Disability as Microcosm

Societies, 2012

In this paper, we query the legitimacy of the atypical body for membership, quasi-membership, or exclusion from the category of human. Geneticized, branded, and designed as not normal, undesirable, and in need of change, embodied disablement can provide an important but circumvented analysis of the explicit and implicit nature of the legitimate human body, its symbolism, and responses that such bodies elicit from diverse local through global social and cultural entities. Building on and synthesizing historical and current work in the sociology of the body, in disability studies, in cyborg and post-human studies, this paper begins to ask questions about the criteria for human embodiment that are violated by interpretations of disability and then met with a range of responses from body revision to denial of the viability of life. Given the nascent emergence of this important topic, this paper chronicles the theory, questions and experiences that have provoked questions and posited the need for more substantive theory development and verification.

Posthumanism is an umbrella term signalling theoretical approaches that endeavour to challenge pervasive human/non-human, normal/abnormal, organic/man-made binaries. To explore the value of posthumanism for disability studies, this piece interrogates Latour’s Actor Network Theory and Haraway’s Cyborg Theory. Both scholars provide innovative ways of reconceptualising how bodies are intimately connected and shaped by technology once we move beyond a purely human-centred mode of understanding the world. I seek to provoke the nuances of each paradigm by applying them to three distinct cases of people who are classified disabled by society and connect differently with technology. Haraway celebrates expansion of subjectivity and hybridity, yet her cyborg imagery better articulates those bodies which are augmented through personal choice rather than circumstance or dependency. On the other hand, a Latourian framework simultaneously rejects preconceptions of what disability is whilst allowing new insights to emerge without denying the possibility of existing inequalities or oppression. This ultimately offers more value to disability studies and anthropology of disability. Gibson, H. (2015) Exploring contemporary anthropological theory: Can we use posthumanism to reconceptualise the disabled body? Sites, 12(2): 1-21 DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.11157/sites-vol12iss2id297

2016

In this thesis I aim at unpacking the ways in which traditional theories about disability fail to view the disabled body in an accurate way. I examine the advance of prosthetic technologies as they relate to disability and suggest that in this way the disabled person is a very good example of a cyborg. I then apply cyborg ideologies to ideas of disability and suggest the cyborgification of the disabled body is beneficial both from a flourishing and an ideological standpoint. I finally consider and respond to some objections against advanced prosthetics and transhumanism more broadly.

Body, Space & Technology , 2024

This paper looks at the new field of posthuman disability studies and its potential to provide a theoretical framework for critical theory's engagement with modern technologies. Historically, the human body, as represented and defined on stage and in art, has maintained a strictly defined visual integrity. Anything not shaped as 'human' was typically deemed monstrous (from hybrid mythological creatures to severely disabled 'elephant men'). Simultaneously, the category of 'human' was used to circumscribe the boundaries of belonging and the categories of valuation: some groups, including the disabled, were deemed 'sub-human' and designated to either be disposed of (as the carrier of 'life unworthy of life') or, if possible, to approximate the 'human' body. (Romanska 2019: 92-93). Until very recently, the goal of the prosthetics industry was to create limbs that would serve as visual stand-ins for missing limbs. Similarly, the technological capacities of prosthetic limbs were delineated by human capacities: the disabled were to be given as many 'abilities' as the non-disabled, but no more. However, this perception of what the disabled body can and should do has changed with technological progress: not only do the newest prosthetics often look as 'unhuman' as possible, but their capacities put into question the capacities and limits of the non-disabled body. All of these and other issues that have emerged in recent years at the crossroads of posthumanism, disability, and biomimicry have led to the development of posthuman disability studies, which tries to untangle and reconceptualize the ethical, legal, and philosophical boundaries of human enhancement, species belonging, sentiency, life and death, and human rights. The posthuman biomimicry and the prosthetic aspects of digital and AI technologies presuppose a form of disabling of the human body: a body without any connection to some type of machine is an inferior body. In this context, understanding the historical dynamics, critical, philosophical, and ethical debates that have dominated disability studies can provide a framework for how we reconceptualize our posthuman, hybrid future in which our existence with the machines that redefine previous hierarchies is inevitable. Thus, the paper proposes critical posthuman disability studies as a new analytical paradigm for recontextualization and exploration of the new modes of being in the Age of Tech.

Public Culture, 2001

Sociology, 2003

This article considers the relevance of Pierre Bourdieu's conceptions of the body to the development of disability theory. We begin by discussing the limitations of reductive conceptions of disability. In so doing, we consider how far Bourdieu's (1990) concept of habitus offers a way of bringing an analysis of the body to bear upon an understanding of the social inequalities which are core to the lives of disabled people. Through focus groups with disabled people, the article explores aspects of disabled people's corporeal identities, feelings and (embodied) encounters in a range of social settings. The research shows that disabled people's lives are connected to different `valuations' attributed to corporeal forms, and to systems of signification and representation, which underpin them. We conclude by reaffirming the need to consider Bourdieu's ideas in helping in the development of disability theory.

2010

Note de lecture de la revue neerlandaise Medische Antropologie sur "le corps dans les disability studies".

Topoi, 2024

A growing body of literature in the field of embodied situated cognition is drawing attention to the hostile ways in which our environments can be constructed, with detrimental effects on people’s ability to flourish as environmentally situated beings. This paper contributes to this body of research, focusing on a specific area of concern. Specifically, I argue that a very particular problematic quasi-Cartesian picture of the human body, the human mind, what it means for these to function well, and the role of technology in promoting such functioning, animate our Western sociotechnical imagination. This picture, I show, shapes the sociotechnical niches we inhabit in an ableist manner, perniciously legislating which body-minds have access to a rich world of affordances and are seen as agential and valuable. Because the ableist quasi-Cartesian commitments animating our Western sociotechnical imagination are problematic and pervasive, I argue that exposing and reimagining these commitments should be a prime focal point of those working at the intersection of science, technology, and human values. I present insights from enactive 4E cognition and critical disability studies as fruitful resources for such much-needed reimagining. I also make the case, more provocatively but also more tentatively, that the ableist view of bodily and minded well- functioning animating our Cartesian Western sociotechnical imagination is not only damaging to embodied minds who deviate from the presumed norm, creating inaccessible worlds for some of us; it is in fact a threat to human and planetary flourishing at large.

Current Anthropology, 2020

2001