Disability studies after the ontological turn: a return to the material world and material bodies without a return to essentialism

Abstract

Over recent decades, poststructuralist theories have allowed critical disability scholars to challenge essentialist understandings of the human species and to contest discourses which divide humans into ‘normal’/‘impaired’ subjects with respect to a wide – and ever expanding – range of corporeal and cognitive traits. For critics, however, these theories are deeply flawed. By focusing primarily on language, poststructuralism shifts our critical attention away from the often harsh material realities of life for disabled people. This has led some to turn to critical realism and to effectively re-essentialise impairment. In this article, I wish to consider an alternative approach. I suggest that the recent ‘ontological turn’ in social theory has seen the emergence of new-materialist approaches – including Deleuze and Guattari’s ontology of assemblage and methodology of assemblage analysis – which allow us to consider disability as a material phenomenon without a return to essentialism.

Keywords:

• Poststructuralism
• ontological turn
• disability studies
• new materialism
• posthumanism
• Deleuze

Notes

1. While this article focuses on new-materialist approaches, it should be noted that certain phenomenological approaches to disability, inspired by theorists including Merleau-Ponty, can also address these shortcomings.

2. Somewhat confusingly, Deleuze also uses the term ‘affect’ as shorthand for an entity’s capacities to affect and be affected.