Cultural Locations of Disability (review)

The development of disability studies as a recognizable and interdisciplinary field over the past three decades has often made uneasy bedfellows of scholars of disability and historians of Western medicine. While many scholars of both medicine and disability have been deeply influenced by the insights of Michel Foucault and Ivan Ilych, they have often diverged in their respective interpretations of rehabilitation and physical therapy, two of the cornerstones of modern medical care. For many, the therapeutic tradition—what disability scholars call the "medical model" of disability—makes the disabled individual legible only through rehabilitation's goals of productive normalization. Like cognate critiques made by some historians of psychiatry and psychopharmacology, the medical model of disability demands that the body be "fixed" in order for it to become whole, locating the problem of difference in the individual rather than in the society that holds unrealistic expectations about bodily norms.

Cultural Locations of Disability, Sharon L. Snyder and David T. Mitchell's timely and erudite intervention into these discussions, advocates for a "cultural model" of disability that challenges social models of disability, the standard interpretive move in disability studies that focuses on environmental and institutional barriers or, at its most extreme, asserts that disability is socially constructed. Cultural models of disability, by contrast, take a third path by arguing that, while certain concepts of disability are indeed historically contingent, it is undeniable that physical and cognitive impairments exist in the world. Cultural Locations of Disability thus sets its sights on historicizing how both social understandings of the body and individual bodily impairment produce knowledge of disability, neither denying nor privileging historical conditions that are independent of one's own bodily experience.

In the first three chapters, for example, Snyder and Mitchell explore what they call nineteenth-century "sciences of the surface"—shorthand for phrenology, fingerprinting, and eugenics—to demonstrate how the quantitative and administrative legacies of such sciences have had fundamental policy implications for classifying and regulating disabled bodies as well as those of immigrants, the poor, and the socially or sexually deviant. In perhaps the book's strongest and most provocative chapter, the authors define the contours of what they call the "eugenic Atlantic" to chart the transnational dimensions of scientific and intellectual collaboration and cooperation among eugenicists in Europe and the United States.

While the book's engagement with scientific and medical history is refreshing and compelling, its ambition to elucidate the cultural model of disability in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries runs into some conceptual obstacles that, occasionally, raise more questions than the authors are able to resolve. The second half of the book, devoted to contemporary documentary films made by and about disabled individuals, provides excellent film analysis but does not explain how filmmaking is either an alternative to or an improvement on the "sciences of the surface," other than to show how people with disabilities have seized control of their histories through direct media activism. Furthermore, given their insistence on recognizing the cultural dialectic of disability, Snyder and Mitchell do not explore the gendered roots of nineteenth-century discourses of self-sufficiency and independence, nor how gender, as scholars such as feminist philosopher Eva Feder Kittay have argued, shaped and continues to shape those with disabilities as well as their caregivers, whether among nineteenth-century "cripples" or twenty first century veterans of the Iraq War. Still, the larger significance of Snyder and Mitchell's book lies in its claim that treating disability as either exclusively physical or environmental ignores the richness—rather than the paucity—of the disabled experience, which, when considered seriously, has the capacity to challenge conventional historical and contemporary understandings of what constitutes ability, health, and normalcy.