Public Culture

Breckenridge, Carol Appadurai, 1942-
Vogler, Candace A.
The Critical Limits of Embodiment: Disability's Criticism
Public Culture - Volume 13, Number 3, Fall 2001, pp. 349-357

Duke University Press

Carol Appadurai Breckenridge and Candace A. Vogler - The Critical Limits of Embodiment: Disability's Criticism - Public Culture 13:3 Public Culture 13.3 (2001) 349-357 The Critical Limits of Embodiment: Disability's Criticism Carol A. Breckenridge and Candace Vogler No one is ever more than temporarily able-bodied. This fact frightens those of us who half-imagine ourselves as minds in a material context, who have learned to resent the publicness of race- or sex- or otherwise-marked bodies and to think theories of embodiment as theories about the subjectivity of able-bodied comportment and practice under conditions of systematic injustice. From this perspective, disability studies may be twice marginalized -- first, by able-bodied anxiety; second, by a tendency to treat disability as just another hindrance to social mobility, perhaps one best left to medical discourse or descriptive sociology. New work in disability studies, however, challenges established habits of thought about "having" a body. Disability studies dissolves deeply entrenched mind-and-body distinctions and further destabilizes the concept of the normal, whose charted internal ambiguities have themselves become too familiar. An ethics and a politics of disability are crucial to the work of the university -- pedagogically, theoretically, and institutionally. But reconfiguring knowledge in light of disability criticism is a project that is likely to take longer than making public space...