Editor's Note

A curb, in some places no curbs at all, but instead drainage ditches, or voice- activated programs, or equipment that demands a certain steadiness of the hand to operate. The built world surrounds us, supporting bodies--human, machine, digital, elongated cybernetworks--and making room for events. Many people never notice aspects of this maintenance. They walk over these elements of the built landscape, speak into them, and as they move with them are moved by them. They may find that the way the environment is built makes their lives more negotiable, their bodies smoother; indeed, that it allows them not to feel their body as (de)limited space. But they may also discover that in some environments their bodies suddenly seem cumbersome. Or what had once seemed convenient suddenly becomes inconvenient as newer designs--and desires--emerge. How did we live without ponies, bicycles, cars? Thinking convenience progressively allows us to forget that many people do not live with these "necessities." Their conveyances--wheelchairs, wide-bodied buses, untimed tests--can seem irksome. And, moreover, can seem "exceptional," having to do with a minority population. Who needs the banister, the brace? Who should pay for them?

Many years ago, Michel Foucault gestured at a new way of approaching the question of sexuality, foregrounding the formations and implications of bodily functions, life forces, physiological processes, sensations, risks, and pleasures under shifting regimes of power. The body was displaced from questions of its representation and domination. Instead, we were led to ask questions about how the body emerged as an experience of corporeal limits and extensions, of singularities and integrities, of encounters with, rather than emergences out of, complex material and discursive supports. In this view braces were not just for some legs, some teeth. Nor are all bodies braced with only some bodies feeling their braces. That is, the point of this theoretical approach was not simply to encompass the proper within the improper (like we now refer to corporate welfare, extending the history of negative connotations of "welfare" as we accuse others of being no different). It was instead to track, as Donna Haraway and others have done, the history of the emergence of the body as such out of a complex set of assumptions about proper braces, foreign parts, the misaligned.

Public Culture is delighted to publish this special issue on disability criticism, guest edited by Carol A. Breckenridge and Candace Vogler. The essays they have brought together show the way that this emergent field of study and activism might convey and extend the spirit of a radical critique of corporeality. These essays examine the responsibilities of embodiment, not only those of governmental agencies and local and national publics charged with caring for persons with various forms of disabilities, but also our own--and how we come to hold certain persons responsible for certain forms of embodiment. Disability criticism shows how the body is a site saturated with scenes of struggle deeply embedded in critiques of the liberalist traditions of the individual--as well as critiques of identity-based politics. Reading these essays, it becomes clear that the literal ability of bodies to negotiate space is not really the point, an idea also suggested by Tod Browning's extraordinary movie, Freaks (1932). Once the problem of disability is displaced from the individuated body, it reappears as a question about the forms of social life that enable some and disable others. The problem of disability is not in the body of the individual, but rather in its formations, the materialities of discourse, the gap between bus step and curb, between the nurse attendant and job, thought and the means we have to record it. We do not ask: What are we to do with "them"? Rather, we ask: What are the networks of enablement, and who is responsible for filling in the gaps; rearranging entrance ways; providing more time for test-taking; and ensuring buses arrive and depart on schedule.

This special issue on disability criticism closes a cycle of issues addressing...