Disability as microcosm: The boundaries of the human body

Emerging from an opposition to medical deviance theories of the 20^th century, sociology and related disciplines have brought potent intellectual frameworks to an expanded, non-medicalized analysis of disabled bodies. Yet, scholars have only begun to directly engage in interpreting embodied disablement and responses to it as microcosm, meaning, and metaphor for fundamental social, philosophical, and cultural questions about essential elements and boundaries of embodied humanness.

In this paper, we undertake a substantive examination of the disabled body within sociological and cultural context. Branded and designed as not normal, undesirable, and in need of change, embodied disablement provides a foundation for 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, disability studies, and cyborg studies, this paper examines 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. We engage this analysis through four categories of content.

 

• Violating humanness: Legitimating the disabled body - what embodied criteria of “humanness” are lost, never obtained or otherwise not present that assign bodies to the disability category? 
• Revising the illegitimate- in order to instill or restore humanness, what elements of disabled embodiment are changed and how?
• Reinventing embodied humanness-How have bodies been reworked, redesigned to expand/contract the range of humanness (prosthesis, robotic enhancements, cyborg, avatar)
• Denying humanness: When embodied revision or reinvention cannot occur, what historical and contemporary methods are used to eliminate the violating body (selective aborting, terminating life)