads to our third point, that Feminist Disability studies must be anti-reductive, exploring how gendered experiences rest upon other social positions (disability, queerness, race etc.) Fourth, we reflect upon the ways in which Disability Studies and feminism share a struggle for bodily autonomy, and that this should include trans people’s bodily autonomy. Finally, we argue that Trans and Disability Studies and activism share complex and critical relationships with medicine, making Disability and Trans Studies useful allies in the fight for better universal health care. We conclude by calling for our colleagues in Disability Studies to challenge transmisogony and transphobia and that transphobia is not compatible with Disability Studies perspectives.

In this essay, we propose that the Deleuzoguattarian rhizome offers a map and metaphor for the field of disability studies, especially as it develops outside the boundaries of a defined program or curriculum. As an example of rhizomatic growth, we discuss a series of events in the Philadelphia area in fall 2012 that focused on disability studies and disability arts and culture, including an art exhibition entitled What Can A Body Do? and a scholarly residency sponsored by the Greater Philadelphia Women’s Studies Consortium. We suggest that the art gallery offers a generative space for the growth of disability studies, disability aesthetics, and new models of access, and we emphasize the importance of cross-institutional collaboration in the development of disability studies not only as a field but as a field of energy.Keywords: rhizome, Deleuze and Guattari, art gallery, contemporary art, curator, access, audio description, multisensory, collaboration, consortium, disability aesthetics, What Can A Body Do?

Shape Stops Story Elizabeth F. Emens A Comment "I would like to suggest," Rosemarie Garland-Thomson tells us, "that 'shape structures story' is an informing principle of disability identity" (113). In her essay in this volume, Garland-Thomson eloquently describes how our bodies tell stories, create stories. Her founding principle—shape structures story—draws upon an essay by Caroline Walker Bynum about metamorphosis and continuity, about change as identity. Garland-Thomson's twist on this idea is best captured in her exegesis of Simi Linton's memoir of identity formation after her car accident: "Although her new shape is instantaneous, the new sense of self develops as a process that is simultaneously growth and healing. The recently impaired body pulls along the new sense of self, which resists and struggles as it reforms itself within a new community based on a shared sense of being in and relating to the world" (Garland-Thomson 119). The changed body pulls along the inner self, shaping and recreating that self in ways before unimagined. The account Garland-Thomson gives us of shape structuring story may seem at first surprising. Initially her idea of bodies creating stories rather than stories creating bodies seems in tension with what is arguably a dominant narrative of disability studies—the idea that the social model of disability should triumph over the medical model. [End Page 124] The medical model views disabled bodies as bodies needing a cure, whereas the social model views disability as a social category created by the context in which we live. Under the social model, someone who cannot walk up stairs is disabled only because stairs assume one kind of body rather than another. As Simi Linton asks her students, "If I want to go to vote or use the library, and these places are inaccessible, do I need a doctor or a lawyer?" (120). Whereas the dominant nondisabled culture tends to medicalize disabled bodies—always seeking a cure—disability studies focuses on the social context that renders certain bodies disabled. Garland-Thomson's rendering of disability as a shape that makes stories, rather than of bodies as constructed by storytelling, might seem then to invert the prevailing narrative of disability studies: the rejection of the medical model in favor of the social model. On closer inspection, though, Garland-Thomson says nothing to embrace the medical model over the social. Her account offers nothing to suggest that disability is a state that needs curing. On the contrary, through the narratives supplied by the film Murderball and works by Cheryl Marie Wade and Simi Linton, as well as her own narrative of the tongue dance, Garland-Thomson celebrates the power of bodies beyond the "norm" to create beautiful and powerful stories, stories to be cherished, not erased through medical cures. As she tells us early on, the imagined narratives of disability and disabled bodies are typically not "pretty ones" (114). As collected and rendered by Garland-Thomson, they become not pretty but passionate, powerful, extraordinary. Her essay climaxes with her description of the tongue dance, an elaborate dance begun by a colleague who is able to move only his tongue, and who therefore moves his tongue better than anyone. The original tongue dancer leads a train of aspiring imitators at the annual Society for Disability Studies dance, in a ritual that Garland-Thomson inscribes as the ethnic folk dance of the disability community. The dance—"the eroticism of [which] is lost on none of us" (121)—perfectly portrays the two themes Garland-Thomson teases out of her freshly positive narratives structured by disability: sexuality and community. Garland-Thomson generously narrates the tongue dance for those outside the community of the dance. Drawing on the language of disability, she renders the dance "accessible" to outsiders (00[8]), implying that they too might participate vicariously. But ultimately the outsiders are not participants. Their function is instead to bear witness to this moment of sexuality and community, to the power of bodies beyond the norm to come together in new ways that far...

