Marvelous Monstrosity and Disability’s Delights: New Directions in Premodern Critical Disability Studies

Abstract

Disability is often reduced to the status of a problem: building compliance issues, a pedagogical accommodation, a medical defect, a parking space. Until recently, scholarship in disability studies has emphasized that disability is an object — the object of inquiry, of social, medical, or legal studies of deformity or aberrance. These approaches endeavor to probe the origins of, correct, cure or even eradicate disability. Although well-intentioned, these approaches can unknowingly perpetuate and reinforce the hierarchies of ableism — the belief that able bodyminds are superior to disabled ones. When these objectifying socio-political treatments and received medical knowledges circulate around disability, it not only generates a category — into which disabilities must be placed, identified and tamed — but it can also ultimately perpetuate ableist marginalization. How then might one critically target the hierarchizing practices and structures that serve to winnow out certain bodyminds and elevate others? How to dismantle the prejudices and longentrenched beliefs that designate certain bodyminds as disposable and others as valorized? This is a quandary that prompts Merri Lisa Johnson and Robert McRuer (2014) to write: