ENGLISH 124 Lecture 1: Disability, Identity, and Representation (An Introduction): The Disabled Figure in Culture

• School: U of M
• Department: English Language And Literature
• Course: ENGLISH 124
• Professor: Lie

Document Summary

Cultural and literary criticism has generally overlooked the related perceptions of corporeal otherness with think of variously as monstrosity, mutilation, deformation, . The physically disabled are produced by way of legal, medical, political, cultural, and literary narratives that comprise an exclusionary discourse. Disability is a representation, a cultural interpretation of physical transformation or configuration, and a comparison of bodies that structures social relations and institutions. The law acknowledges disability as an impairment that substantially limits one or more of the major life activities and is also a matter of being regarded as having such an impairment . These expectations are partly founded on physiological facts about typical humans, and their sociopolitical meanings and consequences are entirely culturally determined. Culturally generated and perpetuated standards of beauty, independence, fitness, . Competence, and normalcy exclude and disable many human bodies while validating and affirming others.