Abstract
In Cultural 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.
Highlights
Snyder and Mitchell argue that the social production of human variance as deviance places disabled people in significant jeopardy
The modern obsession with order and tidiness and our desire to attain perfect bodies constantly produces images of disabled people as living examples of what is imperfect. They continue to illustrate how disability discourses and practises are important as examples of how our society has infused different modes of social obedience Á a transition from a historical period where instrumental techniques were applied to a period where self-policing and regulation of the self prevails
Drawing on the work of scholars such as Henry Friedlander (1997) and Robert Lifton (2000) the authors illustrate how the culturallocation of disabled people was closely linked to an idea of social prophylactic against members of society who were imagined to endanger the racial ‘‘stock’’ from the inside
Summary
In their book Cultural Locations of Disability they trace how disabled people came to be looked upon as biologically deviant. Using the eugenic period as a starting point they examine cultural spaces that have been developed exclusively on behalf of disabled people.
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