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Cultural Locations of Disability

Online ISBN:
9780226767307
Print ISBN:
9780226767314
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press
Book

Cultural Locations of Disability

Published online:
21 March 2013
Published in print:
15 May 2006
Online ISBN:
9780226767307
Print ISBN:
9780226767314
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press

Abstract

This book traces 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. The book reveals 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 study explains how disabled people are instrumental to charting the passage from a disciplinary society to one based upon regulation of the self.

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