Wounded/monstrous/abject: a critique of the disabled body in the sociological imaginary

Abstract

Contemporary sociology has made sense of bodily difference by mobilising a number of tropes. ‘Wounded’ (or vulnerable), ‘monstrous’ and ‘abject’ stand out by virtue of their ubiquity though they do not exhaust the repertoire. These categories highlight the conceptual tensions between the sociology of the body and Disability Studies. In this paper, I will examine the value of these tropes to Disability Studies and suggest that while they can help to clarify the processes that bring about the misrecognition of disabled people, understanding the nature and scope of the lives of disabled people in modernity requires a more embodied language rather than one that has been generated from a sociological imaginary that is strongly influenced by a non‐disabled subject position in which repulsion for the other – which one must become – is never fully resolved. Disability has had little impact on sociological theories of the body and when sociology ventures into disability it has tended to conflate it with an ontology of human frailty or gloss it with tropes that may be instructive about the generic or gendered modernist structure of exclusion but it tells us little about the specific forms of invalidation experienced by disabled people.

Keywords:

• disability
• impairment
• body
• vulnerable
• monstrous
• abject

Notes

1. The concept of the subaltern has not had much influence in disability studies. There are two aspects of it which appeal. It refers to a minority that is in a position to subvert the hegemonic group and it recognises that the presence of the subaltern is central to the self‐definition of the majority. It therefore confers agency on the (subaltern as) other and avoids the dialectic of lack by validating the minority socially and ontologically.