Conclusion

Abstract

In her book Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity, the first comprehensive analysis of disability studies as an academic discipline, Simi Linton specifically prescribes the humanities as needing a disability studies perspective. In fact, she asserts that a disability perspective is central to the curriculum of the humanities. In particular, Linton claims that the study of disability within the humanities may help widen the limited and often pathologized perceptions of disability within the social and applied sciences: “What is absent from the [sciences] curriculum is the voice of the disabled subject and the study of disability as idea, as abstract concept, and it is in the humanities that these gaps are most apparent. It is there that the meanings attributed to disability and the process of meaning-making could be examined.”¹ Despite the ubiquity of representations of disability in literature, art, and history, the humanities fields are all guilty of often failing to critically consider it; consequently, Linton claims, “[d]isability has become … like a guest invited to a party but never introduced.”²