Lecture Notes - Disability and Minority Studies

In a recent conference on "Disability Studies and the University," Professor Simi Linton sat in a wheelchair before the audience and stated,
"Disability studies introduces a disability reading to a range of subject matter. We prod people to examine how disability as a category was created to serve certain ends and how the category has been institutionalized in social practices and intellectual conventions.

Disability studies' project is to weave disabled people back into the fabric of society, thread by thread, theory by theory. It aims to expose the ways that disability has been made exceptional and to work to naturalize disabled people - remake us as full citizens whose rights and privileges are intact, whose history and contributions are recorded, and whose often distorted representations in art, literature, film, theater, and other forms of artistic expression are fully analyzed.

Linton, Simi. (2005) What Is Disability Studies? PMLA.2, 120

In the 1990s, critics and theorists who engaged in discussions of concepts such "minority" and "majority," or "center" and "margin," began to ask us to broaden our perspectives. New areas of inquiry entered the field of "minority literature."

Today, those new areas of inquiry lead scholarship in the field. Along with studying so-called racial or ethnic "Others," scholars now focus on the construction of whiteness as part of the "whole picture." (See separate comments from Peggy McIntosh, a scholar at Wellesley College.) Queer studies programs at major universities question clear-cut readings of gender and sexuality.

Deaf Studies and Dis/ability Studies question the notion of which bodies and realities we consider "normal," or "able," and which we marginalize as not quite "whole" or fully "able." Studies of mixed raced and multi-cultured lives and experiences challenge the earlier notions of race and ethnicity we relied on as we categorized ourselves and others. Studies focused on cultural representations of age and aging question our culture's persistent focus on youth and youthful bodies/minds as the most desirable or attractive.