In this article, the authors trace the possible political potential of their post-modernist, feminist approach to life story research with people with the label of “learning difficulties.” As a self-advocate with an ally, they define tagging along with each other as discovery science. The authors reflect on how they openly and critically write themselves into their life (story) as subjects in dialogue, which makes the driving force to negotiate openness, expose hegemonic power arrangements and inherent silences, highlight secrets of oppression and resistance, and revalue knowledge that risks being disqualified in current social sciences. To be able to do so, and to recognize activism, the authors reveal their choice to creatively apply a variety of research methodologies. Finally, they attempt to rethink and refine conceptualizations that pervade current theoretical developments in disability studies.

This systematic literature review aims to critically review theories on disability movements in the social science literatures and explores the impact of disability movements on combating stigma against people with disability. Using a systematic approach, 18,594 articles were screened from the Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar databases, yielding 47 relevant articles. After a thorough review, 16 articles were selected for analysis based on their focus on the impact of disability movements on stigma. Two experts in the fields of social inclusion and social movement studies conducted the assessment to avoid bias. The findings of this study reveal a growing recognition of the importance of disability movements in challenging societal attitudes and promoting social inclusion from both social movement and social model of disability perspectives. The review concludes that disability movements play a significant role in reducing stigma against people with disabilities. This study contributes novelty by integrating theoretical developments in disability studies with the practical impacts of disability movements across sectors. By synthesizing impact classifications from charitable to empowering, this study underscores the importance of ongoing research in this area to strengthen the impact of stigma reduction and promote social inclusion for individuals with disabilities globally.

NYU’s one-day symposium, Cripistemologies, was one of several conferences this year focused on the relationships between gender and sexuality studies and disability theory. Others included Debilitating Queerness: the Sixth Annual DC Queer Studies Symposium at the University of Maryland, College Park. Debilitating Queerness dovetailed with the University’s lecture series (bearing the same name), which featured (over the course of several months) lectures from Robert McRuer, Eli Claire, Jasbir Puar, and Heather Love. In her keynote address for the symposium, Puar offered a meditation on the normativizing impulses reflected in dominant modes of analysis in disability and transgender studies vis-a-vis the rubrics of debility and capacity. Cripistemologies organizers Lisa Duggan and Robert McRuer assembled a group of scholars based in the United States and Canada to speak to various dimensions of queer, trans, intersex, and disability theory. Organized into three panels, the day began with reflections on the recently published special issue of the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, featuring Katerina Kolarova, Robert McRuer, and Aly Patsavas. The second panel, “Injury, Illness, Chronic Pain, and Disability Studies,” brought together anthropologists S. Lochlann Jain and Karen Nakamura as well as ethnic and gender studies scholar Patrick Anderson. In the final panel, I joined Toby Beauchamp and Morgan

Postcolonial Francophone sub-African literature and film is inhabited by a legion of physically disabled characters, yet most critics see them as mere signifiers of the failure or tragedy of the postcolonial state. While disability studies has been slowly “cripping” the global and the postcolonial, postcolonial studies has, for the most part, turned a cold shoulder to its crips within. Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene’s 1975 film, Xala, calls for both a clinical unseeing of disability and a “coming out all over” of disability in Postcolonial Francophone Studies to recalibrate our focus toward those bodies that dwell in the frame but somehow end up not really mattering. Through the attentive study of varying valences and materialities of visibility, the article argues that Sembene’s film offers an early theorization of disability as a powerful visual counter-narrative to dominant discourses of the postcolonial nation and its hygiaesthetic body politic. Expanding on Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s notion of...

