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                                  DIS/ABILITY RIGHTS MOVEMENTS

Over several decades, movements seeking to gain equal treatment and fair accommodation for people with disabilities have accomplished a great deal, including most notably the American with Disabilities Act. But there remains much work to be done to achieve true understanding of and equality for those labeled disabled by dominant society. Disability is not a natural fact but a cultlurally constructed, relative category.

screen shot of disability activist from worth living documentary

                                   Screen shot from the documentary "Live Worth Living."

The issue begin with the very terms used and the hidden biases they conceal. Let’s start with that phrase itself, “people with disabilities.” That’s the preferred term and is set against the commonly used phrase “disabled people.” What’s the difference? There is a world of difference. To say someone is a person with a disabilityis to stress the personhood first and the disability second. By contrast, to saydisabled person makes the disability the defining feature of the person. That difference neatly sums up the attitudinal problem that people with disabilities face from the able-bodied population—their full personhood is lost in a focus on physical differences.

A person with a disability, or the differently-abled, exists on a continuum with everyone else. We all have certain abilities and disabilities, and to place people who have a particularly visible or more pronounced disability in a wholly other category of human beings from those of us whose abilities and disabilities are less visible is nothing but prejudice. Disability is a continuum, not a state of being. All of us at some point in our lives will be disabled, temporarily or with likely permanence, and most of us will be severely disabled if we live long enough. The most common form of prejudice is to speak of the “normal” body or the normal way of moving through the world. But which is the “normal” way to move over the course of a mile: by walking, by jogging, by riding a bicycle, by riding in a car, by train, by wheelchair? All but the last of these are considered “normal” ways to move by the world at large. Why not in a wheelchair? Disability is not a natural fact; it is a socially defined state. Over the course of history and across cultures today there are many different standards of normal bodily and mental functioning, and many different attitudes towards those currently characterized as physically or mentally disabled.

According to many dis/ability activists, disabling responses to people with disabilities typically take one of these forms: pity (a useless emotion that makes the able-bodied person feel sensitive); heroic appreciation (how amazing that you can do X despite being so messed up) invisibility/avoidance (find ways not to see or interact with the PWD annoyance/impatience (find the presence of a PWD an eyesore or time drag when they must be accommodated). Each of these attitudes, though differing in moral weight, has the effect of reinforcing the non-normal nature of disability, of lessening the person with a disability’s place in the world.

The links below represent a few important dis/ability rights organizations and related resources, and the bibliography offers a few useful books for further study of the movements.

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Some Key Organizations, Resources & Activist Sites

Select Disability Rights Movement Bibliography

  • Bagenstos, Samuel. Law and the Contradictions of the Disability Rights Movement (Yale University Press, 2009).
  • Barnartt, Sharon N. and Scotch, Richard. Disability Protests: Contentious Politics 1970-1999 (Gallaudet University Press, 2001).
  • Colker, Ruth and Milani, Adam. Everyday Law for Individuals with Disabilities (Paradigm Publishers, 2005). 
  • Fleischer, Doris Zames and Zames, Frieda. The Disability Rights Movement: From Charity to Confrontation (Temple University Press, 2nd Edition, 2011).
  • Johnson, Roberta Ann. "Mobilizing the Disabled.," in Waves of Protest: Social Movements Since the Sixties edited by Jo Freeman and Victoria Johnson (Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), pp. 25–45.
  • Longmore, Paul, K. and Umansky, Laurie, editors, The New Disability History: American Perspectives (New York University Press, 2001).
  • O'Brien, Ruth. Crippled Justice: The History of Modern Disability Policy in the Workplace (University Of Chicago Press, 2001).
  • Pelka, Fred. The ABC Clio Companion to the Disability Rights Movement (ABC-Clio, 1997). 
  • Pelka, Fred. What We Have Done: An Oral History of the Disability Rights Movement (Amherst, Boston MA: University of Massachusetts Press 2012). 
  • The Regents of the University of California. The Disability Rights and Independent Living Movement (Berkeley, CA: The University of California Berkeley, 2001). Web. Copyright © 2007 
  • Shapiro, Joseph P. No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement (Times Books, 1993).
  • Stroman, Duane. The Disability Rights Movement: From Deinstitutionalization to Self-Determination (University Press of America, 2003).

Select Critical Disability Studies Bibliography

Critical Disability Studies brings a cultural studies approach to the subject, emphasizing both the socially constructed nature of "disability" and cross-cultural variations in those constructions.

Featured Text

      Walschmidt, Anne. ed. Culture-Theory-Disability Studies  Excellent (automatically downloading pdf) anthology exemplifying the rich cultural studies approach disability studies.

Further Reading

Brown, Wendy. "Suffering the Paradoxes of Rights," in Wendy Brown and Janet Halley , eds, Left Legalism/Left Critique. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002: 420–435.

Corker, Marian and Tom Shakespeare, eds. Disability/Postmodernism: Embodying Disability Theory. London: Continuum, 2002.

Davis, Lennard. Bending over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism and Other Difficult Positions. New York: New York University Press, 2002.

Davis, Lennard, ed. Disability Studies Reader. London & NY: Routledge, 2016 (5th edition).

Garland Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.

Goodley, Dan. Disability Studies: An Interdisciplinary Introduction. London: Sage, 2016.

Grosz, Elizabeth. Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies. London & NY: Routledge, 1995.

McRuer, Robert. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. New York: New York University Press, 2006.

Marks, Deborah. Disability: Controversial Debates and Psychosocial Perspectives. London: Routledge, 1999.

Meekosha, Helen and Shuttleworth, Russell. '‘What’s so 'Critical' about Critical Disability Studies?’' Australian Journal of Human Rights 15(1) (2009): 47–75.

Shakespeare, Tom , Gillespie-Sells, Kath and Davies, Dominic. The Sexual Politics of Disability: Untold Desires. London: Cassel, 1996.

Sherry, Mark. "Overlaps and Contradictions Between Queer Theory and Disability Studies." Disability & Society 19(7) (2004): 769–783.

Shildrick, Margrit. Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self.  London: Sage, 2002.

Shildrick, Margrit. "Critical Disability Studies." in Routledge Handbook of Disability Studies. London & NY: Routledge, 2013.

Shildrick, Margrit. Dangerous Discourses of Disability, Subjectivity and Sexuality. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Siebers, Tobin. Disability Theory. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008.

Stiker, Henri-Jacques. A History of Disability. trans. William Sayers. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999.

Tremain, Shelley. "Queering Disabled Sexuality Studies." Sexuality and Disability 18(4) (2000): 291–299.

Watson, Nick, Alan Routine & Carol Thomas, eds. (2013). Routledge Handbook of Disability Studies. London & NY: Routledge, 2013.

Disability Studies Journals

See also our site "Dis/Ability Digitized"