Genealogies

Abstract

The contestation of received conventions about the nature and embodiment of disability has been greatly advanced by many of the theoretical resources developed during the twentieth century. As the preceding chapter has outlined, the discourse of phenomenology has been particularly influential in opening up alternative ways of understanding the embodied self in general and, like the poststructuralist notion of performativity, has deeply unsettled any notion of a fixed and given subject whose agency may be simply either advanced or hindered by its particular anatomical, physiological, or mental comportment. As with the genealogical analytic that this chapter will develop, neither phenomenology nor performativity was initially addressed to the problematic of disability, but what all three discourses show is that traditional ways of reading the body are inherently open to a process of rethinking. This is especially pertinent to the relationship between ‘standard’ forms of embodiment and various anomalies, for where normative constructs are often positioned as self-evident and remain unproblematised, irregularity alone attracts attention. If we leave aside the (contestable) claims of biomedicine, it is not that a contemporary or twentieth-century rethinking of the body in all its variation is grounded on a more accurate or sophisticated account of the substance of corporeality, but that the meaning given to bodyliness has been privileged above empirical explanation.