Book reviews

Disability studies (DS), disability studies in education (DSE), and connected frameworks (i.e., critical disability studies and disability studies critical race theory) challenge normative assumptions about ability and difference, emphasizing the social, cultural, and political dimensions of disability. When applied to inclusive education, these frameworks offer critical perspectives that center the voices and experiences of disabled people, their families, and those in allied fields. From 2014 to 2024, articles on inclusive education using disability studies frameworks were published more often in countries of the Global North than in the Global South, reflecting the need to extend this field of research to the voices and perspectives of disability studies scholars from the Global South and the unique lived experiences of disabled people and their families living there. Additionally, although articles offered overarching perspectives on inclusion, the researchers rarely named specific inclusive classroom practices or described them in a way that would assist educators in implementation. Furthermore, a disconnect was found between inclusive classroom practices and inclusion of students in educational decision-making. The field can subsequently benefit from more actionable research on how disability studies frameworks shape lesson planning, teaching strategies, and systemwide reforms concretely within varied educational landscapes.

The role of disability in Latin American contexts has attracted increased attention in recent decades, thanks in part to the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, adopted in 2006 and subsequently ratified by all Latin American and Caribbean countries, as well as most other nations throughout the world. This robust and detailed international legislation forms part of a broader tendency toward an expanded view of personhood and human rights, transcending nationally specific juridical contexts. The UN Convention has undoubtedly offered a much-needed framework for approaching injustices experienced by disabled people, particularly in contexts in which access to resources such as food, water, shelter, and education are limited by poverty, inequality, war, and natural disasters, as is the case for significant population sectors in Latin America. However, these injustices and inequalities remain in large part unresolved, particularly in the Global South, often due to discrepancies between legislation and lived reality, or the exigencies of global capital and its localized manifestations. Beyond the visibility of the UN Convention, and prior to its enactment, Latin American disability communities, disabled individuals, and advocacy organizations have played significant roles in promoting disability rights and opportunities in education, labor, the arts, social justice movements, and other sectors. In addition, Latin American scholarship in the interdisciplinary field of disability studies has grown in importance in recent decades, as evidenced by university programs and scholarly production in disability education, arts, human rights, mad studies, and disability history, among other areas. Many Latin American disability studies scholars note the British origins of the social model of disability, beginning in the 1970s, and in which, in contrast to the medical model, disability is located primarily in the social and physical environment, and not in the individual body of the disabled person. This shift toward the social model has undoubtedly impacted disability studies in Latin America, at times in dialogue with scholarship from Spain, the United States, the United Kingdom, and other countries. Yet a fuller picture of disability in the region must necessarily account for complex disability histories and the shifting, locally specific meanings of disability as shaped in part by coloniality and resistance, diverse indigenous practices and traditions, and locally lived experiences of gendered, racialized, and socioeconomic inequality. Latin American disability studies scholars continue to shape the field through detailed attention to nationally specific legislation, localized statistical studies, points of contact between disability studies and Latin American critical thought, and arts-based research and activism.

Because many faculty and graduate students pursue disability studies projects in an institutional vacuum (often being the only disability studies person in a department or institution), it’s exciting when faculty and graduate students come together to work on disability studies projects. Such has been the experience of the two authors of this piece: a graduate student who recently completed her Master’s thesis on hyperactive/ADHD rhetorics (Griffin) and her thesis advisor, whose research area is disability studies, rhetoric, and writing (Amy). As we’ve worked together, we’ve excitedly shared research that enriches both our writing projects, and we’ve exchanged teaching ideas to make our classrooms more inclusive. We’ve had the chance to work interdependently, including on this piece, where one of us got the project going and the other supplied the creative spontaneity we needed to finish it. Further, in our case, we’ve had the chance to openly identify as disabled and use crip humor to navigate our work together. Alongside these benefits, there are what we sincerely and euphemistically call generative tensions, which occur when access needs and desires conflict, when power dynamics re-assert themselves, and when attempts at change and adaptation fail.

