Making and Unmaking Disability

JULIE E. MAYBEE is professor and chair of the Department of Philosophy as well as the director of the interdisciplinary Disability Studies Minor at Lehman College, City University of New York (CUNY). She also teaches in the Disability Studies Master’s Program for CUNY’s School of Professional Studies. For many years, her research areas were nineteenth-century Continental philosophy, particularly the work of G. W. F. Hegel, Africana philosophy, and race and philosophy. After her daughter had a brain aneurysm and came to be what our society would call “disabled” in 2002, Maybee became interested in the analysis of disability as a social category.

Drawing from a knowledge base encompassing such diverse disciplines as anthropology, philosophy, feminist theory, and disability theory and history, Maybee (philosophy, Lehman College, CUNY) develops a powerful discussion of the way prevailing societal beliefs shape every facet of how people organize and make sense of the world around them. Maybee's three-pronged strategy is based on embodiment—institutional, interpersonal, and individual—and she uses it in analyzing how persistent values are created and reflected in the language used to define disability, in effect “making” a construct of a person’s worth in the community. Maybee explores the interactive sociocultural and economic factors that keep people who have disabilities from fully engaging with their milieus. She suggests, rightly, that to achieve equality for people with disabilities, change must be institutional and structural to be effective and “unmake” disability. Maybee is a skilled writer and lays out logical arguments to facilitate change. She has extensive experience as a mother of a child who became disabled because of a brain aneurysm. The narrative is easy to follow, and Maybee provides succinct outlines reinforcing her points.Summing Up: Recommended. All readers.

• Series Editor ForewordPreface and AcknowledgementsIntroduction and Theoretical OverviewChapter 1: Disability and CapitalismChapter 2: A New Structure of Attitudes: Normalcy, Eugenics, the Ugly Laws and SegregationChapter 3: The Experience of the Socially Defined BodyChapter 4: The Socially Defined Body in SocietyChapter 5: The Socially Constructed Body in BiologyChapter 6: Beyond Individual AccommodationChapter 7: Diversifying Access, Remaking WorldsConclusion