Disability and the social body

Abstract

The notion that people with disabilities must have something in common has lain at the heart of Disability Studies since its beginnings, in the 1980s, as an interdisciplinary scholarly approach with a decidedly activist bent. Unfashionable though the label ‘identity politics’ has become (at least in some circles), it is precisely on the formulation of a disabled identity – an identity that, like gender, may be seen as reflecting a societal construct projected from an organic, bodily difference – that literary and historical scholarship on disability has largely hinged. Whether it be bodily condition, medical curiosity, or exclusion or oppression, there must be a something that permits the constitution of ‘people with disabilities’ as a social category. This fundamental and seemingly simple notion has posed no small difficulty to scholars of medieval disability, however. The absence of premodern catch-all terms articulating an equivalent to the modern concept of ‘disability’ (in scholarly and vernacular tongues alike) is but the most apparent sign of the inadequacy of contemporary Disability Studies, its methods and its terminologies, to capture the social experiences of medieval people who manifested the physical or mental symptoms of conditions that would today identify them as