Normality and disability: intersections among norms, law, and culture
RIS ID
128070
Abstract
This special issue of Continuum is published in a conjuncture where there is increased scholarly attention to the positioning as ‘abnormal’ of people designated as disabled, as well as people designated to other marginalized and denigrated categories (such as queer, chronic illness, racial and Indigenous minorities, poverty and criminality). Scholars have critiqued the cultural and material role of technologies of diagnosis and therapy, and discourses of biomedicine and science, in the construction of abnormality, as well as the significant and primary role of disability in positioning as abnormal certain bodies and subjects designated to other marginalized and denigrated categories (for example, through medicalizing and biologizing). The role of law in codifying, challenging, perpetuating and amending historical, material and institutional constructions of disability has also been the subject of much research, particularly highlighting the continuities and discontinuities with key other cultural conditions including settler-colonialism, imperialism, eugenics, reproductive rights, violence and torture, and contemporary forms of neoliberalism.
Publication Details
G. Goggin, L. Roslyn. Steele & J. R. Cadwallader, 'Normality and disability: intersections among norms, law, and culture' (2017) 31 Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 337-340.