Satisfaction Trends in Undergraduate Physiotherapy Education

Julie Avril Minich’s Accessible Citizenships: Disability, Nation, and the Cultural Politics of Greater Mexico is a necessary and refreshing intervention into disability studies and critical race and ethnicity studies. As one of the few monographs focused on disability and race, this book addresses how Chicana/o cultural producers, including Arturo Islas, Cherríe Moraga, Guillermo Arriaga, Ana Castillo, and Cecile Pineda, represent disability and the effects of the ideology of ability within their conceptualizations and critiques of political communities. These representations of disability within political community formations (rather than outside of or in opposition to them), Minich contends, “have the potential to reconfigure how we perceive the body politic and to transform what we imagine when we (to repurpose Benedict Anderson’s canonized phrase) imagine community” (3). From the start of the book, Minich makes clear that she is not interested in reifying the boundaries of the nation or in promoting the inherent value of citizenship. Instead, she leaves “open the question of whether this ‘new political principle’ might include a reformulated, accessible version of what we presently call citizenship, or whether the institution itself must be eradicated in order to create a more accessible means of guaranteeing human dignity for the whole of humanity” (19). For some readers, this early refusal to provide a firm answer may be frustrating, but what Minich reveals repeatedly throughout the text is how concepts such as nation, citizenship, and identity can be used in both liberatory and oppressive ways. Grounded in literary and film analysis with several extended and astute close readings, Accessible Citizenships repeatedly returns to the realities of its major concepts—race, disability, nation, and citizenship—and argues for theorizations addressing the material circumstances that inspire the creation of these texts.

Social work has a rich history in working for the rights of people in society. The profession’s commitment to vulnerable and oppressed people and groups are codified in national and international ethical standards. Social justice and respecting the dignity and worth of people are core ethical principles. Social workers’ ethical responsibilities to clients include self-determination, cultural competence, and respect for diversity. Social workers have been at the forefront of social causes to improve the lives of individuals and groups as evidenced by the high regard that one of the profession’s founders, Jane Addams, a 1931 Nobel Peace Prize winner for her work on behalf of women, immigrants to the United States, peace activities, and involvement in the early years of the NAACP and ACLU. Addams’s work reflected her commitment to empowering diverse groups. She recognized that women, ethnic minorities, immigrants, and others were disadvantaged by society and not because of individual failings. Addams was an icon of human rights and valuing diversity, yet she was deeply ashamed of her disabilities. She deeply admired her father and recounts how she, “prayed with all my heart that the ugly, pigeon-toed little girl whose crooked back obliged her to walk with her head held very much to one side, would never be pointed out. . . as the daughter of this fine man,” lest she bring shame to him by his being associated with his “ugly duckling” daughter (Twenty years at hull house. Addams Publications, 1910. p. 3). Social work histories on Addams contain scant information and discussion about her disabilities. Had Addams lived today, she would have access to disabled role models and mentors within the disability community. And given her commitment to social justice, she would certainly be a disability rights advocate because she would have community and a context to operate in. This contribution to the social work body of literature elucidates a diversity approach to disability that includes disability pride, disability culture, and the contributions of disabled people in society. It builds on the literature such as the Oxford Bibliographies contribution of Rankin and colleagues (2015) in Social Work “Disabilities” that provides information for social workers to work with disabled people who are vulnerable and oppressed because of individual or social pathologies. It offers an alternative diversity-and-strengths-based definition of disability and disabled people in contrast to a “social problems” perspective. It provides resources in two broad-ranging areas of focus to help readers understand disability and disabled people as contributors to the diverse tapestry of society. The first entails academic and activist work in disability studies and the disability rights movement. The second includes cultural and artistic products constructed by disabled people that speak to disability as a socially organized phenomenon as well as a lived experience.