Disability Studies 2.0

Abstract

If disability studies is a form of cultural studies, then the study of disability studies might be a form of cultural studies in itself. The still-brief but continuing, welcome, and successful rise of disability studies in the humanities is an unusual case study in the maturation of a field. Two of the books I will discuss here are written by widely acknowledged founders of disability studies in the humanities. Following their field-defining books of the 1990s, Lennard Davis and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson now return in this decade with field-steering works. Michael Davidson meanwhile navigates a similar course in a book that illustrates some of the specifically literary implications of the latest turn in disability studies. Disability studies pioneers originally aligned the emergent field with racial and ethnic studies. One such field pioneer, Simi Linton, declared in 1998 that more curricular attention needed to be paid to “the minority-group status of disabled people, and the cultural, social, and political meanings of that status” (148). Certainly there is a practical justification for constructing the field as identity-based, if for no other reason than that the unemployment rate among disabled people is shamefully high, and identitybased fields offer practical strategies for identifying oppression and ultimately creating employment opportunities. But disability is no typical minority group, and the development of disability studies as an identity-based field has not been typical either. For one thing, disability is a minority group that anyone can join. “Everyone in this room hopes to be disabled,” I tell the students in my disability studies seminar on the first day that I meet them. Still preening with youthful invulnerability, they mostly look at me as though I have lost my mind. Then I explain to them that old age brings disability—unless they would prefer the alternative. And then I inform them of the acronym that the