Social Ontologies of Disability - Towards the Discursive Interpretations of Embodied Difference

Abstract

Within disability research philosophical issues are becoming increasingly important in line with the paradigmatic change connected with social model of disability. Socio-cultural approach to this phenomenon entails the necessary to reformulate the ontological status of the categories of the body, corporeality, materiality, the notion of biological impairment, as well as the notion of disability itself. The article presents a reconstruction of some theoretical approaches to disability, using epistemological tools derived from Laclau’s political theory of discourse. In the paper, I seek to answer the question of what kind of identities of subjects and what values attributed to the embodied differences are generated in the various social ontologies of disability (ontology of biological lack, ontology of social oppression and ontology of cultural resistance) and what results from these diverse modes of thinking.