Rethinking the Body through Its Disability

A person with physical disability has uncontrollable body. The body’s passiveness and vulnerability go beyond its activeness and capability. Disability studies associated with sociology of the body examine disability as a social, cultural, and political phenomenon in contrast to medical perspectives, focusing on how disability is defined and represented in society. Both of them have been positioned against medical science; they approach to the body from the society and context while medical science from biology and diseases. But they may be accomplice in the sense that they often ignore persons and their daily lives. Pluralism to which sociology of the body and disability studies owe much emphasizes diversity of human behavior and culture regarding health and illness based on binary comparison such as disease vs. illness, and the uniqueness of nature vs. the diversity of human cultures. Nevertheless, post-pluralism relativizes pluralism discourse by suggesting plurality of natures and sciences, and their mutual construction with society and culture. Persons with disability are now assumed to increase in number as overall disease incidences have not been as decreased as the mortality. The gap in the status of disabled persons between developed and developing countries is larger than the gap in non-disabled. Disabled persons from poor families living in rural areas have greatest needs but receive least medical and social care. In developing countries, persons with physical disability have greater handicap than those with intellectual disability, which is opposite from developed countries. Physical disability in a person sometimes leads to body impairment such as lumbago in other family members. Physical abuse to disabled persons is hidden problem. Some of physical disabilities can be relieved through simply changing the body posture. The body can manage its disability by itself through plasticity, and may not require society or sociology so much as we presume.